The Sensory Modes of Animal Rhetorics: A Hoot in the Light (Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature) 3030767116, 9783030767112

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN ANIMALS AND LITERATURE

The Sensory Modes of Animal Rhetorics A Hoot in the Light Alex C. Parrish

Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature

Series Editors Susan McHugh, Department of English, University of New England, Auburn, ME, USA Robert McKay, School of English, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK John Miller, School of English, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

Various academic disciplines can now be found in the process of executing an ‘animal turn’, questioning the ethical and philosophical grounds of human exceptionalism by taking seriously the nonhuman animal presences that haunt the margins of history, anthropology, philosophy, sociology and literary studies. Such work is characterised by a series of broad, cross-disciplinary questions. How might we rethink and problematise the separation of the human from other animals? What are the ethical and political stakes of our relationships with other species? How might we locate and understand the agency of animals in human cultures? This series publishes work that looks, specifically, at the implications of the ‘animal turn’ for the field of English Studies. Language is often thought of as the key marker of humanity’s difference from other species; animals may have codes, calls or songs, but humans have a mode of communication of a wholly other order. The primary motivation is to muddy this assumption and to animalise the canons of English Literature by rethinking representations of animals and interspecies encounter. Whereas animals are conventionally read as objects of fable, allegory or metaphor (and as signs of specifically human concerns), this series significantly extends the new insights of interdisciplinary animal studies by tracing the engagement of such figuration with the material lives of animals. It examines textual cultures as variously embodying a debt to or an intimacy with animals and advances understanding of how the aesthetic engagements of literary arts have always done more than simply illustrate natural history. We publish studies of the representation of animals in literary texts from the Middle Ages to the present and with reference to the discipline’s key thematic concerns, genres and critical methods. The series focuses on literary prose and poetry, while also accommodating related discussion of the full range of materials and texts and contexts (from theatre and film to fine art, journalism, the law, popular writing and other cultural ephemera) with which English studies now engages. Series Board Karl Steel (Brooklyn College) Erica Fudge (Strathclyde) Kevin Hutchings (UNBC) Philip Armstrong (Canterbury) Carrie Rohman (Lafayette) Wendy Woodward (Western Cape)

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14649

Alex C. Parrish

The Sensory Modes of Animal Rhetorics A Hoot in the Light

Alex C. Parrish James Madison University Harrisonburg, VA, USA

ISSN 2634-6338 ISSN 2634-6346 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature ISBN 978-3-030-76711-2 ISBN 978-3-030-76712-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76712-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: Matthijs Kuijpers/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the James Madison University Program of Grants for Faculty Assistance, and by an award of educational leave by the JMU College of Arts and Letters. Further support was provided by the School of Writing, Rhetoric, and Technical Communication, in the form of a summer research grant. I have many additional acknowledgments to make, and I don’t doubt I will have overlooked many of the people who made contributions to this project along the way. Any omission is due entirely to oversight on my part, not a lack of appreciation for all of the help I’ve received. If I missed you, rest assured that you still receive the good karma, if not the praise. A hearty thanks to Traci Zimmerman for her support and tireless recommendation letter writing while I was attempting to fund this research. Also to the kind, blind reviewers who evaluated this for Palgrave Macmillan, and who so enthusiastically recommended the transformation from humble manuscript into the shiny new book you see before you. Attendees of my “animal rhetorics” workshop at the 2017 RSA Summer Institute, who inspired me to keep plugging away at my keyboard in the wee hours of the night. Contributors to my previous edited collection with Lexington Books, whose work inspired and challenged me to think more deeply about our growing subfield. All of the tireless readers of snippets, odd ideas, and turns of phrase I amused myself with (some of which needed to be cut, of course). v

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My previous collaborator and all-around good sounding board, Kristian Bjørkdahl, who was really intrigued by what might result from thinking about McLuhan in terms of von Uexküll, or von Uexküll in terms of McLuhan, with a lot of George Kennedy thrown in for good measure, depending entirely upon how you read the following pages. Thanks to the editors and staff at Palgrave, who have made the process more straightforward. All of the fiddly bits of the publication process should get easier after a couple of books are behind you, you’d think, but it still takes a lot of help from the folks behind the scenes. A special thanks, once again, to my family and close friends. Especially in the midst of a global pandemic, it’s nice to know it’s not just my cats, my manuscript, and me versus the world.

Praise for The Sensory Modes of Animal Rhetorics

“Through this study of how the different (nonhuman) ways other animals perceive the world (electroreception, thermoception, echolocation) and how these in turn shape the forms of their communication and persuasion, Parrish further extends the field of human-animal studies to communication. As it decenters human exceptionalism, the interface with ‘animal rhetoric’ has important implications for the ethics of our treatment of other animals.” —Kenneth Shapiro, Cofounder and President of the Board of the Animals & Society Institute, USA, and founding editor of Society & Animals: Journal of Human-Animal Studies “In The Sensory Modes of Animal Rhetorics, Alex Parrish offers readers (or human animals) novel insights into modes of communication among nonhuman animals through sensory channels far beyond sight and hearing. These unique communicative abilities across the phyla highlight the biological fundamentals under the cultural constructions of communication, the yin and yang of Parrish’s biocultural approach. The result of his multidisciplinary review is a new appreciation for the continuities across species in our evolved abilities to persuade.” —Jeanne Fahnestock, Professor of English at the University of Maryland, USA, and author of Rhetorical Figures in Science (1999)

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PRAISE FOR THE SENSORY MODES OF ANIMAL RHETORICS

“In this lively tour through recent research on the variety of sensory modes employed by animals, Parrish expands our vision of persuasion beyond the limitations of audio-visual rhetoric into the biocultural. Persuasion occurs not only through language and images but through touch, gestures, tastes, smells, and other modes in ways we don’t notice or are blind to. And, as Parrish argues, our inabilities to ‘listen’ to others leads to damages as well as real dangers.” —Marilyn M. Cooper, Emerita Professor of Humanities at Michigan Technological University, USA, and author of The Animal Who Writes: A Posthumanist Composition (2019) “Alex Parrish has shed new light on what often goes unsaid: human beings are not special—not special amongst the animal kingdom, anyway. While our rhetorical capacities are many and varied, so are our biological limitations, and if we see rhetoric as a bio-cultural force, these limitations become startlingly clear. Through insightful cross-species rhetorical investigation, Parrish shows the folly of human rhetorical exceptionalism and points out possible directions in cross-species rhetorics.” —Ehren Helmut Pflugfelder, Associate Professor of Scientific and Technical Writing, Oregon State University, USA

Contents

1

Introduction: A Hoot in the Light

1

Part I The Study of Animal Rhetorics 2

Adaptive Rhetoric: A Biocultural Paradigm for the Study of Persuasion

19

3

Challenges to the Cross-Species Study of Rhetoric

31

4

Information Sharing, Manipulation, and Deceit

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Part II The Senses We Think We Know 5

The Audio-Visual Norm

101

6

Tactile Persuasion (Haptics)

125

7

Gustatory and Olfactory Rhetorics

157

Part III

Extra-Sensory Rhetorics: Beyond the Human Sensorium

8

Thermoception

189

9

Electroreception

209

10

Echolocation

231

ix

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CONTENTS

Part IV

The Dangers of, and Alternatives to, Human Exceptionalism

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Rhetoric’s Role in Human Exceptionalism

267

12

The Study of Animal Rhetorics as an “Awareness Raising” Effort

299

Rhetoric and the Animal Turn: Concluding Thoughts on the Benefits of the Cross-Species Study of Persuasion

325

13

Index

347

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: A Hoot in the Light

There is a world that runs parallel to the one you know. It cannot be seen by the naked eye. You cannot smell or taste it, but it leers at you, mocking your human fragility. Yet there are no spirits in the darkness of this unknowable realm—as Pink Floyd reminds us, “All you touch and all you see / is all your life will ever be.”1 Plato was correct that we are but prisoners of our earthly senses, admiring the flickering shadows on the walls of our mental caves. This other world is material and real, and independent of your existence, and teeming with life. It can touch you and taste you, and nourish itself with your flesh, even though you might not know it until your time is up. This world was here before you were born, and with any luck will continue until long after your children’s children are forgotten. Don’t be startled. The parallel world I describe is not what it seems (and it never has been). The seeming, as Hamlet lamented, is the problem; or, rather, it’s our ability to only sense what seems, that barest part that fits within our abilities to perceive. We have windows into our external reality, but they are only cracked open a small way, and some are creaky and could use a dose of lubricant before they can be opened far enough to provide a decent view. They afford us several incomplete pictures that we merge in our minds to provide a rough and ready map to the exterior, the not us. These maps have brought humanity far—perhaps © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. C. Parrish, The Sensory Modes of Animal Rhetorics, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76712-9_1

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too far for the good of our environment—but we have lost many of our number along the journey, because the maps did not show all of the wondrous fine detail of our magnificent planet. Our species has a lens without a zoom, an overview lacking the fine-grain detail necessary to identify the underlying forces without the use of tools. And we’ve made tools. Boy, have we. In dribs and drabs, we learn the precious tiny secrets of our universe that make world-altering social waves. The merest scrap of additional insight into our earth, or solar system, our universe is enough to cause wars that continue off and on for millennia (and counting). But as sophisticated as our tools are, my view of what surrounds me when I write this passage, and your view around you while reading it, is woefully incomplete. We humans see only medium-sized objects in a middling level of detail, traveling at moderate speeds, if we are able to see them at all. We don’t smell much that almost any other mammal would find shockingly obvious. Our hearing is weak in comparison with many related animals, if we haven’t completely ruined it with our headphones and heavy metal music, or whatever your pleasure. Our sense of taste might be impressive if it gave us much insight into the external world, but we have for some reason developed an aversion to letting strangers walk up and lick us or our possessions. We can gain more knowledge through touch, but again this is limited by proximity and the laws of etiquette. Luckily we have more than five senses. By some estimates, we could have nearly thirty! but that is still incomplete, not nearly enough to sense the entirety of the world that is chugging along under our feet and in front of our faces. We’ve gotten along okay thus far, one could argue, but a peculiar thing about being human is that simply getting along is a goal we don’t realize is noble until most of us become very old and tired of fighting with one another. It is also very human to want to know more—to not miss out on details, especially those that could be important to our survival, to our ability to communicate, to procreate, or even to recreate and eat lots of unhealthy desserts. But all of these activities are both enabled and constrained by our senses, and as has already been mentioned, our senses are woefully inadequate. Worse yet, the ones we do have are often deployed in an effort to communicate not just facts and feelings, but also misunderstandings and outright deceptions. Communication is manipulation, and if you’ve read my first book (the publisher assures me tens of people have by now), you will understand that this is not always an evil—though it can be if we try hard

