Instant Genius - How to listen to what animals are trying to say

Episode Date: November 28, 2025

It’s likely that if any of us step and of our front doors and take a moment to listen to what’s going on around us, we’ll hear the vocalisations of dozens of different animals. But why are they making these sounds and can we ever really understand what they actually mean? In this episode, we’re joined by naturalist and author Amelia Thomas to discuss her latest book What Sheep Think About the Weather, How to Listen to What Animals Are Trying to Say. She tells us how the tone that’s innate in animal vocalisations may be the mother of all communication how dogs may have evolved their barks in order to express their wants and needs to us humans and how we can all enrich our lives by listening to the sounds that naturally occur around us. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to learn more. Hello and welcome to Instant Genius, a bite-sized masterclass in podcast form. Every Monday and Friday, you'll hear a world-leading scientists and experts talking about the most fascinating ideas in science and technology today. I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor, a BBC science focus. It's likely that if any of us step outside of our front doors and take a moment to listen to what's going on around us,

we'll hear the vocalisations of dozens of different animals. But why are they actually making these sounds? And can we ever really understand what they actually mean? In this episode, we're joined by naturalist and author Amelia Thomas to discuss her latest book, What Sheep Think About the Weather, how to listen to what animals are trying to say. She tells us how the tone that's innate in animal vocalizations

may be the mother of all communication, how dogs may have evolved their barks in order to express their wants and needs to us humans, and how we can all enrich our lives by listening to the sounds that naturally occur around us. So welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you very much for having me. So today we're talking about your latest book, What Sheep Think About the Weather, How to Listen to What Animals Are Trying to Say. So as the title suggests, the book is about our kind of attempts to understand

what animals are saying, you know, in quote marks, or communicating. So, as you talk about in the book, this is a question that humans have been asking for centuries and it's been the source of lots of debates. So over the years, what are some of the sort of key points of contention that have come up around this topic? So it seems to me that if we look back into the history of our attempts to figure out whether animals even have anything to say in the first place, it's not really a straight line in the sense that we haven't evolved from believing they didn't say anything to now believing,

oh, they've got, you know, they can write poetry. It's much more subtle in the sense that there were moments, like in ancient Greece, where animals were considered to be, they had a really strange and interesting nuanced view of like animals could do certain things and could say certain things. And on the other hand, didn't really have souls, didn't have agency, that sort of thing. And then you go to the Middle Ages where, for example, animals were believed to have so much agency that they were taken to court for things that they did sometimes. So, you know, for example, there was a famous case where locusts destroyed a field of crop and the bishop was in Switzerland, took them to court and decided that they were responsible,

criminally responsible. So, and then you head into the 20th century and debate still continued. how much are animals individuals, how much do they react to things that happen to them rather than choosing to do something? So that's kind of gone back and forth over the ages. And now what we find is that everybody's on a sort of a bit more of a grey scale. So I think there's a general agreement that when an animal makes a sound, it isn't meaningless.

You know, if you go outside, you hear pigeons or you hear blackbirds, they're not saying nothing. They're not just tweeting for the sake of it. But there's a sort of, some people are really interested in whether that we can decode those things. And that goes for things like Whale Song and Dolphin Clicks. And then other people, you know, still think that it's limited. So, you know, I would say that from this kind of ping ponging back and forth of animals

have something to say, no, they don't. Yes, they do. No, they don't. Over the ages, now we hit this like, how much do they have to say? and if they have something to say, what exactly is that? Yeah, so sticking with that, so presumably in order to communicate in the first place, you know, you need something to communicate. So in the book, you talk about something called emotional primitives.

