Back in the day, fox girl and current non-fiction writer Mia Takula wants to get people to listen to what other species have to say. She doesn’t think we need to look all the way from space to find intelligent life.
A man talks, a dog barks, a bird sings and a cow shoots.
Only man has language and only man has culture.
– We have a frenetic need to elevate and differentiate ourselves from other animals. Language is one of the last things humans want to keep to themselves,” Takula says.
Takula has been one of Finland’s best-known animal activists since she was a teenager. The general public still remembers him best for the attacks on fur farms in Ostrobothnia in the 1990s.
The fox girl designation still fluctuates delicately, although Takula has since earned her spurs as a non-fiction writer, among other things. The previous work, *In the lands of the wolves*, was created in such a way that Takula spent 150 nights in the countryside in the wolves’ territories. Now a book about the eco-catastrophe is in the works.
However, now we are talking about the speech of animals.
Cranes dance when the words run out
Today it is known that, for example, whales sing changing \”hit songs\” to each other.
Takula decided to debunk myths related to animal language.
In the essay, in addition to Takula and Virman, wolves, jackals and bulls, forest birds, and experts who explain what the animals are talking about get to speak. The program has also used recordings of the sounds of animal production by the Right to Animals organization.
– I myself was confused when making the program, for example, about how quiet the cows were at the Animal Protection Center in Tuulispää. They make such a quiet noise, even though children are already taught that a cow shoots. It turned out that cattle mostly shoot when excited or stressed.
Some things are so big that the wretches express them with other than voice.
– Jouko said that when words are not enough, the wretches dance their big feelings. It touched me personally, as I have been dancing myself since I was 4 years old, Takula says.
Language is not just words
In their radio essay, Mia Takula and Ellen Virman also try to cross genre boundaries. Virman composed music for Nunnu the bull and Kookka the wretch who lives with humans and cannot fly.
It was already known about cattle that what kind of music they like, for example dark sounds. There was less information about the poor.
– The kriikkroo sound that echoes over the Finnish peninsula in the spring is quite different from the extremely small sound they use to chat with each other. It’s such a small sound that it was a big challenge for us to record it.
Takula thinks that it’s easy for humans not to recognize animal language as language, especially when we can’t hear it.
Many species vocalize so high or low that the human ear cannot catch their frequency. Some animals also communicate with the lateral line sense.
– The definition of language is made by man, and man also has the opportunity to expand the definition. It is strange that while we search for intelligent life in space, we do not recognize it in our fellow travelers here on earth.
Wolves have a better sense of smell than dogs and wolves also communicate with smells. Wolf cubs have vocal folds just like human children. Wolf cubs can’t howl unless they learn.
Rats laugh, but with ultrasound. Our only native whale species, the Baltic porpoise, also communicates at a frequency that is outside the narrow range of human hearing, Takula downloads examples.
Other species perceive their environment in a different way than humans. Some species sense magnetic fields, some have ultraviolet vision.
– It would be worth stopping to hear and find out what other species have to say. They have a huge amount of knowledge gained from experience and between different senses, which is not necessarily accessible to us in any other way than from them.
Because language is power and a tool of reproduction, Takula does not refer to us and them when talking about people and animals. He talks about people and other animals, and uses the pronoun \”he\” for all of them.
Horn conversations with your horse
One of the questions that Mia Takula set out to find an answer to in her essay was whether species can learn each other’s language.
There are many examples of bird species learning to understand the language of other species, especially warning sounds.
– For example, titmice can inform other small birds whether a hawk or an owl is approaching. In terms of staying alive, it is essential to know what or who is threatening.
It is also known how some crows and parrots learn to imitate human language. Takula thinks it’s funny that an animal is considered wise if it can talk about \”people\”.
– If you turn the thought game the other way around, for example a chimpanzee could try to teach me to speak chimpanzee. Then I would answer it in the human languages \u200b\u200bI know, in Finnish, English, Swedish and Italian, that I speak here all the time, but I don’t know your language. As a result, the chimpanzee would conclude that he is stupid, he can’t even speak.
Of course, Takula himself has tried, more or less, to learn the language of his beloved animal. He can neigh like a relaxed horse.
Takula had an animal friend, the now deceased Rölli horse. Takula and Rölli even had half-hour long rambling conversations on their joint forest trips.
Or well, discussions and discussions.
– I don’t know if Rölli would call them conversations. I can’t tell if he was trying to tell me something specific, or just to express that it’s nice to be here in the spring forest with a reliable friend.
Dogs understand human language better than toddlers
Many pet owners believe they know what’s going on in their partner’s head. However, a pet probably understands its human better than it understands its pet, Takula sums up.
It is known that, for example, a dog understands a considerable number of words in human language, even though, due to its completely different structure, it cannot talk about \”people\”.
Many people think that it is enough to say something to the dog with a certain intonation, for example enthusiastically. This is not the case.
– It has been shown that what is said, how it is said and in what situation it is said must be matched. This has been studied recently. The exact same test was performed on children under five years of age. The dogs did better, they distinguish cheating more easily.
In Takula’s opinion, in general, it is not a very good idea to start putting thought bubbles on animals. Too much humanization can do a lot of damage.
– We tend to humanize our pets and transfer human-like thoughts to them. We don’t really know how a dog thinks, let alone that we know what he thinks. It would be important to learn to interpret at least the basics of the languages \u200b\u200bof other species correctly.
*What thoughts did the article arouse? You can discuss the matter until 23:00 on 21 February 2023.*