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But we know more about what chickens are saying than about dog language
Studies show that chickens have a series of calls that refer to specific objects or situations. Because the calls could actually mean "Duck for cover" or "Look down" instead of "Hawk overhead" or "Food on the ground," though, researchers call them functionally referential. They refer, functionally, to a specific object or situation.
Animals such as vervet monkeys and ring-tailed lemurs also have functionally referential alarm calls, but having separate calls for separate predators doesn't confirm that this is the case. California ground squirrels have different calls for aerial predators and ground predators, but squirrels give the aerial alarm if ground predators are in hot pursuit and give the ground alarm if a hawk is flying far away. Thus their calls refer to how urgently they should respond rather than the specific type of predator.
Studies have also uncovered answers as to how animals learn to communicate. One set that spans a decade or two involves cowbirds -- birds notoriously known for chucking eggs out of other birds' nests and replacing them with their own, thus tricking others into fostering cowbird babies.
One study found that young males raised with females but in the absence of adult males learned songs that researchers deemed demented because they sounded different from normal cowbird songs. When they played recordings of these songs and songs from adult birds of known breeding success, though, they found that females really fell for the "deficient-sounding" songs. .
Learning how to sing
Several more studies set the situation straight. Young male cowbirds learn which songs to sing by watching their adult female tutors. The youngsters try various songs, and when the lady cowbirds give their approving nods, they know they've hit the right ones.
Male cowbirds all learn the super-songs but only a select few -- the higher- ups -- are actually allowed to sing them. Since the juvenile males that are raised singly are socially retarded, they sing the super-songs all the time, even when first placed in a group. A few pecks from the high-status singers teaches them to temper their tunes.
Surprisingly, when these juveniles are allowed to sing their desired song, they still don't get the girls because in cowbird terms, they sing like Pavarotti but dance like a potato. They have to learn to perform the courtship routine -- which consists of, for one, facing the female when they sing -- from adult males.
These are just a few of the sort of findings we haven't yet explored in dogs. With more research and funding, though, I hope we eventually know at least as much about communication in domestic canids as we do about it in chickens.
But it all starts with a simple study showing that dogs have different barks in different contexts.
Sophia Yin, DVM, is a small-animal veterinarian in Davis with an animal-behavior Web site at www.nerdbook.com/sophia. Send questions to her via her site or mail them to P.O. Box 4516, Davis, CA 95616.
Animals do talk
An animal's eyes have the power to speak a great language. ~Martin Buber
At any given time, there are anywhere between one and two billion living birds on the planet.
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