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enough.2 Like any tool, human persuasiveness is used and misused in accordance with the wishes of the mind wielding it. The sharper we hone our linguistic edge, the more easily it cuts our bodies, both physical and metaphorical. What we cannot do, however, is think very well outside our own experiences. This book is an attempt to remedy that. There are several reasons a remedy could be helpful, including hopefully developing a greater sense of empathy for the other creatures who share our environments, as well as those of our own tribe who might need a little extra help to get along. In order to come to a better understanding of the world we occupy, the limitations of our senses, and some possible new ways of looking at life and the types of communication it provides, there are many sources of information to consult. I will try to provide a wide survey of some of the many, many disciplines that inform our knowledge of sense perception and communication, but as with any book, this work will likely represent but one more window being cracked open a small amount. I can only hope the view it provides is useful. However, that isn’t for me to tell. What I can share is what inspires this sort of deconstruction of rhetorical theory and its materialist reconstruction with an eye (no pun intended) toward seeing what the sensory systems of other animals might be able to tell us. This book is broadly inspired by two ideas: Marshall McLuhan’s often misunderstood statement that the medium is the message, and Jakob von Uexküll’s emphasis on the importance of Umwelten in the worldviews of creatures and how that shapes their interactions with all other living things. This will bring to bear ideas in rhetorical theory, cognitive linguistics, psychology, evolutionary biology, biosemiotics, media studies, and a host of related fields that all share a certain inquisitiveness about the ways animals (including humans) interact physically, verbally, and socially. Cognitive linguistics shares with biosemiotics the basic premises laid out by von Uexküll that we have our models of the world and so do other organisms. By trying to understand how other organisms make these models of the world, we recognize our own possibilities and limitations in modeling. Predicated on this basic principle, the ideal scientist is one who is always looking for new narratives or is ready to revise existing ones, not the one who clings dogmatically to old stories.3 Understanding other people, other cultures—even other species—is a process of being open to, listening to, other narratives and other ways of interpreting the world around us. That doesn’t mean all ideas about

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communication are equal, simply that all offer insight into the way others sense and interpret the world we share. While the research contained in this book stands on the shoulders of countless authors involved in a nearly endless list of disciplines, it is especially important to highlight the ideas that McLuhan and Uexküll have inspired in later scholarship. The probably too ambitious goal behind this effort is not merely to get a glimpse into the narratives humans and other animals create to navigate their worlds (a challenging task by itself), but to divine, as Prisca Augustyn suggests, a “process of crafting a newer, more accurate story” that can replace some of the more harmful views about life that human cultures have created.4 Countless books are written every year to help the average human being feel special. This is not one of them. In fact, if you take nothing else away from this book, I hope it at least introduces a feeling of lingering discomfort whenever you hear someone else speak of how exceptional humans are, how talented, how smart, or how unlike the rest of the animal world. Humans are admired by no other species. Nor should we be. We are special only in the sense that every species is special and in possession of distinctive traits that mark a blurry contrast between ourselves and our closest relatives. But why would someone say such things? Should we stop telling our children that they are special, that they can be anything they want when they grow up? Of course not. Only a horrible monster would tell children that they aren’t very bright, or good looking, or able to accomplish what they set their minds to, regardless of their actual abilities at present. There is a difference between building the confidence of a small child and feeding the ego of a species that has long acted like children on this big, round, rotating playground called Earth. Human exceptionalism—the idea that humans are special, better, above the lesser beasts —is a dangerous concept, one that has persisted for at least two millennia in the West, and elsewhere. It causes us to accept our special nature and parley that sense of specialness into a very natural conclusion of entitlement. We treat the world, and the other feeling creatures in it, as tools to be stripped of their value and discarded when worn out. Being special is truly an immoral thing to be when it causes the suffering of those who are less special. Thus, it is important to consider McLuhan and Uexküll’s ideas before synopsizing the argument laid out in this book they inspired. McLuhan’s emphasis on media and the senses significantly shaped the study of

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communication and mass media. He worried about the ways humankind reached out physically, and through impersonal technologies, to touch, exploit, and control all aspects of the world that is now fully explored. He stressed that “the stakes are very high, and the need to understand the effects of the extensions of man becomes more urgent by the hour.”5 As our species reached full extension across the Western states, and our world became “electrically contracted,” the planet became no more than a global village, one where humans could persuade from distances more impressive than even the far reaches of whale song in the great ocean channels.6 While whales had only one medium or a few media through which to communicate, humans have developed a great variety, variously defined (though most still occur above land, as opposed to most whale communication being transmitted through water). McLuhan emphasized that the medium leads to expectations that can obscure reality, not unlike the famous Taoist story of the Vinegar Tasters. I keep a hand-painted image of this scene on my office wall depicting a telling, if unlikely, meeting of minds from the earliest formational days of Chinese philosophy. In this scene are represented images of the Buddha, Confucius, and Lao Tze, all gathered around an unmarked vat that they’ve stuck their fingers inside in order to determine what it contains. The container is shaped like one that should hold wine, or some other satisfying beverage, which leads to some degree of surprise when sampled. Confucius, because he sees the world as corrupt and sour, makes a disgusted face and proclaims the contents themselves are sour and unwanted. The Buddha, having been sheltered from the world, attempts to see the contents as their ideal forms, but is disappointed and proclaims the contents bitter because he could not change them. Lao Tze merely smiles at the taste of vinegar, for it is among the delightful surprises of a sweet life. If we accept that the medium, the container, can shape the way its content messages are perceived, then it is no difficult leap to accept that environment, and the ways each species interacts with them according to their own perspectives and sensory abilities are also apt to strongly shape the messages they are able to send and comprehend. This requires us to allow for a much stronger relationship between perception and rhetoric than is commonly acknowledged today. Jakob von Uexküll argued that every animal, because it occupies a specific niche and exhibits unique body structures with specific sensory and cognitive abilities, is going to imagine the world in a different way, on a different scale, and with different goals.

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The front porch that grandfather built with his bare hands was intended for human relaxation, but to the skunk who attempts to raise her litter underneath it, the same wooden structure will mean something very different—shelter, home. Moreover, to the termite colony burrowing into it, the porch is an entire world, its source of food, a place where entire generations could live in, feed on, and procreate inside. Von Uexküll’s Theoretische Biologie inspired work by many thinkers who would be much more easily recognized by an audience familiar with communication, rhetoric, and philosophy. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Giles Deleuze, Georgio Agamben, and Noam Chomsky are but a few of von Uexküll’s intellectual inheritors. This work explored our vastly limited knowledge of sense perception, which led to von Uexküll’s focus on animal-environment interaction as a constant feedback loop. Our ability to navigate the world depends entirely on our perception of it, which is gained through our sensory inputs. Nature composes through signs and sign-processes, and these processes are in constant conversation with Umwelten (simply “environments” in modern German, but carrying with it a connotation of mutual influence between individual and milieu in von Uexküll’s work). By this model, language did not develop so that we might swap messages with others, so much as it developed as a tool to help us model our world in the form of narratives. These narratives we create in order to explain what we experience. By forming beliefs about the world, we actually create or reinforce existing structures in the brain.7 This leads us to a sort of blindness to anything that occurs outside our own perception of our Umwelten, as if the world was somehow limited only to ideas inside our minds. These ideas or impressions are formed by arranging the data our sense organs provide us, meaning that any sense organ we lack is an impression we cannot form, and an idea missed having. Howard C. Hughes relates an illustrative story from the Hindu tradition (which has been recirculated often in Western scholarship, perhaps trading unfairly on disability) when discussing the role of limited sense impressions in forming conclusions about the world. In this story, four blind Hindus hear of a creature called an elephant and go on a journey to experience the creature for themselves. At length, they find someone who has a captive elephant they may investigate. The first man touches the elephant’s ear and concludes that an elephant is much like a fan. The second man touches the elephant’s leg and concludes that the first was a fool, as elephants are much more like tree trunks than fans. The third

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felt the animal’s side and came to the conclusion that elephants are like walls. The fourth touched the trunk and decided elephants are like giant snakes.8 My point in re-relating this story is only slightly different from my colleague’s. His point was about the difference between evidence and explanation, while mine has more to do with the conclusions we draw from severely limited information. We are all (metaphorically) blind Hindus encountering elephants every day of our lives. Sometimes these elephants are harmless, like flowers we cannot smell, or colors we cannot detect. Sometimes, though, the conclusions we draw from incomplete information can be harmful to ourselves or others. Animals like ourselves “respond selectively,” note researchers into the biology of communication, and to relatively few stimuli in their environment.9 Sense receptors constrain what information is extracted from an environment teeming with signals in multifarious media. And signals are not simply shaped by animals; animals, too, are shaped by the signals they transmit and receive. This includes morphological changes—actual physical structures being altered because they enhance pre-existing signaling behaviors.10 Another goal of this book, then, is to better understand how human and nonhuman animals who sense in different ways are thus forced to think and communicate in different ways. Because of the limited information their sensory suites can provide, because these senses are shared through specific media with varying constraints, and because these media are part of environments that significantly alter the messages and their interpretation, communication in the natural world is much richer than humans generally understand. Human perception constrains rhetorical practice and has in the past constrained theory—we can break free of that theoretical constraint through the study of nonhuman animal rhetorics. But, just as our senses constrain practice, our genetics and environment suggest ways we can communicate. Animals who share phylogenetic history or environmental pressures with humans will likely demonstrate similar communicative responses. Nature, in a sense, “‘prepackages’ species to act and react in particular ways that have direct human correlates.”11 Our haptic responses, for instance, often closely match those of our closest cousins on the tree of life—chimpanzees and bonobos. Senses even shape our subjective realities. “We never have an understanding of some absolute reality outside ourselves; rather …we ‘know’ only what our particular sensory abilities allow us to perceive about the