So that's a new concept to me. So what are they and how do they fit into this idea? When I started thinking at first of whether animals have something to say, I kind of decided to look at how small we can go. I thought, well, you know, one of the things that you need to have, if you've got something that's worth saying or to say, is you need to be an individual. And what does it mean to be an individual? You know, and one of the things that I kind of thought perhaps might be a sign of an individual is the capacity to have an emotion. So I thought, okay, well, you know, we know our dogs and cats have emotions. We probably our hamsters have emotions. And then you kind of head towards fish and things like, oh, do they have emotions? So I thought, well, I'll go as small as possible and see how small you can get. So I talked to a cockroach researcher and he talked about how he was surprised that his cockroaches have shown these things called emotional primitives. And I think the reason that scientists like to use that phrase is because the word emotion is quite an emotive word and people can't really agree on what that exactly means.

So if you say an emotional primitive, it's something like feeling fear or feeling pain or feeling an attraction to something, for example, like to a food source. So then I went, I was like, okay, so cockroaches have these emotional primitives. What about if we go even smaller? So then I talked to a neuroscientist who works with fruit flies. And he said that fruit flies have emotional primitives too. And he's a neurosurgeon at Oxford University. and he said that pretty much everything that they've tried out with fruit fly to see their capacities,

they've either fulfilled the experiment or they've surpassed the experiment. And the insects actually, interestingly, have a lot more, I don't want to say emotional depths because that seems to be quite anthropomorphic. But, you know, they have much more capacity to feel than we had ever really. I don't think that I had really ever considered whether a fruitfly had feelings before. Yeah. So sort of expanding this out, often in these sort of conversations, the idea of consciousness sort of inevitably crops up. And, you know, people, philosophers, animal behaviourists want to know, are animals actually

aware of their surroundings and that, as you said earlier, their actions have consequences or are merely sort of automatic, thoughtless reactions to external stimuli. One thing that you talk about this that scientists used to investigate this is a concept known as theory of mind. So what exactly is that? Theory of mind in its simplest form is an awareness of ourselves as individuals and of the world as separate from ourselves. humans have theory of mind. We know we're us and, you know, I know I'm me and you are you,

and we all know that and we take that for granted. The question for philosophers is do animals know that? If they do, how can we figure out if they do? And one of the ways that scientists tried to test that have tried over the years has been with tests like a test where you would put a dab of colour on an animal's face and then you'd show them themselves in the mirror and you'd see if they went to investigate that dab of colour that they had previously seen that they didn't have. And that would be a sign that perhaps they have this sense of self, that that in the mirror is me. And therefore, by extension, you over there are not me. Yeah.

And so which animals can pass this test? Well, there isn't really, you know, one thing that I learned from science is there's never really full agreement on anything. So apes have been shown to pass the test and that particular test, the scientists who originally came up with that test, you know, thinks that that's pretty much it. But other scientists have contested that and said,

well, you know, not every animal is really very interested in its reflection in the mirror. And so what you need to do is consider how they find meaning in the world and form a test that would work for them. So for example, Paul, there's a dog behaviourist who believes that dogs pass this, you know, in inverted comma mirror test by supplying them with different little patches of dog pee and then seeing

whether they sniffed their own pee out differently from other dogs pee. So, and that worked. So, you know, that behaviourist believes that that that means that dogs have passed the mirror test. I tried it at home with, in a very dad's army, non-scientific way, really, with some of my own animals and saw exactly that. We have some pet pigs and they aren't interested in their reflections in the mirror. So that obviously wouldn't work with a pig. So I think, you know, they've been tests done with dolphins that have worked a different way and the behaviourist believe that the dolphins pass the test. So I think there's still work to do in figuring out the animal's sense of the world and then designing a test that would work for them rather than this sort of one

one size fits all approach really where you might say well they didn't pass it therefore they don't understand that they're separate from the rest of the world but if you tried a different test it would have a different result so let's have a look at some of the specific animals that you write about in the book let's start with one of my favorite things to talk about which is dogs a lot of people who have pet dogs they'll often have wished at some point oh i wish i could understand what you're saying you know i wish you could speak to me say you know they come with their ears down or something whining and you say, you just instinctively say, oh, what's wrong? And, you know, you wish they could say, oh, I've got a thorn in my paw or a bee stung me on the snout or something.

