A given call might contain information about a suspicious figure’s identity (“hawk!” “coyote!”), speed of approach, and size—or, if they happen to be a nosy researcher, their height and the color of their shirt. These messages are responded to with the appropriate behavior—craning a neck for a wheeling falcon, diving into a burrow for a close-by dog. By hanging cutout shapes above a prairie dog colony, UFO-style, Slobodchikoff and his colleagues learned that the rodents can even differentiate between circles and triangles (although not, for whatever reason, between circles and squares).
“It has been unfashionable in scientific circles to refer to animal communication systems as language,” says Slobodchikoff. Plenty of people consider language to be unique to our own species. But to him, the prairie dogs clear the bar, exhibiting “all the elements that linguists say you have to find,” from sounds that carry distinct meanings to the capacity for expressing new combinations of thoughts.
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