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world around us. We cannot hear ranges of sound that dogs or elephants or whales can hear; we cannot practice echolocation as bats and dolphins do; we cannot see in the dark as cats and other nocturnal creatures [sic] do.”12,13 What we can do is stop ignoring the communicative abilities of other species because we assume (in near-complete ignorance) that ours are the best, the most complex, and somehow the most effective. The work of this book continues my argument in Adaptive Rhetoric and is inspired by work of the late twentieth century that attempted to resurrect the use of valid scientific information in a discipline that had become dominated by postmodern, post-structuralist antipathy toward the perceived “scientism” and positivism that overwhelmingly committed postmodern rhetoricians to throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Science is not the only way of knowing, but it is very effective at finding out details that can be quite useful to scholars of persuasion and I am not alone in making this argument. This is one of the messages that George Kennedy, who was then the foremost scholar on Aristotle’s rhetorical program, imparted in his essay, “A Hoot in the Dark: the Evolution of General Rhetoric,” published in the widely read Philosophy & Rhetoric in 1992. This groundbreaking article outlining the ways we could view persuasion not simply as a human pursuit, but one that all animate lifeforms seem to employ to manipulate environments and others, was not immediately well-received. There were objections to specifics, of course, like the idea Kennedy floated that there is an unnamed energy that presages or prefigures rhetorical performance, that it is not the utterance or gesture itself that makes something rhetorical, but the underlying impetus. But generally, most readers were able to understand and accept that other agents, like nonhuman animals, could indeed be considered rhetorical. Humorously, less than a year later, Bruno Latour published Aramis, or The Love of Technology, in which the main “character” was a talking train, and the book took the rhetoric of science and technology world by storm. In the more than a quarter century since Kennedy published his article suggesting a general rhetoric was possible (what other disciplines have called a “continuist” paradigm of communication study), the idea has slowly transformed from one that met with polite indifference to one that is the inspiration for a quickly growing research area in the study of human and nonhuman animal rhetorics. As an individual phenomenon, this slow gaining of steam in a single scholarly discipline might not have been significant to those outside the field, but students of animal

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rhetoric are now part of a much larger “animal turn” that is invading the humanities and social sciences. Fields like philosophy, linguistics, literature, sociology, psychology, and many more are now captivated by species that are not only inhuman, but are often not even closely related. Yet they offer us more information about the world through context, comparison of similarity, and discovery of difference. Thus, before the demands of modern publishing, searching, and indexing got in the way, I had originally planned to name this book A Hoot in the Light: because on the one hand George Kennedy has inspired me, and many like me, to dig deeper into this idea of persuasion as a natural feature of many, many species existing in the natural world. Also, because this program of study is finally crawling out of the darkness of obscurity to which it had been subjected. Animals had been a feature in rhetorical treatises since the discipline began. The semi-mythical founder of the discipline of rhetoric was literally named Corax (gr. “crow”) because of the way he strutted around as he spoke sharp utterances to his audience. Every age preceding the mid-twentieth-century ascendance of postmodernity had embraced the animal, the natural world, and the material.14 Thus, the title of this book is one part tribute to an inspirational figure and one part celebration of animal rhetorics rejoining the world, and sharing the spotlight of scholarly interest once again. It is “a hoot” to help these ideas see the light of day, and the arguments in the following chapters will endeavor to make this attention edifying, persuasive, and entertaining. The book is arranged thematically in four parts. The first part serves as an introduction to the study of animal rhetorics, and as a reminder of a few of the key concepts that will be helpful moving forward. Hence, the first chapter describes a few aspects of the biocultural paradigm I have adopted in my research program, which (being aptly named) includes information from both biological and cultural influences on behaviors like communication and persuasion. This type of inquiry requires a more contextualized approach than the more highly focused rhetorical treatises that put words and parts of speech under a microscope. Adaptive rhetoric is expansive, and general, and while this means some individuals do not fit the mold for some conclusions (there are exceptions to many rules), it reveals information at the broader population level that can then be compared to the microscopy of more traditional work in the discipline. Thus, it should always be assumed moving forward that generalizations about groups are meant neither to exclude nor prescribe what “should

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be,” merely to describe what you see most often if you study a whole lot of members of that group. Presenting this form of animal rhetorical study leads into the second chapter, which tries to anticipate some challenges to a cross-species paradigm, or share some challenges it’s already had to deal with. These include the general hurdles of an ambitious interdisciplinary project—for instance, the reader of almost any discipline will surely be able to say “Why didn’t he include this person’s research?” To which the author of a work like this could either continue to research indefinitely, because there is so much more of great research on animals and rhetoric and psychology and ethology these days than anyone could ever read, or he could set a limit and admit that no treatment will ever deal with all of the truly great scholarship the author wishes he could. This is a challenge every project of this scope has to address. More specific to this particular study are challenges that arise from the strong urge in many humanistic disciplines to denounce science, human nature, or animal similarity in the late twentieth century, or the strong urge in Western religion and philosophy to draw distinct lines between one species and all of the other species (which it ironically then groups into equal categories of the human and the animal). The third chapter in Part I sets up the importance of the biology of communication and argues for the innateness of deception in all forms of persuasion. Human language, being a very complex and varied technology, is most susceptible to corruption by manipulative utterances, which is ironic because it is held up by the vast majority of language scholars as the most effective form of communication in the world. Efficacy is a double-edged sword, then, because sophisticated talk is just as important to the vicious as it is to the virtuous. It is indeed a constant struggle to weed through deceit, even when it is trivial or mundane. The ones we love lie to us as often as a stranger on the street (on some touchy personal topics, even more often), and our various media are inundated with commercial advertisements filled with lies, half-truths, and spin. There is an evolutionary and cultural arms race going on between those who want to deceive and those who want to learn the truth, and as we become more civilized as a species, it does not appear to be getting easier to find the latter. We all deceive others, and we are all deceived by others. But there are other forms of deception and misleading information in the world that can be just as troubling. Part II of this book suggests that the way we view

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our best-known senses can lead us astray for several reasons. Our senses are not always as reliable or powerful as we would like to think. They also present only partial pictures of the world. With regard to the five senses we think we know, the three chapters in this portion of the book will present some surprising information. The first treats the audio/visual bias humans have—most regularly developed individuals of our species rely heavily on these to map, navigate, simulate, and interact with their environments, often to the exclusion of other obvious sources of information. Yet our sight and hearing are fairly weak compared to many animals, and these primary senses are apt to “play tricks” or be processed in misleading fashion. The chapter on tactile persuasion will more likely be entirely new to most people who do not spare much thought on the topic of touch (which most people do not). Yet touch has always been an integral sense for the human, as well as other animals, certainly. For us, it is an intimate sense, often strictly forbidden to strangers and individuals who are not close friends or relatives. It is also essential to a species so reliant on tool use for survival. From early flint knapping to using our cell phones for destination mapping, it would be hard to imagine Homo sapiens getting anywhere without a sensitive touch or two. Equally ignored in most literature on communication are the gustatory and olfactory rhetorics that we employ on a daily basis. Yet these signals help regulate our appetite, our sense of home and place, and even our openness to sexual intercourse. From an evolutionary standpoint, they are senses that greatly contribute to our ability to cooperate and carry on our genes to the next generation. While humans have more than 20 senses (some have suggested as many as 30), these five are presented as “the senses we know,” no matter how ill-informed we still are about them, because the functioning or even existence of the others is even more arcane to the average mind. Yet these senses contribute in various ways to our communicative abilities, and our sense organs constrain and shape our rhetoric in myriad ways. That is why it should be enlightening not only to learn more about the senses we think we know, but also some senses most humans generally do not have. Part III takes up three senses that affect human and nonhuman animal communication in interesting ways, even though humans are generally not aware of the information these senses provide. Thermoception is the ability to detect heat of varying degrees in the world, and in some

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cases inside the bodies of other creatures. Some of the best thermoreceptors are animals like pit vipers, which humans have only been able to emulate in the creation of heat-sensing devices and technologies. Electroreception is the ability to sense electrical fields, especially in a liquid medium like marine or freshwater bodies. However, a very few species of terrestrial animals have been discovered using electrical field data for their own benefit, which suggests new avenues of research, despite air’s poor conductivity compared to water. The medium almost always prevents the message in the case of air, but diverse creatures use electric organs to stun prey or defend themselves, to locate food, even to communicate with one another! Humans do not have this sense. We were not even aware of its existence until relatively recently, and only now have begun to explore new methods of technologically exploiting the information this sensory mode provides. The final “extrasensory” rhetoric this book explores is that of echolocation. Echolocation is interesting to humans for several reasons. Some wildly popular charismatic megafauna practice it. It is effective for terrestrial mammals, unlike electroception. Moreover, some humans—especially those who have lost their sight—have been able to figure out ways to tap into this ability that humans generally do not employ. However, even those who master the human version of echolocation are like babes in the woods compared to the true masters: microbats and cetaceans. The mostly more-than-human sensory abilities presented in this section of the book are obviously not an exhaustive list. There are potentially dozens of sense organs we could add to our metaphorical Mister Potatohead humans, if we were allowed to pick and choose. What these three demonstrate, though, is that there is a shocking amount of information that the human sensorium misses out on. Worse yet, as we go about our days, we are broadcasting this information for anyone to hear. We communicate under a veil of ignorance, and in some cases, this ignorance can end our lives. Because we occupy a certain Umwelt, because we have a unique pattern of interactions with our environment, as all species do, our persuasive activity is constrained by the sensory data—the media, if you will—we are able to transmit and collect. If we transmit more than we collect, then it would be good practice to try to figure out just what it is these other species are able to pick up on that we are missing. But this is only one of many reasons to study nonhuman animal communication. A larger problem looms because of humanity’s ignorant thrashing about in an

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ecosystem it doesn’t fully understand, and that is the likely decrease in habitability for us and many other species that is all but guaranteed in the future. Much of our ignorance, sadly, is willful. Through religious and philosophical ideals that drive us to rank-order the world and all its contents, we envision ourselves as special, exceptional, and entitled to the planet and all of its riches, no matter how much destruction we reap in extracting them. The final part of the book addresses the dangers of human exceptionalism. In the first chapter of the section, I provide a brief history of rhetorical theory’s role in human exceptionalism, as well as its ties to various periods (treated briefly) in Western philosophy. As we reach past postmodernity to something post-postmodern, some alternatives to idealism will present themselves, which includes the so-called new materialist subdisciplines of rhetoric. Many of these new approaches are anti-hierarchical systems that treat the evolution of language in a continuist frame. Human speech did not crop up de novo, and it has many similarities to other forms of animal communication. The study of animal and object agency—like Carolyn Miller’s adventure with a snake who invaded her study, which I will relate later on—helps to dismantle notions of human specialness, replacing it with a view that humans and their abilities are one among many, not one above all. To condemn exceptionalism is good, and to deconstruct harmful beliefs is better, but it all amounts to intellectual onanism if there is not an attempt at reconstruction following the joyful tearing down of past theory and practice. To do one without the other is irresponsible scholarship. Thus, the final two chapters of the book attempt to answer the question, “So, what now?” The second chapter highlights some ways animal studies raise awareness of not only the plight of nonhuman animals, but also of several groups of oppressed human animals. We rely too heavily on traditional views toward the nonhuman, despite our more enlightened times. It is better that we identify with the species similar to us, and to attempt to hear their voices and avoid the traps of mediation when possible, in order to provide all living creatures more autonomy, dignity, and freedom. All animals die, but humans have the power to prevent much of their suffering before they do. In the last chapter of the book, I address some future directions for the cross-species study of persuasion and manipulation. There is much work to do, but this chapter reflects on some ways to inspire more thoughtful attitudes about animal communication and animal welfare. Overcoming