But in the book, you mentioned that like dog barking, like a classic dog behaviour, that actually exists specifically for the purpose or evolved for the purpose of letting us know what they're trying to say. That's right. Aithologists believe that wild canine populations like coyotes and wolves, while pups will bark and yip and make these playful noises to each other, they tend not to do that when they reach adulthood, whereas our dogs realized over the years, over this very, very long period of cohabitation with humans, that a bark gets attention. The human looks, the humans use their voices much more than a dog naturally would. And so, yeah, the ethologists believe that dogs vocalize much more to humans.

than to each other. So yeah, if a dog's barking, it's actually really, really useful information for us and obviously you can have many, many different meanings and that's when you sort of have to look to the specific context of that bark. From personal experience, when I was younger, I had a German shepherd. He definitely had different vocalizations to tell me what it, for example, if he wanted to go outside to use the toilet, he'd go, ooh, it was, I always knew what he meant, which is really fascinating. And I think, a lot of people who have lived with dogs will know this as well. But currently there's kind of a trend on social media of taking this a step further to these boards that say human words

that the dogs press and it says things like outside or something. So what do we know about that? Because you could think, well, does the dog actually know that it's saying something? Or is it just knowing to press that button to get a certain reaction? I mean, it's a complicated question. Yeah, it's a really interesting field, and it's not new in the sense that those same button boards or AIC, which I think is augmented into species communication boards, have been used with other animals too. So they used them in the 1960s and 70s with bonobos to great success. And I believe there were some dolphin tests too, which were maybe a little bit more complicated because it was underwater. So this is, it's not a new field, this, using a button with a human.

So the way that those buttons work is that you take a little kind of, it looks like a game show buzzer button. And you record your voice, your human voice in it saying, uh, walk or toy or treat or whatever. Actually, you're not supposed to do treats and they'll just press that in set. But, you know, like scratches, like if your dog likes scratches. And then you'll associate for them. You'll create this bridge, this association where if they press the button, that consequence occurs and therefore they learn the meaning of that. So that's the sort of just general theory behind it.

And it does seem to work. I tried it out. I didn't love it. My dogs didn't really seem to love it either, but they did understand it. Both dogs, I've got a big mastiff mixed with a Great Dane. And then I've got a sort of American bulldog who's very expressive in many ways. and they both kind of had a, you know, they understood a couple of the buttons, they understood them. And it seemed that they could generalise, you could put the buttons somewhere else, they would

understand, they press it, it's already a word that they understand the meaning of in the sense that, you know, you have said treat before you've given them a treat or you've said sit before they sit. So they do have a capacity to understand these words, I think. One of the criticisms, though, of those boards is that, and this is from sort of a canine, behaviourist, if you concentrate on teaching your dog to press a certain button in order to say, for example, the example you gave outside, then they'll press it if they want to go outside. But you're missing out on all this other canine communication, which is body language, these subtle gestures, all these little tiny things that they might be doing to say,

oh, outside looks nice, or something's changed outside. or I want to go outside or I need to go outside. And instead you're kind of lumping them into one human word. So there is this sort of, on the one hand, they're kind of fun to play with. And there's, of course, a huge discussion as to whether a dog can learn an abstract concept on one of those buttons. Like, can they understand one of the very, very big issues that people discuss over and over again, I love you.

Well, okay. How have they learned the intrinsic meaning of, that and what does it mean to them? And, you know, that's, that's a huge question. And, you know, it goes back to the idea that we, how do we even know with meaning the same thing between two individual humans when we're saying those words, you know, could mean two different things to do different people. So that, you know, those more abstract words, it's still kind of up for debate how much the dog really genuinely is understanding and using and how much of it is a human projection. but I found that I agree with the behaviourists that although it's kind of fun, it's almost like a party trick and it is fun and it can be useful, it sort of almost diminishes your communication because you're saying to the dog, okay, let's communicate in my language rather than, oh, I'm going to try really listening and delving into what you're saying in yours.

