SOUND AND SENSE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 930, 7 June 1957, Page 9

SOUND AND SENSE

bY

SUNDOWNER

MAY 15

HAVE to thank an anonymous correspondent for an article from an unnamed and undated magazine written to prove that animals can talk. Dogs bark, the author says, cats miaow, monkeys chatter and frogs croak-all for the benefit of others of their kind by whom

their communications are understood. With that I suppose everybody agrees.

But talking is a little more than signalling emotions. When a ewe answers her lost and bleating lamb she is no doubt. letting it know that she is coming. But she is not saying that she is coming. She is not thinking that she is coming. She is expressing an emotion aroused in her by the absence of her lamb and the sound of its voice. She has no consciousness of what she is doing-no realised plan of banishing its fears and comforting it as she runs to it. She is comforting herself by giving voice to her anxiety. I did once in the Melbourne Zoo hear a chimpanzee making sounds to a baby that she had terrified on a swing which were astonishingly like the sounds a human mother might have made to her child in similar circumstances. They were not words, of course, but they were certainly soothing sounds the purpose of which seemed to be to banish fear. In any case, the sounds a human mother makes, if they take the form of words, are meaningless to the child except as comfort. Colonel Williams in Elephant. Bill makes a female elephant utter "the grandest sounds of a mother’s love" to a three-months-old baby elephant standing terrified on a ledge in a flooded river while she herself stood on the far bank unable to get to the rescue. "When she saw the calf," Williams says, "she stopped roaring and began rumbling, a never-to-be-forgotten sound, not

unlike that made by a _ very highpowered car when accelerating." I can’t read as much into that sound as Colonel Williams did, but the calf held on till the flood went down-a wait of some hours-and if I can’t believe that its mother kept telling it to do this, the waiting was no doubt made easier by her rumblings from the other side. It is, of course, a fact that animals make different sounds for different reasons-I hesitate to say different purposes. My dog tells me when he is angry and when he is bored. He can tell me, while still on his chain and unable to see the road, whether the dog just arrived at the gate is Digger, whom he hates, or Fluff, whose arrival makes him as silly as adolescent boys usually become under the eyes of a flapper. He has a pleasant gurgling growl when he approaches me with something in his: mouth and wants me to play. If talking can be done by ears and tail and. hair and muscles and teeth, all dogs are eloquent in doggy ways. But they are wholly dumb if talking is the expression of thought and not merely of feelings. Nor have dogs since the beginning of time learnt the meaning of one word in the dictionary sense. Though they can learn how to react to words, to them these are not words but sounds, and any sound at all will do if the teacher uses that and no other. I have seen estimates of the number of words sheep dogs learnit is usually between six and sixteenbut the fact that a whistle is a better signal than a word means that they never learn words at all.

MAY 17

N case I should forget about. rabbits for a few moments every day J.M.R., of Matangi, has sent me the latest book about them. I think he has de-cided-that I will not forget about them,

or be silent about them, and that it will be an advantage if my meander-

ings are scientifically accurate. To read some of the things I say about

animals is, I am sure, a little more than a_ geneticist can take without squirming. But rabbits make fools of most of us. ~ Though I have not yet read the book through-it is one of the fascinating New. Naturalist series, whose aim is to make science readable-I have read enough to discover that the authors like rabbits and fear them. With the assistance of such material as the British Museum provides, of books that we never see in New Zealand, and geological clues, they can look back through history for hundreds of years and see rabbits disputing the earth with man all the way and = surviving his attempts to exterminate them. It is particularly interesting that they have done this while suffering a certain lack of biological efficiency. Whatever a layman may think about their works-I mean their physical factories and not their deeds-science finds it a weakness that they do not ruminate. They do, I must now admit, go half-way to rumination, passing at least a portion of their food a second time through the mill; but that is not as efficient as the ruminants’ method of double treatment on the way. However, rabbits have a survival factor possessed by very few mammals in the same degree: an almost terrifying fecundity. If this book reveals nothing new on that side, it gives a detailed and carefully documented account that, with the facts given about the adaptability of rabbits to almost all climates and all terrains, further undermines my confidence in our ability to destroy them altogether. New Zealand has had rabbits for about a hundred years. Britain has had them for a thousand years; Europe for two thousand. I am beginning to think it impertinent as well as reckless to imagine that, if I missed seeing the first one come, I may live to see the last one go. > (To be continued)