No Language for Lottie

People sometimes take my skeptical comments on animal-language news stories (“Dolphin Talk and Human Credulity,” for example) as evidence that I regard animals as inferiors. Jeremy Hawker complained on Language Log that I showed no interest in animal communication, and that linguists “cannot mention the subject without making a snotty comparison with human language.”

In truth, the only animals I had showed contempt for were the bipedal primates who write science stories for newspapers. In the case at hand a certain parrot had been claimed to have the cognitive ability of a 6-year-old human child. I was telling journalists not to be so silly, and I was accused of prohuman triumphalist gloating.

A later commenter declared that I was in “anthropodenial” and had “little respect for nonhuman sentience”; and a third accused me of bigotry.

Hawker later added that if you think humans alone have language you must be “so insecure that you get comfort from being a member of some exclusive club, the ‘smart’ species.”

Well, I’m not at all inclined to lay claim to human superiority. Let me tell you why.

Seven years ago a cruel and greedy woman in Wakefield, Yorkshire, was attempting to get some Dalmatian puppies ready for sale in the Christmas season. The plan went awry: the litter came too late. By January she had 10 puppies in a dirty garage and was running out of money for dog food.

One, now named Lottie, had been diagnosed as deaf in one ear, and thus wouldn’t fetch a good price. The woman therefore didn’t care whether Lottie lived or died. When the puppies were being fed she would physically hurl Lottie into a corner of the garage to keep her away from the food.

When finally rescued, Lottie was caked in filth, and so malnourished that she was not thought likely to survive; but my partner adopted her. After two years of being carefully encouraged to eat protein-rich foods, Lottie slowly improved, and today she is a normal healthy dog.

But to this day, mealtimes terrify her. When food is brought to her bed (she will never come to the kitchen for it) she backs off as if the bowl were a live rattlesnake. She turns her head away. Only after several minutes, if no one goes near her and nothing alarming happens, will she tentatively lick at it a little (see the picture above), and start slowly and cautiously nibbling.

I long to tell Lottie: No one will ever hurt you again, or throw you in the corner. But I can’t. It calls for a language with negation, generalized quantifiers, transitive verbs, second-person pronouns, disjunction, future time reference, and universal quantification over times. Every day of my life, as I watch Lottie cower from her dinner, I regret that she and I share no such language.

There is plenty of two-way communication, of course: We cuddle her to show her we love her, we teach her to respond to one-word commands, and she knows well enough how to convey to us that she’s thrilled we’re home, or that going out for a walk would be a terrific idea. But we cannot inform her explicitly that the terror and starvation of that garage in Wakefield will never return.

I’m truly saddened by the insurmountable barrier that forever separates me from Lottie’s scarred but lively mind, and prevents me from imparting the promise I want to impart.

It yields no comfortable feeling of human superiority. How could I feel superior? I belong to the same subspecies as the woman in Wakefield. I can hardly feel proud of that.

Language Madness Result:

The final matchup went down to the wire, with the two contestants ultimately separated by less than two percentage points. And here’s the winner:

You can see the full bracket here. Thanks to all who voted, and remember: choose your words carefully.–Ben Yagoda