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anthropocentrism is an ambitious step, one that stumbles every time I teach my honors seminar on animal rhetorics and ask my students if their lives are more important than those of other animals. At the beginning of the semester, the idea seems absurd to most students, and many laugh out loud when I ask whether the life of a squirrel in the road is as important as the life of the woman they would hit on the sidewalk if they swerved to miss the squirrel. While few come to accept both lives as equal, by the end of the semester students are more thoughtful about the ethics of choosing one life over another. They even try to work out more challenging scenarios to their ethical standpoints: what if it was a whole basket of baby squirrels with full lives ahead of them, and only one very old woman, or other absurd but instructional situations. The point was never to ask them to think that they should give up their own lives before stepping on an ant, but that they should value the lives of all creatures, despite their differences. We are all related to some degree, and we all suffer when we hurt, so unrestricted anthropocentric thought gives us license to hurt and kill when we should think carefully before wielding such power. If we can break down hierarchical thinking, and I am unconvinced we ever will entirely, but if we can diminish it and recognize it and point out its harm, then we can come one step closer to living in a world that minimizes suffering rather than compounding it. We can recognize nonhuman animal voices and agency without giving up our own, and this is the goal of books like this—to expand the scope of rhetorical theory to include those voices. To reach beyond the microscopic words and phrases that have fascinated rhetoricians in their word labs for millennia, and to step outside into the fresh air and invite the chorus of life to sing its songs persuasive. When we hear those brave new rhetorics, we will better understand our own. We will better understand the world around us. We will listen as much as we speak, and we will be better for it.

Notes 1. Roger Waters, Richard Wright, and David Gilmour, Breathe, Dark Side of the Moon (Harvest, 1973). 2. Alex C. Parrish, “Adaptive Rhetoric: Ethos and Evolved Behavior in Cicero’s De Oratore,” in Rhetoric: Concord and Controversy, ed. Melody Lehn and Antonio de Velasco (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2011), 67–101. 3. Prisca Augustyn, “Animal Studies in the Language Sciences,” Biosemiotics (2018): 4.

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4. Ibid., 5. 5. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (MIT Press, 1995). 4. 6. Ibid., 5. 7. Augustyn, “Animal Studies in the Language Sciences,” 3. 8. Condensed, from the wonderful book by Howard C Hughes, Sensory Exotica: A World Beyond Human Experience (MIT Press, 1999). 9. D. Brian Lewis and D. Michael Gower, Biology of Communication (New York: Wiley, 1980). 26. 10. Ibid., 161. 11. Mark Hickson and Don W. Stacks, “Biological Views of Communication,” Review of Communication 10, no. 4 (2010): 265–66. 12. Louise Hutchings Westling, The Logos of the Living World: Merleau-Ponty, Animals, and Language (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 107. 13. Depending on what manner of cat Westling means, as humans have caused housecats to become (mostly) diurnal. 14. For a recent treatment of animals as symbols and inspiration in the history of rhetorical texts, see Debra Hawhee, Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw: Animals, Language, Sensation (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

References Augustyn, Prisca. “Animal Studies in the Language Sciences.” Biosemiotics (2018): 1–18. Hawhee, Debra. Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw: Animals, Language, Sensation. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Hickson, Mark, and Don W. Stacks. “Biological Views of Communication.” Review of Communication 10, no. 4 (2010): 263–75. Hughes, Howard C. Sensory Exotica: A World Beyond Human Experience. MIT Press, 1999. Lewis, D. Brian, and D. Michael Gower. Biology of Communication. New York: Wiley, 1980. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. MIT Press, 1995. Parrish, Alex C. “Adaptive Rhetoric: Ethos and Evolved Behavior in Cicero’s De Oratore.” In Rhetoric: Concord and Controversy, edited by Melody Lehn and Antonio de Velasco. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2011. Waters, Roger, Richard Wright, and David Gilmour. Breathe, Dark Side of the Moon. Harvest, 1973. Westling, Louise Hutchings. The Logos of the Living World: Merleau-Ponty, Animals, and Language. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014.

PART I

The Study of Animal Rhetorics

CHAPTER 2

Adaptive Rhetoric: A Biocultural Paradigm for the Study of Persuasion

The biological side of our nature is nothing to be ashamed of. Human consciousness has always a biological grounding or complement. And biological activity makes little if any sense apart from its evolutionary history. —Walter J. Ong1

A Biocultural Approach Social constructivism got many things right. As a corrective to biological determinism, it demonstrated the importance of history, culture, and environment to human behavior and development. In response to extreme versions of determinism, it even took on an ideological battle with the forces of racism and eugenics. The problem with social constructivism, I would argue, is not its moral or philosophical basis—it is its complete victory in many disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Luckily, this trend is slowly being moderated. Few there are who still insist on a blank slate theory of human development, the idea that we are born empty vessels that are filled by culture, resulting in a near-infinite variety of behaviors and ideas. Following the likes of Steven Pinker, and other psychologists working at the front lines of human development, we realize that neither biology nor culture can account for human behavior in its entirety. Rather, much of our cultural output serves a function; © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. C. Parrish, The Sensory Modes of Animal Rhetorics, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76712-9_2

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for instance, literature, while it has the by-product of being delightful, is potentially an adaptation for instructing and building scenarios to discern proper behavior in a social group.2 Our slates are not blank; they are messy at birth, and become ever more crowded with information both biological and cultural as we grow.3 We are biocultural beings. The simplest conclusion we could draw from this fact is that some human behavior is biological and some is cultural, and we should be able to separate these behaviors from one another and sort them into piles. It is unfortunately not so simple. Culture is a biological trait of human beings. All humans are influenced by culture, and in the very few cases of abused children who grow up isolated from human contact, their development is irrevocably damaged. There is a window for learning the basics of culture (which are far from basic, when we consider cultural influences on language, social behavior, pair bonding, and other fundamental human drives). This is not to say any single culture is better than another. It seems any cultural learning at a young age is preferable to none, and all cultures have developed in order to provide the necessary learning opportunities for survival in their local environments. Culture is heavily influenced by place, but it is not unique to any region or people. All people have culture. It is a biological trait that helps to define humans, as well as some other intelligent social animals, such as dolphins or bonobos. These cultures interact with our genes, our hormones, and our already developed phenotypic traits to produce behaviors and attitudes that help us deal with the other people in our places, and to navigate the physical environments around us. Proponents of epigenetic theory, which accounts for a growing number of biologists these days, have in fact declared the nature/nurture dichotomy irrelevant. “We now know that genes and experience interact,” they say, “both requiring the other in order to fulfill their function.”4 While Lamarck’s theory of inheritance—which suggested if a father worked out his biceps very hard every day, eventually creating gigantic muscles on his arms, his children would be born with large bicep muscles, as well—is still a very simplified version of epigenetics, it does suggest some truths that were scorned when it was opposed directly by natural selection on a Darwinian model. Our environments, interactions, and behavioral patterns influence chemical compounds (our epigenome) that can influence the way our DNA instructions are carried out in our bodies. Because our biology and culture interact in complex and multiple ways, it is necessary to stop labeling any single behavior or attitude as cultural or

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biological. They are all both. What this means to students of persuasion, of attitude, of identity, similarity, difference, is that a biocultural approach is necessary to gain a fuller understanding of any rhetorical phenomenon we wish to study. Before I continue in this vein, it is important for readers to know a little about my journey into this subject, to understand the motives behind this research program. Earlier efforts to incorporate animals and brains into the study of persuasion received criticism that it was perhaps a conservative political reaction to social constructivism, which in many minds is conflated with social justice movements, due to the early work against the biological determinism that led to many racist attitudes and actions. This is decidedly no such reaction. Other criticism stemmed from the idea that an approach informed by evolutionary theory was inherently progressive, that it set up hierarchies. This, too, does not apply here and in fact does not apply to modern evolutionary theory at all. Evolution cannot be progressive for any length of time, as environments and ecosystems are in a constant state of flux. Just as dinosaurs were the “fittest” for millions of years, they were not able to adapt to changes in their environment, unlike mammals. Mammals’ days are likely numbered, as well. While I hate to ruin anyone’s feelings of superiority so early in this book, I should warn you that Spencer’s idea of survival of the fittest has it backward. We do not survive because we are universally fit; we are considered fit because so far we have survived. Every one of your ancestors was fit. How do I know this? Because they lived long enough to breed. Because you are here. That is all that fitness can tell us. It does not tell us that one culture’s rhetorical practices are better than another. George Kennedy received criticism along these lines when he presented his analysis of human rhetorical practice in order of perceived complexity in his Comparative Rhetoric.5 Yet critics neglected a fundamental fact in the evolution of behavior that being more complex is not necessarily better and can even be a hindrance.6 So, if this work is not a conservative reaction to social constructivism, and it is not an attempt to reinforce hierarchical thinking, what is it? Celeste Condit suggests that “the questions that rhetorical critics choose are always a product of their embodied positions.”7 For herself that meant that, as a young woman interested in reproductive politics, she chose controversies regarding abortion. When she moved to New Orleans, she listened to debates regarding race and racism. For me, it was my love for animals and the opportunity to spend a great deal of time among a wide

