another, they use the play bow and other play behaviors to explain that they mean no harm, that it was just in fun. They also use play gestures when the preferred partner responds in a serious way to acts that were meant as play. Dogs also communicate about the future in play: they negotiate social hierarchies, can work out tensions and conflicts in a safe way, and form friendships (Bekoff 2002; Smuts 2006). This meta-communication enables them to learn about their own strength and the strength of others in the group, allowing the strengthening or clarification of social bonds.
In play, animals of different kinds can use expressions in new and different ways and create new meaning. Massumi (2014) argues that the reflexivity that is needed for this meta-communication to work, or the space between one meaning and another, creates the conditions for the emergence of language, which he sees as the highest or most developed form of animal expression. According to Massumi, many non-human animals use creativity in play, but only humans use language. Both the relation he sees between play and language and his idea of language as human language are problematic. Play can mean many different things for animals of different species, and the relation between play and language is not simply hierarchical. Play and human words can be connected in many ways, depending on the context and the actors involved; play can take place inside human language, as when making a joke, and human words can play a role in interspecies play, as when a dog is asked to fetch a ball. Non-human animal expressions can have a similar relation with play, and, like humans, non-human animals have their own complex forms of creating meaning through play, in which these different expressions, ranging from eye contact to movements, can play a role. As we have seen, equating language with human language is problematic, and it obscures non-human animal agency with regard to using language. Instead of viewing play and language as separate realms, it is better to understand “play” as a set of language games in which different human and non-human expressions play a role. Viewing play as a set of language games that enable human and non-human animals to discuss social issues helps us obtain a better understanding of how other animals shape relations among each other and with humans, and it also helps us to see how they shape their own futures.
Another example of a set of language games that involves meta-communication, and which can involve human, non-human, or interspecies interactions, is greeting. Certain non-human animals use meta-communication in greeting rituals to discuss the future. The greeting rituals of male baboons illustrate how this works. These rituals serve as a means to establish and learn about social hierarchy (Smuts 2002). Male baboons often fight, and because their teeth are sharp they get hurt easily. They do not have many friendly encounters such as playing or grooming; their only friendly approach to each other is in greeting, and they often greet each other. When a male approaches another male, the other will usually either avoid or threaten him. When the approach is accompanied by lip-smacking, the “come hither” face, and an exaggerated gait, it is understood as an invitation to greet and answered by the making of eye contact (which is threatening under other circumstances), lip-smacking, and making the come hither face in return. This is then followed by a series of gestures that usually involve one male presenting his hindquarters and allowing the other to mount him, grasp his hips, and/or touch or mouth his genitals—an act of trust, considering their sharp teeth. The pair sometimes nuzzle or embrace, and in rare circumstances may play briefly. Their roles are mostly asymmetrical, and the greeting ritual only lasts for a few seconds.
Ethologist Barbara Smuts (2002) argues that patterns of greeting tend to reflect coalitional behavior: young males do not greet often, nor do they form coalitions; older males, who engage in longer, calm greeting sessions most often form coalitions. Considering the sharpness of baboon teeth, allowing someone else to put one’s genitals in their mouth poses a risk, so it demonstrates a willingness to cooperate. Play and greeting behaviors both involve meta-communication: behavioral asymmetries are temporarily suspended in both and the future is discussed. The distinctive approach that announces a greeting functions as meta-communication, which works in a similar way in play behavior; a baboon tells another baboon that he wants to greet rather than fight, which minimizes the chance of aggression. As in play, the safety of the greeting environment allows baboons to learn about the intentions of others and negotiate the future without having to fight. Greetings might change over time, as the baboons get to know the other, or when their position in the hierarchy changes. Play is connected to learning about and negotiating social rules, and is also connected to morality, to learning about right and wrong in one’s community (Bekoff and Pierce 2009). Understanding, expressing, and forming rules may take different forms in different communities; for many animals, play is a way of learning about boundaries, and responding to them.
From Thinking about to Thinking with Other Animals
This brief investigation into the language games of mimicry, alarm calls, grammar, and meta-communication shows us that there is great variety in the ways that other animals express themselves, make sense of the world around them, respond, and connect to others. To further develop a non-anthropocentric view of language, however, it is not enough to simply study other animal languages. While existing concepts, such as mimicry and grammar, can function as tools in understanding other animals and working towards better relations, they should rather be seen as starting points, not end points. In this chapter, the focus has mostly been on the scientific study of animal languages, which is itself a specific set of language games. In these language games non-human animals often do not have access to how experiments are set up, even though they clearly exercise agency. However, humans and other animals also live together, and form common worlds in which language often plays a formative role. In the next chapter I turn to investigating these relations further by focusing on the relation between language and world and the building of common interspecies worlds.
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From Animal Languages to Interspecies Worlds
In 1904, when he was four years old, Hans could solve multiplication and division problems and extract square roots (Allen and Bekoff 1999, 26; Despret 2004). He could spell words and detect intervals in music, and he could discriminate tones and colors. Hans, who was a horse, answered the questions that humans asked him by tapping his right fore-hoof on the ground. Local newspaper articles about Hans and his human, Wilhelm von Osten, drew many humans to the courtyard where he exhibited his talents. Some of them were convinced he was a genius; others thought that he, or rather his human, was a fraud. Von Osten was insulted by the suggestions of fraud, and formed a commission consisting of a veterinarian, a circus manager, a cavalry officer, several schoolteachers, and the director of the Berlin Zoological Garden, to investigate the case. It turned out that Hans could also answer questions correctly in the absence of von Osten, and psychologist Oskar Pfungst was enrolled to solve the mystery. Pfungst soon found that although he could not detect any, Hans was picking up signals, because when the human who asked the question did not know the answer, Hans was also unable to answer. Pfungst continued his investigations, and finally discovered that, without being aware of it, the humans who questioned Hans nodded slightly when he tapped the right number, which allowed Hans to give the correct answer.
Hans was clearly an intelligent horse, but his intelligence lay on a level other than the one investigated: Hans had learned to read movements in the skin and muscle of humans. He also trained the humans he worked with (Despret 2004). By responding to some cues and not to others, he taught humans how to communicate with him. Vinciane Despret (2004) describes this process as a mutual attunement: human and horse learn to read each other through “body language,” some of which is intentional and some of which is not. For Despret, the phenomenon of attunement is a positive research method that can allow scientists to collect data beyond the animal as object of research, seeing and showing the non-human animal in question as subject. Close interaction with other animals thus produces a type of insight not reducible to the classic canons of scientific knowledge-production (Candea 2013). The scientists who investigated Hans did not share Despret’s opinion, and while the public still came in large numbers to watch Hans perform his tricks, scientists in fields such as cognitive and social psychology developed experiments that were double-blind, meaning that neither the experimenter
