Human–animal communication
[1] Some human–animal communication may be observed in casual circumstances, such as the interactions between pets and their owners, which can reflect a form of spoken, while not necessarily verbal dialogue.
A dog being scolded is able to grasp the message by interpreting cues such as the owner's stance, tone of voice, and body language.
[8] Scientific American editor Madhusree Mukerjee described these abilities as creativity and reasoning comparable to nonhuman primates or cetaceans,[9] while expressing concern that extensive language use resulted in feather-plucking behavior, a possible sign of stress.
Most bird species have at least six calls which humans can learn to understand, for situations including danger, distress, hunger, and the presence of food.
[10] Chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans have used sign language, physical tokens, keyboards and touch screens to communicate with humans in numerous research studies.
[26] Lilly said that he had heard other dolphins repeating his own English words,[27] and believed that an intelligent animal would want to mimic the language of its captors, to communicate.
[28][29] The experiment ended in the third month and did not restart, because Howe found the two-room lab and constant bumping from the dolphin too constricting.
[30] After several weeks, a concerted effort by the dolphin to imitate the instructor's speech was evident, and human-like sounds were apparent, and recorded.
By having separate whistles for object and action, Herman could reorder commands without fresh teaching (take hoop to ball).
Dolphins typically perceive their environment through sound waves generated in the melon of their skulls, through a process known as echolocation (similar to that seen in bats, though the mechanism of production is different).
This capacity is strong evidence for abstract and conceptual thought in the dolphin's brain, wherein an idea of the object is stored and understood not merely by its sensory properties; such abstraction may be argued to be of the same kind as complex language, mathematics, and art, and implies a potentially very great intelligence and conceptual understanding within the brains of tursiops and possibly many other cetaceans.
[55] Humans began communicating with wolves before the end of the late pleistocene,[56] and the two species eventually created a wide scale symbiotic relationship with one another.
[56] Humans likely began attempting to cooperate with wolves through commands, which eventually led to a more familiar species of dogs that we know today.
New theories within academic discussion of scientific data refer to this as both prezygotic and postzygotic “strong” artificial selection.
[57] Humans began controlling the offspring of livestock during the agricultural revolution through the mating of high yielding animals.
In a Scientific American article from May 1884, John Lubbock described experiments teaching a dog to read text commands on cardboard cards.
[58] Bonnie Bergin trained dogs to go to specific text on the wall to ask clearly for "water, treat or pet me."
"[65] Canine researcher Bonnie Bergin trained dogs to obey 20 written commands on flashcards, in Roman or Japanese characters, including 🚫 to keep them away from an area.
Feline companions began with the establishment of organized wide-scale agriculture, as humans needed a way to exterminate vermin which inhabited food stores.
After training is finished the human communicates by giving signals with words, whistles, gestures, body language, etc.
[78] APOPO has trained Southern giant pouched rats to communicate to humans the presence of land mines, by scratching the ground, and tuberculosis in medical samples.
[80] Patricia McConnell found that handlers around the world, speaking 16 languages, working with camels, dogs, donkeys, horses and water buffalo, all use long sounds with a steady pitch to tell animals to go more slowly (whoa, euuuuuu), and they use short repeated sounds, often rising in pitch, to speed them up or bring them to the handler (Go, Go, Go, claps, clicks).
Chimpanzees, dogs, gulls, horses, rats, roosters, sheep and sparrows all use similar short repeated sounds to tell others of the same species to come closer.
A harbor seal, Hoover learned to speak several phrases in understandable English as a pup from his human foster parent and used these in appropriate circumstances during his later life at the New England Aquarium until he died in 1985.
Though animal communication has always been a topic of public comment and attention, for a period in history it surpassed this and became sensational popular entertainment.
One poster, dated 1817, shows a group of "Java sparrows" who are advertised as knowing seven languages, including Chinese and Russian.