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variety of them, that has allowed me to perhaps identify more closely with other species than those who did not have the same early exposure to the beasts of the field. Growing up on a small ranch in southern Minnesota, I was a child of the fields and forests, and while I cannot claim to have always been a model citizen toward other animals, I did learn to respect them in ways that make witnessing their mistreatment very painful to me. My embodied position is that of a human animal who, like most people if given a chance, is able to empathize with those individuals of other species whom they encounter. Douglas Anderson, when discussing Charles Sanders Peirce’s affinity with animals, suggests that those who are best equipped to study animals are those who “feel with” them—those who have empathy for animals, a natural interest in them, and a predisposition to connect with them.8 Some of my favorite scholars and authors have demonstrated this quality, and I think there is some merit to the argument that animal studies require a certain predisposition, or at least a certain wonder in the natural world, that truly captivates the animal lover. Thus, it came as little surprise when my intended specialty in the classics kept turning up questions about animals, communication, cognition, evolution, and culture. Stumbling upon an article on evolutionary literary criticism in a graduate course on Darwin and (yes) animals in Victorian literature, the transition from classical rhetoric to animal rhetorics was both quick and painless. It may still be unclear how a messy slate and an interest in animal communication becomes a scholarly topic. Much of this has to do with the growing importance of a biocultural stance toward explaining behavior in those disciplines in the life and social sciences where consilience has become important. Consilience, originally William Whewell’s term for the “jumping together” of multiple overlapping forms of knowledge, is in modern academic practice an attempt to attain truly interdisciplinary approaches to knowledge. In many cases, interdisciplinary studies have consisted of one discipline poaching on the preserve of another—reading chemistry in terms of poetry, if you will—which is often an intellectual dead end, as it does not embrace the valuable insights of the subject discipline, only its themes that are suitable to the original discipline’s standard discourse. Rather, a consilient approach would appreciate the contributions of both poets and chemists, perhaps interrogating the inventive processes that occur when attempting to explain chemical interactions to the public by using poetic imagery; what is gained and lost through the use of metaphor, for instance. Popular work on consilient

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studies often acts as correctives to the overwhelming popularity of social constructivism and so leads the reader back into a biocultural perspective.9 The growing public realization of the explanatory power of biocultural paradigms has inspired a closer look not only by public intellectuals, but even mainstream journalists like Michael Pollan. He argues in his wildly popular, In Defense of Food: an Eater’s Manifesto, that “more than many other cultural practices, eating is deeply rooted in nature—in human biology on one side and in the natural world on the other.”10 In arguing against what he considers the “not food” food products created in laboratories and manufactories by Western food scientists, he reminds readers that many “traditional culinary practices are the products of a kind of biocultural evolution, the ingenuity of which modern science occasionally figures out long after the fact,” if it figures it out at all.11 While his book argues for a return to traditional views of a healthy diet—eating whole foods, not too much, and mainly plant matter—his approach is in many ways sympathetic to my own, in that we both wish to break down reductionist assumptions (for him it’s nutritionism, and for me it’s biological determinism and social constructivism) that only present incomplete views of human behaviors, such as dining or persuading. These are, I might add, traditionally complementary activities; from the Paleolithic campfire to the modern lunch meeting, rhetoric and food have literally shared a place at the table. To relate my intellectual journey back to the topic of messy slates and animal rhetorics, then, it is important to consider the implications of a biocultural perspective on the study of persuasion. A biocultural approach entails two fundamental ideas that are changing the way we see the study of persuasion and identification: the human central nervous system is a primary locus of rhetorical judgment, fed by perception and experience. In some ways, this book will address this aspect of a biocultural approach; additional information can be found in the growing body of scholarship on cognitive rhetoric, neurorhetorics, and evolutionary psychology.12 The second idea a biocultural approach entails is that, in order to understand persuasive behaviors among human animals, it is necessary to treat them in context. We are but one of millions of species that persuade, and many of our tools are shared with our closest kin, and those whose environments presented similar challenges to overcome through communication. This project of contextualization is the heart of my present volume— figuring out how animals see (and hear and touch) the world is central to understanding the ways they, and we, persuade. Our range of response is

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constrained by, and informed by, the limitations of our sensory modalities, as is every animal’s. By better understanding what is out there, what exists in nature, and how differing abilities translate into various modes of communication and perception, we will understand our own significant abilities and limitations, and how they shape our own range of response.

Cross-Species Study It is important to remind humans that they are neither the first nor the best rhetors. We are not the fittest, whatever that might mean, and we may or may not be the most sophisticated. Until we understand even one other animal communication system fully, we are merely making assumptions. This is one reason it is of vital importance that we begin to expand the scope of rhetorical studies to include nonhuman animals. Emily Plec describes the closely related field of communication studies as a community of scholars frustrated by the tendency to obsess over a supposed human-animal dichotomy and the dismissal of human-animal relationships as insignificant. She wishes to see a communications discipline inclusive of all life, much as I wish the same for the field of rhetoric.13 That begins by analyzing the ways human and nonhuman animal rhetorics are similar and different. One of the easiest points of entry into this endeavor is to observe the physical limitations of each species based on their morphology. Our bodies, and especially our senses, constrain rhetorical practice, and just as we see nonhuman animals as limited, they would almost certainly view us in the same way. We are not fast runners or swimmers. We do not have strong claws. Our teeth are not that sharp, and our jaws are relatively weak. We can barely see at night. We cannot fly. If it weren’t for our highly social nature, which caused the evolution of such big brains, we would never have lasted the mere ~95,000 years anatomically modern Homo sapiens have been bumbling their way around the planet, breaking things. We see animals as limited based on our own perceived strengths: language, culture, reason. One may rightly wonder what any of these intellectual strengths have done for us. Granted, we have mastered most terrestrial environments, because of our extreme adaptability and our willingness to support specialists in education-intensive professions. However, what will that earn us when we completely destroy our species’s ability to grow food, because we do not care enough about global climate change

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to restrict our use of fossil fuels? As I will argue in Chapter 44, one of the greatest accomplishments of sophisticated language use seems to be that it allows us to deceive each other (and ourselves) more efficiently. If we saw ourselves from the perspectives of other animals, we would be the limited ones. Louise Westling makes a similar point when she asks us to consider humans from a crow’s perspective: we would look severely “limited or captivated… seeing that humans cannot fly up into a tree.”14 This is not to say that our traits are unimportant. Language is extremely useful, and we rely on it for a number of things. For example, most people would assume that visual stimuli are most important in determining mate choice, but that is not the case; it turns out that sophisticated language use is often the most important feature of a potential mate—especially in terms of male attractiveness to females. 15 That said, language is only one of many important ways people communicate, and it is not even the most common. Language use as we recognize it in ourselves is often our benchmark for judging the intelligence of other species—how similar or different are their communicative behaviors? This is arrogant, or at least anthropocentric. We have seen the mistake of human exceptionalism carried out in other disciplines, to significant detriment. The field of primatology offers a potent example. For much of the early twentieth century, scientists in the West treated animals as little more than robots—unconscious beings acting on instinct alone. This view retarded the study of consciousness in human and nonhuman animals, primate sociality, and animal communication for decades. By way of contrast, in Japan, where prevailing philosophies in the twentieth century did not view humans as significantly distinct from other animals, primatologists were able to make advances in the study of animal consciousness that few Western scholars would have credited. Yet many of these advances are heralded as key moments in the study of primate consciousness and behavior, and the Western world was recently forced to catch up lest it be left behind. One of the fundamental modes of mitigating the entrenched exceptionalism within communication studies and rhetoric is to broaden our perspective by means of the cross-species study of persuasion. We must increase our awareness of discourse communities, as well as what I would call discourse ecologies —not just the social, but the environmental, embodied, and cross-species influences on our rhetorical situations. We

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live in ecosystems of thought, behavior, and action, in which our actions affect, and are affected by, the actions of humans, nonhuman animals, and even inanimate objects in our environment. It would behoove us to recognize the recursive influence of the physical environment, or Umwelt, and rhetorical energy on one another. When studying the interactions and mediations on behalf of others, whether they are human or nonhuman animals, influence seeps, even against the primary flow we would recognize. Not only can humans speak through animals, and for animals, but animals can communicate on their own or on behalf of their humans. When analyzing the relationships between veterinarians, pets, and pet guardians, Mary Pilgrim found that a great hodgepodge of communicative efforts goes into the triadic relationships. In some ways, vets say “you have to rely on the client for what’s ailing the animal,” but pets communicate in various ways, and often they have knowledge their humans do not.16 Moreover, mediation on behalf of animals is often an imperfect, or even misleading, method of communication. Anthropomorphism, emotion, even concern about financial costs can color the ways humans report to veterinarians what they interpret their pets as feeling. It is very important, therefore, to proceed carefully as we attempt to broaden the scope of the field. One potential trap is that we rarely consider the significance of sense perception on communication. Beyond the range of our five most commonly recognized senses, animals experience the world in very different ways. Some of this I will cover in Parts II and III of this book, dealing with the common senses we generally understand from our own experience and some explorations of what we might call extra-sensory rhetoric, respectively. Of additional use will be the consideration of Umwelt theory, used primarily in biosemiotics and zoosemiotics. What these considerations boil down to is this: not only does every species encounter life in different ways, but every individual does, as well. Sense perception, ways of viewing and interacting with our environments and each other—these things heavily influence why and how we signal. Much of the first part of this book will be dedicated to setting up the important discussions to follow and to contextualizing the discussion. Because I am attempting to synthesize countless fields of research in the humanities, social and life sciences, it will be necessary to provide some history of the ideas that will influence this study. It will also require

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some tugging at disciplinary boundaries, some gentle urging in one direction or another, when long-held assumptions come into direct conflict with those of another discipline. Of course, no one will be absolute in their pleasure at the results—as Winston Churchill said, good diplomacy is when everyone leaves the table dissatisfied—but while delectatio is one of Cicero’s offices of rhetoric, I am under no obligation to please, only to edify. I will discuss this in Chapter 4, but let it suffice to say that few efforts at recontextualizing an entire discipline have resulted initially in lots of happy critics. Efforts at this sort of context expansion did not start with my own work, of course. As I mentioned in the introduction, one of the major theorists of the late twentieth century, George Kennedy, urged shocked readers to consider the rhetorical energy that precedes all communicative events, be they plant, animal, or fungal in nature.17 John Angus Campbell predicted a move toward placing rhetoric under an evolutionary lens as early as 1986.18 This was something that was not accomplished systematically until I proposed the study of rhetoric in terms of animal signaling in my first monograph, in 2013.19 What an evolutionary perspective gains us, of course, is the bio in a biocultural perspective. Rhetoric and communication scholars have accumulated much cultural knowledge regarding the ways we persuade, identify, or reach consensus, but the study of life itself had been divorced from the humanistic approach for some time. So it follows that this book is an early attempt at blowing up boundaries. To take reductive approaches to persuasion and position them alongside pertinent scholarship in psychology, ethology, and anthropology is to position the discipline on a field of knowledge that is rarely viewed. It is not worthwhile to study rhetoric in a vacuum, at least not solely in a vacuum and all of the time (which other scholars have also begun to address in rhetoric and related fields). Forays into other ways of understanding persuasive behaviors are necessary and good. A little communication between disciplines should not scare scholars of communication or persuasion, and understanding the cultural, social, psychological, embodied, sensual, and environmental effects on rhetorical practice is a business that requires research into a wide variety of fields.