So let's have a look at that a bit further than. You say there's more ways to listen than just with you. your ears. So I think that's really interesting. Let's stick with dogs a bit. I spoke to a researcher a bit back. One theory is that wolves and coyotes, etc. don't have like eyebrows, but dogs do. And in order to make facial expressions. So, you know, as I said, anyone who's lived with a dog knows how expressive they are in a physical way. So, you know, how important is that? Well, it's interesting that you use that example because about five minutes before we hopped on our call, I was in the kitchen making some breakfast and Dolly, a huge mastiff cross, did exactly that. She sat down next to me. She looked at the toast that I was making and then she raised

her eyebrows and, you know, the message was unequivocal. Like, can I have a bite of that? And she had food in her bowl where she was like, yeah, yeah, I want the toast. So it's, it's, it's really important to look at dog's facial expressions and not just at the expressions that they're like for example as you say with their ears and their eyebrows but also at where they're looking because it can be really really subtle like they may glance at something and glance away glance at something and glance away and that may be you know that can be a variety of messages to you like oh have a look over there or i would like that or shall we go there or so as with human communication It's not as simple as this equals this.

It's very much to do with the context. And with dogs, if you listen to, listen in inverted commas to body language really carefully. And of course that will vary. You have to know your own dog's specific body language. I'm sure you did with your German Shepherd. And then you need to look at the context that you guys are in. So, you know, there are levels to the communication just as in a human setting.

You know, somebody says to you, you say to your, your friend, how are you? And they say, oh, I'm okay. Well, that doesn't mean that they're okay. Necessarily. It can mean I'm kind of annoyed. I couldn't park or I'm okay or, yeah, I'm okay. You know, there's so many different nuances to it. So that's something that I find really interesting is that listening to an animal, even when you know really well, is as nuanced as listening to a person. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, We roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building.

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Yeah, that's an interesting theory that anathologist came up with a long time ago. I think it's about 50 years old. And it posed this idea that we can understand an animal's communication, based on fear would tend in many animals to mean that we would go higher and higher and higher in what we're saying. Anger might be a low tone, you know, many people, their voices drop when they're angry. And that can work across species. Now, since that time, I think that has been a debate about how many species that applies to. And of course, there are exceptions. Like, you might scream at someone when you're angry too and use a high tone. So it isn't, again,

it's a framework within which many situations will fit but not everything. But I do think it's interesting in the animals that we know well tend to fit that paradigm like a dog might whine if it's sad or scared and tends to bark with a deeper tone if it's angry. So certainly with the animals that we spend a lot of our lives, that theory seems to still hold weight. Yeah. Let's shift gears a little bit and talk about another species. another form of communication. And that's chimpanzees that were taught sign language. So this is fascinating story and also in some ways kind of a sad one. They were taught American sign language

these chimpanzees. And, you know, we're pretty good at it, surprisingly good at it, in fact. You know, can you tell us about that? Yeah, that's right. They were. Again, I have to preface it by saying it's contentious in that there are still scientists who think that it didn't work. But I can also explain a little bit why I think why some of those experiments didn't work. In the 1960s, there was an interest in how much can we teach an animal to use our language and how much will they understand. And so there were a variety of experiments with chimps, with dolphins, with the very famous Alex, the parrot. And they were all kind of looking at the same thing, which was again, like the button boards, was like how much of a human language can an animal learn to understand

and use. And I think because, you know, the great apes are closest in many ways to humans, they said, okay, let's try with great apes. So there were various early attempts which were to try to get chimps to actually speak, like human words with their mouths and those didn't work because they've different vocal operators from us and that wouldn't work. So they settled on American Sign Language and two camps set out to try and do this. And one of those camps was called Project Washoe. And then the other one was with a chimp who was kind of named, playfully named Nim Chimpsky, a play on Noam Chomsky, who believed the animals couldn't say anything.

