or the predicted responses.
Bird scientist Len Howard (1952, 1956) argued against behaviorism, the predominant way of studying birds in her time, both in method and as a theoretical starting point. Howard believed that experiments in laboratories could never give us a real insight into bird behavior, because captivity made them nervous. She also argued against a mechanistic view of birds, and instead saw them as conscious and intelligent individuals. In order to study their behavior in a more natural setting, Howard opened her cottage in Sussex—literally leaving the windows open—to the birds who lived in the area. She fed them and made nesting places for them in and around the house. Great tits, robins, sparrows, blackbirds, thrushes, finches, and birds of many other species soon learned not to be afraid of her, and began to use the house as they pleased. This allowed Howard to get to know them intimately. In her work, she writes about the relations they had with one another and with her, their behaviors and personalities, which she often wrote down in the form of their biographies. Trained as a musician, she also studied and wrote down their songs. The communication between Howard and the birds was extensive, and included gestures, eye contact, tone of voice, bird songs, and calls, but also human words; the birds usually understood what Howard meant intuitively and otherwise learned fast.
With one of the birds, a female great tit named Star, Howard began an experiment reminiscent of the story of Clever Hans. One morning, instead of giving Star her daily nut, Howard told her to tap for it. Star immediately understood what was required of her and rapped out two taps on the wooden frame of a screen with her beak, copying Howard’s tempo. Howard first taught Star to tap numbers in response to her own taps, and then used spoken numbers. Star learned to count to eight in this manner. Howard could not tap fast enough to get to nine. Star sometimes refused the lessons, holding her head up high, and at other times explicitly asked for them by turning her beak towards the wood, or instigated them herself by tapping. Because of her mathematical insight, and because she understood so well what Howard wanted from her, Howard called her an avian genius.
In the experiment with Hans, von Osten was investigating human intelligence in a horse, which limited Hans’s options to respond. Even if, following Despret (2004), we understand that Hans was intelligent and that attunement makes the production of knowledge possible, Hans’s options for exercising agency were limited. He could not, for example, leave the experiment. Howard was interested in bird intelligence, and shows that it is not necessary to raise other animals or hold them captive in order to gain their trust,1 build a relationship, and conduct a counting experiment.2 Howard describes how two animals of different species connect, get to know each other, and derive joy from a specific kind of communication in the form of a working relationship (see also Hearne [1986] 2007), whereas the story of von Osten and Hans primarily seems to be one of use—or even exploitation. As far as we can tell from their life stories, Howard was genuinely moved by and interested in the birds she shared her house and life with, and vice versa. Star was free to come and go as she pleased; both she and Howard initiated the contact. In her house and garden, Howard let the birds co-shape the terms of interaction. She repeatedly mentions that the birds were quite demanding in terms of attention, food, and interior decoration. She was willing to expand her human world to incorporate their forms of creating meaning, and actively searched for ways to build new common worlds with them using human and bird languages. For her personally this meant retreating from the human world; because the birds were scared of other humans, these had to be kept out of the garden and house as much as possible. The birds and Howard created a new community by interacting, and over time. Generations of wild birds taught their children not to be afraid of Howard, so perhaps this can be seen as the beginning of a new interspecies culture. Language played an important role in this process, and in the next section I further explore the relation between language and building a world with others in interspecies relations.
Learning to Read the Darkness: On the Relation between Language and World
Teaching a dog to retrieve may seem like a simple process, guided by human superiority and dog treats. Dog trainer and philosopher Vicki Hearne ([1986] 2007) shows that there is more to it than that. Hearne describes how she taught pointer Salty to fetch a dumbbell, which she conceptualizes as teaching her the language game “to fetch.” Teaching a dog the meaning of a word clarifies the interaction between dog and human, both on the side of the dog and on the side of the human, and lays the foundation for further interaction. The precise meaning of retrieval is not given beforehand, but comes into being when both individuals interact, and the outcome will differ between individuals depending on their characters and personalities. The learning process asks something of both sides: the dog has to be willing to learn, but so does the human. In order to teach a dog something, one needs to be open to that particular dog, and this means that there is also a chance of being changed by this individual. There is not one formula that works for all dogs, and Hearne argues that dog trainers, in contrast to behaviorists, recognize and respond to the fact that dogs are complex and layered beings.
Hearne uses Wittgenstein’s concept of language games to demonstrate how dogs and humans, who are phenomenologically very different—a dog’s perception of the world is mostly olfactory, whereas humans have a primarily ocular experience of the world—can come to an understanding. Retrieving is a language game that describes a dog-human activity: the human tells the dog to fetch an object, and the dog brings it. The exact meaning of the word “fetch” is also formed by Salty. When Salty learns what it means to retrieve something, this enables her to express herself more fully. For example, it gives her the opportunity to make jokes. Salty jokes by fetching the garbage bin or a car tire instead of the dumbbell, or she does fetch the dumbbell, but takes it to someone else. When she does this, her body movements and facial expression are playful and joyful. Because Salty has more options to express herself and to understand Hearne, and vice versa, their relationship deepens, and their understanding, as well as their common world, grows.3 Hearne expresses this as follows: “When we learn a language game, we learn to read the darkness” ([1986] 2007, 72).
Teaching a dog to retrieve, sit, or stay creates common language games, which lead to a larger common world in which both the dog and the human have more options to express themselves to the other. In order for this interaction to work, dog and human need to follow and respect certain rules; the capacity for rule following is also increased in establishing a greater understanding. In other words: a dog can only learn a new language game in a world in which the concepts “right” and “wrong” make sense, and through learning new language games, this moral understanding also grows. Hearne sees a clear hierarchy between the species in this process: humans set the moral framework in which dogs take part and obey. This does not do justice to dog agency. Bekoff and Pierce (2009) draw on empirical research, especially on dog play and theory of mind in dogs to argue that dogs do act morally, and they emphasize that dog morality is not the same as human morality, but tailored to interaction in dog, and interspecies, communities. Dogs can think about, respond to, and anticipate the mental states of others (Hare and Woods 2013; see also chapter 2), and Hearne is right in arguing that creating dog-human language games serves as a starting point for interspecies moral understanding. Differences between the species are not an obstacle to understanding, but rather enable a different kind of being together, which allows for animals of both species to express themselves more fully and which can also be—for the human at least—a source of beauty.
In thinking about the relation between establishing common language games and a common world, it is important to recognize that we are always already with others. For companion dogs, these others are usually dogs and humans, and sometimes other companion animals. For some humans, this means mostly humans, while others also live with other animals. As we have seen, according to Heidegger, “Being-attuned” to others (1927, 172) is a fundamental characteristic of our structure of being in the world. We are not solitary beings who sometimes meet or engage with others; we are always already with them and Mitsein is constitutive for our way of being in the world. This “being with others”