Notes 1. Walter J. Ong, Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981). 10. 2. Steven Pinker, “Toward a Consilient Study of Literature,” Philosophy and Literature 31, no. 1 (2007): 172–3.

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3. Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Viking, 2002). 4. Peter A. Reich and Blake A. Richards, “Epigenetics and Language: The Minimalist Program, Connectionism, and Biology,” Linguistica Atlantica 25 (2004): 11. 5. Mary Garrett, “Review of Comparative Rhetoric: An Historical and CrossCultural Introduction,” Rhetorica 16, no. 4 (1998). 6. If you want a much fuller discussion of this topic, see Alex C. Parrish, Adaptive Rhetoric: Evolution, Culture, and the Art of Persuasion, Routledge Studies in Rhetoric and Communication (New York: Routledge, 2013). 69. 7. Celeste M. Condit, “Contemporary Rhetorical Criticism: Diverse Bodies Learning New Languages,” 2006, 370. 8. Douglas R. Anderson, “Peirce’s Horse: A Sympathetic and Semeiotic Bond,” in Animal Pragmatism: Rethinking Human–Nonhuman Relationships, ed. Erin McKenna and Andrew Light (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004), 88. 9. See especially: Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Knopf: Distributed by Random House, 1998). 10. Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto (New York: Penguin Press, 2008). 174. 11. Ibid. 12. For an early exploration of neurorhetorics, see Jordynn Jack’s special issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Vol. 40 No. 5, 2010. 13. Emily Plec, Perspectives on Human-Animal Communication: Internatural Communication (New York: Routledge, 2013), xiii. 14. Louise Hutchings Westling, The Logos of the Living World: Merleau-Ponty, Animals, and Language (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 66. 15. Benjamin P. Lange et al., “Words Won’t Fail: Experimental Evidence on the Role of Verbal Proficiency in Mate Choice,” Journal of Language and Social Psychology (2013): 1. 16. Mary Pilgrim, “Communicating Social Support to Grieving Clients: The Veterinarians’ View,” in Perspectives on human-animal communication: internatural communication, ed. Emily Plec (New York: Routledge, 2013), 137. 17. George A. Kennedy, “A Hoot in the Dark: The Evolution of General Rhetoric,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 25, no. 1 (1992). 18. John Angus Campbell, “Scientific Revolution and the Grammar of Culture: The Case of Darwin’s Origin,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 72, no. 4 (1986): 369. 19. Parrish, Adaptive.

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References Anderson, Douglas R. “Peirce’s Horse: A Sympathetic and Semeiotic Bond.” In Animal Pragmatism: Rethinking Human-Nonhuman Relationships, edited by Erin McKenna and Andrew Light, 86–94: Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004. Campbell, John Angus. “Scientific Revolution and the Grammar of Culture: The Case of Darwin’s Origin” [in English]. Quarterly Journal of Speech 72, no. 4 (1986): 351–76. Condit, Celeste M. “Contemporary Rhetorical Criticism: Diverse Bodies Learning New Languages.” 2006. Garrett, Mary. “Review of Comparative Rhetoric: An Historical and CrossCultural Introduction.” [In English]. Rhetorica 16, no. 4 (1998): 431–33. Kennedy, George A. “A Hoot in the Dark: The Evolution of General Rhetoric.” Philosophy & Rhetoric 25, no. 1 (1992): 1–21. Lange, Benjamin P., Eugen Zaretsky, Sascha Schwarz, and Harald A. Euler. “Words Won’t Fail: Experimental Evidence on the Role of Verbal Proficiency in Mate Choice.” Journal of Language and Social Psychology (December 19, 2013). Ong, Walter J. Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981. Parrish, Alex C. Adaptive Rhetoric: Evolution, Culture, and the Art of Persuasion. Routledge Studies in Rhetoric and Communication. New York: Routledge, 2013. Pilgrim, Mary. “Communicating Social Support to Grieving Clients: The Veterinarians’ View.” In Perspectives on Human-Animal Communication: Internatural Communication, edited by Emily Plec, 129–41. New York: Routledge, 2013. Pinker, Steven. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature [in English]. New York: Viking, 2002. ———. “Toward a Consilient Study of Literature” [in English]. Philosophy and Literature 31, no. 1 (2007): 162–78. Plec, Emily. Perspectives on Human-Animal Communication: Internatural Communication. New York: Routledge, 2013. Pollan, Michael. In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. New York: Penguin Press, 2008. Reich, Peter A., and Blake A. Richards. “Epigenetics and Language: The Minimalist Program, Connectionism, and Biology.” Linguistica Atlantica 25 (2004): 7–21. Westling, Louise Hutchings. The Logos of the Living World: Merleau-Ponty, Animals, and Language. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014. Wilson, Edward O. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York: Knopf: Distributed by Random House, 1998.

CHAPTER 3

Challenges to the Cross-Species Study of Rhetoric

In the previous chapter, I introduced new readers to some concerns we might address by adopting a biocultural approach to the study of rhetoric and to some fundamental ideas in taking a cross-species view. That we do not generally study rhetorical strategies as continuous between species constitutes a fundamental flaw in our scholarly tradition. Animal communication demonstrates examples of message transmission, metacommunication, innovation (invention), flexible reference to messages, double articulation (syntax), dialogue, and even metaphor.1 Thus it is important that we begin to “take account of codes outside human language—codes of the body and the broader ecologies in which we swim.”2 But there are hurdles to overcome if the scope of humanistic studies into communication and persuasion is to be expanded. Some of these challenges, as I alluded to in Chapter 22, stem from the fact that opening up these boundaries requires consolidating the knowledge acquired in several different disciplines, which take several different approaches to gathering that information. Different fields have adopted various methods or heuristics that some find incompatible with others. This fact also signals that there will be methodological, and perhaps even epistemological challenges to such a wide-ranging study. And none of this is even to mention the problems with observing human and nonhuman

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animal behavior without in some way invalidating or limiting the results of the conclusions we can draw from the data. Luckily these challenges are not insurmountable. Interdisciplinary work of this sort is beginning to crop up under the aegis of several different parent fields. In semiotics or linguistics, there is a strong cognitive and embodied turn that began several decades ago. This has opened the door to much biolinguistic and zoosemiotic inquiry recently, that might not have otherwise found mainstream acceptance. It will be important, later in the chapter, to introduce some of the achievements of one of these fields, in order to bolster our understanding of what has already been done and what still needs to be accomplished. Likewise, scholars in communication studies have been increasingly accepting the idea that the study of human and nonhuman animal communication can tell us much, one about the other. Understanding trends in allied disciplines will help to set up a brief history of the field of animal rhetorics, which has heretofore seen little in the way of deep engagement; for most of the last two decades, there have been very few monographs on the topic, as well as some articles and special issues of journals showing up in fits and starts. That said, the tide is turning. The field of animal studies has been increasingly showing up at mainstream rhetoric and composition and communication studies conferences, and top journals and university presses have begun actively seeking out manuscripts that combine animal studies and rhetorical theory, even going so far as to publish re-imaginations of traditional animal bestiaries as innovative ways to rethink human and nonhuman animal rhetorics.3 It would be wise, as this trend of interdisciplinary inquiry continues to grow, to understand the difficulties of approaching human and nonhuman animal persuasion from both humanistic and scientific angles.

Challenges from Humanist Traditions Since the rise of Neo-Platonism, and especially since the triumph of Christian dogma over the cultural history of the western world, the importance of language on the history of human intelligence has almost always been assessed from a discontinuist perspective.4 Animals, until very recently, have been nearly universally treated as tools put on earth for the use (and misuse) of ‘man.’ As Jacques Derrida once wrote, nonhuman animals are conceived as the “wholly other, more other than any other.”5 While many enlightened and sensitive individuals now occupy positions as public

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intellectuals, there remains only an unspoken animality in our theories of language and intelligence. However, just as special creation is unnecessary in explaining the evolution of Homo sapiens, neither is it necessary to posit a spontaneously developing language organ that has no features in common with the communicative systems of other species. The more parsimonious theory is that communication exists as a multi-modal energy that is expressed in species- and situation-specific manners, with no sense of the ideal or ‘fittest’ at any point on the spectrum.6 The topic of communication, especially in rhetorical theory, is traditionally rational and disembodied. Aristotle’s emphasis on the artistic proofs (ethos, pathos, and logos) seems to heavily discount the natural, the material world—physical evidence was considered atechnic, or lacking in art. His theories were very influential in medieval and Renaissance rhetoric, and even inhabit the postmodern that sought to break with persuasion and the scientific and rational. Natasha Seegert notes, rightly, that “despite the poststructuralist turn in much of the humanities, academic discourse continues to naturalize the human as the center.”7 Her work on coyotes blurring the lines between nature and culture in downtown Chicago acts to decenter “rhetoric from the human and reminds us that there is a great deal to learn not just about the coyote but from the coyote.”8 This fascinating study deserves to draw a greater response from humanists than it has thus far, especially outside of rhetorical theory. As those arguing for expanding scholarship along other lines have claimed, “in privileging specific ‘sides’ of dichotomous binaries,” such as rational versus emotional, or natural versus cultural, rhetoric has “severely limited its applicability in a multi-cultural,” and I would add, multispecies, “world.”9 What we consider rational has traditionally been the basis for the separation and attribution of agency to humans alone. Ehren Helmut Pflugfelder has recently questioned the sorts of assumptions that are required to suggest that agency can only “take root in or through human subjectivity.”10 Inspired by Bruno Latour’s ActorNetwork Theory, Pflugfelder argues that agency should be seen more holistically, as beings and objects influencing one another—not dissimilarly from how we currently view ecological networks.11 In order to form a more complete understanding of an animal’s place in the communicative landscape, we need a transcendental paradigm shift to see outside ourselves and into the greater sea of materiality.

