She is 16 years old, she lives in a resort town in the south of France and has spent most of her life in obscurity.
But Wikie the killer whale from the Marineland Aquarium in Antibes made headlines around the world this week when it emerged that she could speak. Actually, “speak” is over-egging things slightly. What a study published on Wednesday showed was that she could mimic a human voice on command enough to say things like “hello”and “one, two, three”.
Researchers also released a recording of her allegedly saying “bye, bye”but after listening to it several times, I am not entirely convinced. To my untrained ear it sounded more like a cheerful piglet.
From Eve’s conversation with a snake to Little Red Riding Hood, our cultures are full of human-to-animal communication
This is not to belittle Wikie’s accomplishments, nor the researchers documenting them. Parrots and other birds have long shown an ability to copy human voices but the talent is very rare in mammals.
Even apes were thought to be useless until a 2016 study suggested an orangutan named Rocky in the Indianapolis zoo could mimic sounds made by people.
Sadly, Rocky’s vocabulary was even more limited than Wikie’s. Researchers called his noises “wookies”, because they sounded like the Star Wars Wookiee character, Chewbacca. Still, there is a reason scientists pursue such findings.
This week’s study may not mean whales will be reading the six o’clock news any time soon but it does suggest they can copy new sounds, a hallmark of human spoken language.
This points to the main reason Wikie’s story caused such a flurry of headlines. It was yet another tantalising hint that we might be closer to answering a question that has perplexed humans for millennia: what do animals think?
The urge to talk to creatures who seem so familiar and yet remain so unknown is fierce. Our cultures are full of human-to-animal communication, from Eve’s biblical conversation with a snake, to Little Red Riding Hood’s encounter with a talking wolf.
It no doubt explains why the internet is stuffed with cat videos and ratings soar for television shows about the brilliance of the sheep dog.
Well before the invention of either Twitter or television, the world was captivated by Clever Hans, a horse in Berlin who could allegedly do simple arithmetic, tell the time and identify playing cards, by tapping numbers or letters with his hoof.
Unfortunately, it turned out that the horse was supplying the correct answer by reading microscopic signals in the face of his questioners. Clever Hans has since become a by-word for the way in which behaviour can be influenced by unintentional cues from a questioner.
Yet our anthropomorphic urges remain undimmed. We seize on any sign of animals behaving in human-like ways, from a gorilla seeming to rescue a child falling into a zoo enclosure, to a dog travelling thousands of miles to be reunited with its owner.
It is not entirely clear why we do this, yet it is easy to dismiss it as a serious lack of imagination. It takes far more ingenuity to conjure up the world as animals see it when we have no clue of what that would look like nor any words to describe it. As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once said, “If a lion could talk, we would not understand him.”
This may be just as well. There was another, darker example of human-to-animal interaction this week that underlines the gulf between the two.
On Monday, the BBC aired an astonishing documentary called Trophy: the Big Game Hunting Controversy. It showed hunters shooting a string of lions, elephants and other game in Africa before arranging the fresh corpses to pose for photos. In one of the most gruesome scenes, a hunter shoots a young elephant at close range and stands by as the creature bellows softly until it eventually dies.
Animal rights campaigners were understandably horrified. Many also leapt on news of Wikie the killer whale’s words to demand the release of such apparently intelligent creatures from captivity.
“They could actually be saying ‘set me free’ for all we know,” the president of the Born Free charity, Will Travers, told the BBC. The sentiment is understandable.
Yet the true significance of the Wikie study is that it underlines the continuing depths of our ignorance about animals. As the cetacean researcher, Luke Rendell, wrote in The Conversation on Wednesday, it would be better if we dropped our “navel-gazing, human-centric focus” on whether whales can talk and instead try to understand more about the different ways these creatures communicate and how they have evolved. “Only then,” he says, “will we be able to appreciate their true wonder.”
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