So that's what happened. And the Project Washoe chimps learnt really well and learnt, I think Washoe herself, learned about 350 American Sign Language Signs. What the researchers started to find was that those chimps were using them, were stringing together signs in sort of inverted commas sentences, we're using them with each other as well as chimp communications. And then sometimes, and I think this is really interesting, sometimes they would give them a magazine and they'd leave the room.

The chimp would be alone with a magazine sort of flipping through and would be signing what the chimp saw, almost like they were thinking out loud, like we might, you know, talk to ourselves. So, you know, there's a consensus amongst those researchers that that was working. and I went off and met a couple of those remaining chimps who are still alive and saw that these chimps do actually use those American Sign Language signs. And then there were, you know, the other camp, the NIMCimpsky camp,

Professor Herbert Terrace who ran that said no, he said it didn't work, it was a failure, chimps can't sign, and that's that. So why is that? Why did one camp and still believe that that worked really well? And the other camp said, no, it didn't. And I think it's to do with the language acquisition. how they learnt those American Sign Language signs. So the Project Washo Chimps learned by the way that we as a child would learn a word.

So, you know, you'd sign the word for ball, for example, and show them a ball, give them the ball, let them play with the ball. And so they'd associate ball with the sign. So the physical object they'd associate with the sign. Whereas Nim Chimpsky was taught in a way that's kind of similar to how we train dogs to do things, which is that you ask them for something and then you give them a treat. So you would teach him a word and then he would get a treat if he got it right. So that's an integral understanding of the association between the sign and the object or the concept wasn't there. So I think that's why the project Washoe Chimps considered their project a success.

And the Nim Chimpsky camp believed that it was a failure. So we've been talking about land-based animals, but you also have. talk about animals that live in the ocean. So the first one most people think of, if they're my Asian, they watch Flipper when they were growing up, which I loved, is dolphins. So you say that they communicate via something called a dolphin whistle. So what is that? Oh, well, that's, yeah, so dolphins each give themselves a name, which is a, which, you know, I'm sure you know, and they have these, these whistles and clicks, which they use, just like us. So they'll, they'll, They'll use a whistle to say, you know, oh, here I am. It's Amelia. Hi. You know, that's basically

what it means. So I talked with Denise Herzing, who's a researcher with wild dolphins in the Bahamas and has done so for decades. And what she did was so interesting because she said, okay, what we're going to do is find something that's fun to do with dolphins together. And then we're going to put some words to it in their click and whistle language that they don't currently have a word for and see if they can understand it and learn it and we can understand it and learn it and then we can kind of say these words in dolphinese and they'll both understand. So they did the experiments where they played with young male dolphins with three things that the dolphins really enjoy playing with and that's Sargassum seaweed with scarves

and I think with sort of a toy rope, a little bit like the ones you used to play tug-of-war with the dog. And they came up with signature whistles for those three items that the dolphins didn't have, it wasn't anybody's name locally. And then they played them and showed them the object and these dolphins learnt those new words in inverted commas dolphinese. So the researchers could come on, you know,

come on down into the water and the dolphins would say in that would request that particular. item and then they would give it to them play. So I think that's very, very cool because that's, oh, and not only that, but Denise Herzing also gave herself a signature whistle. So she has her name in Dolphonese too. That's pretty cool. It is. So we've been talking about, you know, really fun stuff here, but there is a very serious side to this. In the book, you talk about research that was done recording the vocalizations, of factory farm to pigs.

I mean, this is a really extreme example, and you'd think they probably are in distress, but we can actually hear that through the recordings, which is interesting in itself. But could this sort of quite sad news be used in a wider context to improve animal welfare of captive pigs that aren't in such grim situations, for example?