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Just as animal communication is treated out of its social or physical context by biologists in a lab, human persuasiveness has been isolated from its physicality for too long.12 Some of this can be attributed to the feminization of body in the body/mind binary, which devalues female rhetorical practice, just as it devalues the animality of persuasion.13 Additionally, it can be attributed to an unwillingness to recognize the textual production of animals. To return to Seegert’s coyotes, we see a rich palette of discursive modes for coyotes to communicate: through the scent of the body, to urine marking, the laying out of their physical dens, their howls, and even their carelessly shed fur to mark their presence.14 If we were to merely focus on one aspect of coyote rhetorics—their vocal communication, for instance—we would be completely decontextualizing their wide-spectrum efforts to persuade, identify, and perhaps even reach consensus. But allowing for agency in other animals, let alone recognizing their sophisticated communicative efforts, is difficult for humans raised in western religious traditions. Aldo Leopold complained of the same moral bankruptcy of capitalist monotheism, in the foreword to his magnum opus, A Sand County Almanac, when it was originally published, in 1949. Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. There is no other way for land to survive the impact of mechanized man, nor for us to reap from it the esthetic harvest it is capable, under science, of contributing to culture.15

How we overcome challenges that are so firmly intertwined with the roots of the majority belief system in the West may be painful for some, but it needs to happen—and soon—if humans are going to continue to thrive on a planet that cares little for hairless apes, no matter how smart they think they are. To embrace the animal inside is a fundamental challenge to the ongoing project of studying humanity’s place in the world. As Louise Westling reminds us, to the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty animality is the logos of the living world, an embodied place of meaningmaking. “Thus human language and aesthetic behaviors emerge from our animality.”16 Mearleau-Ponty’s philosophical project was the “redefinition of nature, not centered on humanity as the apex of creation as

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with Descartes, nor from Spinoza’s division into god, man, and creatures, but instead … as ‘a description of the man-animality intertwining (VI 274).’”17 Westling argues that Mearleau-Ponty’s philosophy has become increasingly necessary as a lens to view human communicative and aesthetic experience, as it is imperative that we pay heed to the increasing body of scientific and archaeological evidence that “humans cannot be considered separate from other living creatures with whom we coevolved and share ancestry, genetic makeup, and morphology.”18 This sounds promising, but it is a hard sell to the average humanist, who (apropos of the title) studies all things human. The humanities are inherently and unapologetically anthropocentric. This does not seem like much of a revelation at face value, but the study of human origins, development, behavior, and cognition all require an understanding of our evolutionary past and our relationships with other species. As it stands, current humanistic scholarship overwhelmingly “privileges human interaction and relegates” animals to the margins.19 This is a narrow view, and while close scrutiny of specific events can yield interesting information, that information must be contextualized to be understood correctly. What makes the cross-species study of rhetoric even more difficult is our persistent bias when studying communication strategies of the Other, even when the otherness is defined only by a difference of race or gender. Elisabeth Oberzaucher argues that women and men view interpersonal communication in very different terms: for women, it is often a way to form and strengthen relationships, whereas for men it often serves specific goals.20 Each person has a tendency to feel his or her way of communicating is better, which is a common observation in intercultural communication, as well. It takes little imagination to extend these observations to note the very obvious bias of humans studying interspecies communication. Because we are not crows, we think there is little to value in crow speech or gesture. We are wrong to feel this way. While I will explain this conviction more fully in the coming chapters, it is also important to note that the animal turn is already beginning to address such misapprehensions. There is hope for humans yet (and therefore hope for other animals, as well).

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Challenges from Scientific Traditions Beyond challenges coming from humanistic assumptions, the sciences that study animal behavior bring their own difficulties, as well. I will touch on some of the more difficult barriers now, as these represent a particularly well-entrenched set of assumptions that continue to crop up despite a growing mass of scholarship militating against them. It is important to stress, however, that this is overwhelmingly a problem of disciplinary tradition, not malevolent design. Nonetheless, the results can be troubling. The first issue is this: most western scientists, up until the very latetwentieth century, did not recognize animal individuality, social thought, or personality. A brief story by Jane Goodall illustrates this quite clearly. Goodall, who has written some wonderful reflections on the course her career has taken, describes an interesting consequence of her early field studies, living with chimpanzees in Kenya in the 1960s. These days we might call her work zooethnographic, but at that time she was acting as a resident anthropologist (anthropologists, mind you, study human origins and societies). Most scientists of her day could not see the value of her experiment, living near but not as a chimpanzee. Nonetheless, she made many discoveries simply by being—being among the chimpanzees in an unobtrusive but persistent manner until they felt like she was part of the natural landscape. This allowed her to make important discoveries, such as the realization that chimpanzees will fashion and use their own tools, something most scientists of the day believed only humans were able to do (but now we know many species of animals are able to do this).21 Famously, when Goodall related her discovery to her mentor, Louis Leakey, he responded: “now we must redefine ‘tool,’ redefine ‘man,’ or accept chimpanzees as humans!”22 The broader implications of this statement have been explored elsewhere, but the basic message is obvious— western thinkers once again assumed a division between human and nonhuman animals, based not on scientific observation, but on disciplinary assumptions about animal capabilities and a religio-philosophical need to feel distinct and above the other animals.23 As mentioned above, one reason primatology was so advanced in twentieth century Japan is due to the lack of these human exceptionalist assumptions among their growing number of scientists trained after World War II. The same sorts of assumptions affect western scientific views of social consciousness among nonhuman animals, which scientists were up until

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recently quick to dismiss. “We have tended to take it for granted,” writes Donald R. Griffin, “that only people are consciously aware of the social relations that make up their culture, and that nonhuman animals, no matter how much they learn to cooperate, are unthinking automata. But accumulating evidence makes it almost impossible to defend rigorously any qualitative dichotomy.”24 One cause of this conservatism among scientists is an almost morbid fear of the charge of anthropocentrism. This causes assumptions to swing wildly in favor of an outdated Cartesian dichotomy between thinking ‘men’ and the ‘lesser beasts.’ But the idea that no other animal could think or behave in many of the same ways as humans do is not only highly anthropocentric in itself, but it’s also false.

Transdisciplinary Challenges Critics of an interdisciplinary approach that bridges the gap between science and the humanities could raise some important questions about the feasibility of such work, both theoretically and methodologically. One such question is this: How are we supposed to study animal communication if, as I have insisted, we are unable to fully understand it? To a disinterested party viewing human-animal communication, this is a serious conundrum, as it must seem that the other animals with whom humans interact most often are much better able to understand us than we are able to understand them. Indeed, if a dog can learn up to a thousand human words, and a human can only distinguish a very few dog gestures or vocalizations in turn, then one or more problems persists. It may be that humans generally just don’t care enough about what dogs mean, unless there is a daily working relationship with the dogs, which requires certain amounts of knowledge about dog disposition or desire. While dogsled mushers and shepherds (for instance) certainly do understand their canine employees better, at least in the context of the work being performed, this minimal gap in knowledge does not account for the orders of magnitude of difference. Another explanation is that dogs just don’t have that much to say, or that they are too unsophisticated to communicate in complex ways. This answer requires a considerable level of reliance on old-fashioned anthropocentric hierarchy. Moreover, it is a tired argument that has been applied to communication issues in all sorts of situations. We see similar arguments crop up when confusion occurs in interpersonal and, especially,

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intercultural human–human communication: ‘because we do not understand each other, the problem must be yours.’ An experienced writer will recognize this sentiment, as it crops up in almost every beginner’s writing workshop, when someone who is new to peer review is as yet uncomfortable with the idea that most misunderstandings are due to a lack of clarity on the author’s part, or a failure of the author’s theory of mind, not because the reader is dim, or cruel, or hyper-critical. The information in our heads seems perfectly obvious to those of us who are writing or speaking, but sometimes we leave out some important details that make our conclusions unintelligible to a reader who does not have access to what goes on inside our heads. Could it be the case that dogs are communicating in ways that humans simply cannot or will not figure out? In some situations, this is very much the case, and I will discuss this in further detail in the chapters on sensory differences and how they affect our ability to both signal and receive. A third and final (for this discussion, anyway) solution to the question of how we can study nonhuman animals if we do not fully understand them is probably the most obvious, but also the most shockingly neglected. I’ll answer a question with a question: Why would we need to study something we fully understand already? That is to say, think of some of the important things people are studying in other fields. Should researchers stop trying to find a cure for cancer because they do not fully understand the disease? Should we give up on a manned mission to Mars because we’re not sure how we would plan for such a long trip? Put this way, the argument that we should not study something we do not fully understand seems foolish. The real question we need to ask is how much can we find out with the tools currently at our disposal? Kalevi Kull and Peeter Torop present one answer in their treatment of biotranslation: they note that even partial knowledge of a second language allows a translator to produce useful information when translating one human language into another.25 Based on our knowledge of another species’s Umwelt, its physical disposition (body language, demeanor, etc.), its vocalizations, and the rhetorical situation at hand, a wealth of information can be reliably inferred from communication studied in context. Indeed, it is quite possible that, just as in non-verbal human communication, nonhuman animal communication may locate its syntax partially in physical disposition or accompanying gesture. Syntactic physical actions could describe differences in social status, hierarchies

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of behavioral acts, or historical reference (mostly regarding relationship status, hierarchy, or indebtedness). One example of a gesture that acts syntactically, in order to align body language and vocalizations to contextualize meaning in subsequent action, comes from the canine practice of bowing when initiating play behavior. Without this information about the disposition of further gestures and speech, dog play would be indistinguishable in many cases from dog fighting. However, in most cases when an animal bows on its front legs before growling, biting, or wrestling, all of the dogs involved are invited into a different realm, where attacks are for fun, and each animal takes turns assuming dominant and submissive stances, regardless of their actual rank in the real world hierarchy of the pack. Among humans, there are similarly syntactical gestures, which expose the following utterances as meaning something often diametrically opposed to what they would mean in a different alignment. One example of this is what we commonly refer to as the ‘air quote,’ which is used to indicate a state of unbelief in the order of the words presented. As the root of the word syntax implies a marshalling of troops in a manner that indicates their significance, the air quote presents a false front, but one that people who are in on the gag understand is intentionally false. Underlying these gestures is a sense of negation due to a specific sequence of signs. If a dog bit and growled first, and then play bowed, that series of actions would likely result in a fight, or at least the impression that the signaler desired one. The idea that animals can negate through contextualizing gestures or speech, the clearly agreed-upon meanings of subsequent signals presents an added layer of complexity when studying their communicative behaviors (What other syntax, negation, or context are we missing when communicating with dogs?). Nonetheless, because humans share this ability to foreshadow play or sarcasm, it seems like perfectly logical behavior to us. What could be more troublesome is when the cross-species linguistic concepts do not translate in parallel. Beyond the question of how we can study animal communication we do not fully understand, another transdisciplinary challenge finds its roots in the Western religio-philosophical tradition that privileges the human and those animals that are most humanesque, at the expense of more alien species. The history of this tension will be explored more fully in Chapter 11, but a brief example or two will plant the idea for the reader