Yes, I think there's... it certainly could, and that's something that people are also looking into with battery farm chickens too, is that the same sorts of studies are being done. But I spoke with moral philosopher Peter Singer who sort of gave a little bit of a different opinion on that. He said, the problem with factory farming, for example, is that it relies upon commodifying an animal and taking away this sort of sense of individuality. So since they become commodities, you can accept a certain. percentage of discomfort or unhappiness so long as the yield isn't really affected. So he worried that the only way in which this would really improve the welfare of battery farm, factory farmed animals would be if yield drops, it would still mean that conditions would

improve, but it would always allow for a certain percentage of, let's say, distress or unhappiness that would be acceptable because the yield is not affected. But another interesting element of that is that it turns out that we humans, I think, underestimate our ability to understand what an animal is saying quite a lot of the time. So with both chickens and pigs, experiments have been done where they've played different calls of different types to people who don't work with them or live around them. And it turns out that humans actually have a really, really good ability to recognize a distress call in a pig or in a chicken or an excitement call in a chicken without any previous experience.

So again, that kind of suggests that, well, do we really need these sort of automated paradigms in order to tell us something in an automated situation that we would, on a human level, maybe already know. So you also talk about the field of bioacoustics, which is really interesting. Not that I do this, well, sort of do, but on a personal example, so I live in a second floor flat, but there's lots of mature trees around me. And so I often go out and listen to the birds, but sometimes I can't see them.

So I haven't heard that call before. So I think it's from Cornell University. I use the app to identify the birds. So that's sort of my sort of bit of fun or whatever. But we can actually use recordings to kind of assess populations in certain environments as well. So how does that work? Yeah, that's right.

So soundscape ecologist Bernie Krauss has been doing this for a really, really long time. He's been working on that for, oh, I don't even know how many decades, but possibly since the 60s. And what he decided was that he wanted to see if you could understand the health of an ecosystem by listening to it rather than by seeing it. So he went off and he went up to a particular meadow and he took sound recordings of it over the year. years. And then he, so he did that before a logging company came in and selectively logged that meadow. So selective logging meant that they, they didn't clear cut it. They just sort of took out things here and there. And so when you see a photograph of before and after the selective logging, it looks fantastic because it's, oh, you did, they did a really good job. They kept the ecosystem intact.

but what he wanted to do was listen to the sounds that and compare the sounds of those two biospheres and see what had changed. And he did that by using actually exactly the same apparatus that your bird listener uses. What he noticed was that previous to the logging, the audio was full of birds and insects and all the things you would expect would go along with that picture. But in the second instance, after the selective logging, he almost heard nothing. So you wouldn't see the difference. If you went up there, you wouldn't see any difference at all.

But the soundscape told a really different story. And Bernie Krauss believes that you can hear the sounds of extinction better than you can see them. So we've covered quite a lot there in this conversation. Just as one final sort of closing point, what's the message you'd like to give to readers or listeners of this podcast that you're trying to get across with the book. I think we underestimate our ability to understand other species. I think our world is very noisy right now with human voices and they're often really polarised voices and we're hearing people talking and talking all the time and perhaps we've got a little bit complacent in our listening

skills. But naturally we're really, really good at it. And if you notice that a species exists, you just notice, you know, look around and notice, which is a form of listening, wherever you live in the city, in the middle of the city, in the countryside, in the suburbs, doesn't matter. If you notice and you take time and you just try and practice those listening skills that we innately have, I think our world becomes much richer and not just for us, but also for the, you know, for the creatures we're listening to. So it's really a win-win situation to listen to animals, not just our pets and not just the animals out in the countryside when we go for a walk, although that's fun too.

But just to recognise that we're part of this listening speaking world, we're not separate from it. And that, you know, it's only beneficial. The more listening we do and the less talking, although I feel like I've talked a lot in this podcast, the better it is for everybody. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought to you from the team behind BBC Science Focus. That was Amelia Thomas. To discover more about the topics we've just discussed, check out her book, What Sheep Think About the Weather, How to Listen to What Animals Are Trying to Say. If you liked what you just heard, then please consider subscribing to Instant Genius on your preferred podcast platform.

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