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to keep in mind as the intervening chapters traverse much distance before returning to the moral implications of animal communication difference. An example that might help illuminate this unofficial hierarchy comes from the way many scientists and humanists have received von Frisch’s groundbreaking study of honeybee communication, especially his discussion of the honeybee waggle dance (this dance will be discussed in more detail later in this chapter). While clearly symbolic and able to be adapted based on what the signaling bee requires each waggle to stand for, many discount this as instinctual or non-symbolic communication. “The very fact that we would readily accept the bee dances as evidence of intentional communication if they had been discovered in primates, rather than in insects,” writes Donald Griffin, “should warn us that our frame of reference may not be sufficiently flexible to take advantage of truly revolutionary new discoveries.”26 We insist, despite the evidence to the contrary, that intelligence and language are traits of the human, or the very-nearlyhuman. So do we close our minds to evidence that fits outside our narrow modes of thinking about rhetorical practice. This habit extends to marginalized human populations as well as animal ones. To return to Seegert’s coyotes, she describes the way they roam the streets of Chicago and are presently treated as animals with similar roles to African Americans in the recent history of the American South: they are given menial jobs (household labor for the humans, pest control for coyotes) or are allowed to work as entertainers, provided they keep their ‘paws’ off the women and children.27 The privileged human population puts up with the existence of the subaltern, provided certain rules of decorum remain intact. Because African Americans were treated as animalistic humans, they were afforded more respect than the honeybee, but definitely not on the same footing as members of other races. The human is also privileged in anything that relates metaphysical belief to physical fact. Because of the assumptions of the Abrahamic tradition— that humans have souls, that animals do not, to name but two—Western metaphysics have worked against the rights of nonhuman animals to selfdetermine. More often than not, religion is held up as justification for using animals as tools or property. As early as Hesiod telling the tale of Zeus giving justice to humans but not to animals, metaphysics in the West have done countless injustices to nonhuman animals.28 Aristotle granted animals their souls in De anima II.1¸ but this has only shown up as a minority viewpoint in modern Christianity, as it butts directly up against scripture (e.g., Genesis 1:26, 28).

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Beyond these considerable theoretical challenges to the study of animal rhetoric, there are some methodological briar patches to avoid as well. Because the broader goals of scientific and humanistic inquiry do not always align, it can be challenging to find unity of purpose when bridging multiple disciplines. While much humanistic scholarship of the past few decades has emphasized difference and attempted to downplay the tyranny of the normal, the powerful, and the abled, science is inherently interested in the general trends at population levels, rather than the unique features of an individual, or even at times an individual species. Thus, when scientists speak of normally developing humans or generalize about genders or species, it does not discount the individual variations of the neuro-atypical or the non-gender-binary individuals one knows; it is not a matter of moral judgment, but one of focus. When considering the complexity of what I call discourse ecologies—those human and nonhuman animals and the objects in their environments that interact to influence specific and ongoing communication situations—it is extremely easy to overlook important factors when we concentrate on only one, or a few, aspects of the situation, so individual analysis is often less helpful. Adrian Wenner warns us of just such a blind spot when studying persuasion from an interdisciplinary perspective. If we compare superficially the communication of closely-related species, this can at times be deceiving. It is important to remember that even close relations may compete with their nearest relative in a similar ecological niche, which could cause them to communicate in potentially very different ways.29 As discussed elsewhere in this book, sexual selection can also significantly affect communication, and this powerful shaping force generally cannot jump species boundaries.30 One of the very frustrating facts to linguistic continuists—those people who believe communication in nature operates on a continuum, so that human rhetoric may be different from other animals’ by a matter of degree, not a matter of kind—is that the problem of very close relatives occupying similar ecological niches does not affect humans as much as other animal species. The reader might wonder why a lack of a problem should present a problem, but this is explained fairly simply. When studying cross-species communication using humans as the frame of reference, there is no truly close relative left. Humans have presumably murdered off, interbred with, or out-competed the other members

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of the genus Homo. In the case of Neanderthals in particular (and potentially other close relatives), it could have been a combination of several of these. We have a pretty good idea from genetic testing that many modern humans have Neanderthal ancestry. As I worked on the early outlines of this book, I thought it would be interesting (to myself, if not the reader) to find out how much of a Neanderthal I am, with the hopes that I could refute any such claims in the future. In order to find out, I sent a vial of saliva speeding through the mail, right beside people’s personal letters and Christmas cards to loved ones, to a popular genetic ancestry testing company. Alas, I found I am likely to be at least 2% Neanderthal, but definitely less than 4% (which is about the maximum people of European or Asian descent will have; people of African descent generally have none) with almost 300 identified Neanderthal DNA variants (a number that is lower than 66% of other customers of this testing company, thank you very much). What this means for my ability to communicate is impossible to tell—other than the pop culture images of Neanderthals as brutish cave people with sloping foreheads, speaking in a lot of words that end in “ugh” sounds, little true knowledge about their communication practices can be discerned. Moreover, because humans are so shockingly lacking in genetic diversity, any racial assumptions about communication ability are apt to be misleading. The tragedy in losing the other Homo species, from a rhetorical perspective, is that we lose what would have been the best information about how our communication practices compare and contrast with our closest relatives. To know more about this matter could have even helped settle the long-standing dispute between linguistic discontinuists, who think human speech is an act of special creation with no parallels on Earth, and the continuists who more properly see us as being one communicative animal among many; obviously we are very sophisticated in at least one form of communication, if lacking terribly in others. The knowledge that we are very weak observers of some forms of communication should not be surprising, but the idea always seems to raise objections from one human or other. The problem presents another methodological challenge, as some humans seem to be willfully ignorant about our weaknesses because acknowledging them would make us less special. One example of our weakness is our general imperceptiveness when it comes to reading body language across species. This is something any other mammal finds fairly straightforward. Nonetheless, Heini

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Hediger tells a story of one female zoo visitor who was so clueless as to seem like she must be a caricature of humanity’s blithe unawareness of animal behavior outside its own species. On the day in question, Hediger recounts that several zookeepers were attempting to physically wrangle an African barbary sheep into a poorly-placed enclosure, which understandably put the animal under considerable stress. The sheep was able to slip through the grasp of several strong keepers, and proceeds to freak out, darting around the enclosure with its eyes rolling, panting like crazy. As this sheep presumably thought it was running for its life, a woman walks up to it and offers the sheep some hay.31 Needless to say, the sheep did not accept her gracious offer, and instead kept racing around the pen until the keepers could get hold of it once again. While Hediger’s story about the sheep and the unmindful zoo visitor seems like an extreme case, instances like this happen often when humans (especially humans who are not raised in the company of animals) do not pay attention to non-verbal signals. Responses to signals are heavily context-dependent, and context is something that takes great practice and experience observing in order to understand. W. John Smith reports that both vervet monkeys and domestic fowl have been known to alter their calls and physical dispositions based on their audience.32 The ability to play to one’s audience in the animal world reinforces the basic biological tenet that for signals to persist in nature, they must have been favored by selection in both production and reception—that is, it has to be more often the case that both listening and speaking are helpful, not harmful.33 Moreover, this implies a recursive reinforcement structure where rhetor and audience build relationships of meaning (mostly unconsciously in mundane communication situations). For humans, who are mostly unaware of what is going on in animal minds, and who are apt to underestimate the sophistication and variety of nonhuman communication strategies, this presents a steep learning curve for those who wish to better understand what animals are communicating with their utterances, gestures, and any combination thereof.

Innovations in Zoosemiotics While these and further theoretical and methodological challenges persist, inroads have been made into the study of nonhuman animal communication. Among the first serious students of these phenomena were the bioand zoosemioticians. While very closely related to the study of animal

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rhetorics generally, zoosemioticians treat the sign as the basic unit of life. Work from this signal-first perspective began in earnest as early as 1963, when Thomas Sebeok began zoosemiotics as a field of inquiry, based on the connection between the animal (Gr. zoion) and the sign (Gr. semeion).34 Zoosemiotics is related closely to, and often fluidly intermixing with, the field of biosemiotics, with which Sebeok was also heavily involved, and which takes as its subject all forms of communication, including nonhuman animals and plants. The field has expanded slowly since 1963, but now has a strong foothold, especially in Northern European universities, where zoosemiotics is more formally defined today as “the study of signification, communication, and representation within and across animal species”35 Communication, in this sense, is widely defined as a transmission of information from a sender to a receiver. Signification need not imply a recognizable sender, just a way for an animal to make sense of its environment, while representations are myths, names, or descriptions of or by animals. More than just a new way of looking at animal behavior from an ethological viewpoint, zoosemiotics is an attempt to understand animal behavior by reducing it to information interpretation and exchange. The sign is the basic unit of zoosemiotics, and all life is semiosic—semiosis distinguishes life from non-life.36 The majority of bio- and zoosemioticians adhere to the basic principles of semiotics laid down by Charles Sanders Peirce, which differ significantly from his contemporary and co-founder of the discipline, Ferdinand de Saussure. While the fine detail of these theories are important neither for the lay reader, nor for my argument, some very basic principles will be helpful. The primary difference between Saussurean and Peircean semiotics is that of a dyadic or triadic relationship between reality, signs, and the people (of whatever species) who perceive them. To simplify and generalize Saussure’s theory, concrete reality had nothing to do with signification. Any utterance, gesture, or concept could be renamed or recreated at a whim, and so long as at least one participant found these signs meaningful, they were meaningful. While Peirce agreed that much communication, especially human language, was symbolic and arbitrary (a bi-lingual person could use the terms dog or perro/perra interchangeably, for instance, without sacrificing meaning to other Spanish and English speakers) some of it was in fact grounded in concrete reality. This move expanded semiotics from what really amounts to nothing more than an arbitrary linguistic game into an important facet of human (and probably

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nonhuman animal) life. By thinking of a grounded reality, we elevate the importance of speaker and listener in a concrete but changeful environment, in addition to the shared context that a Saussurean would deem necessary for communication. If we are to accept this notion, that there is a very real natural world ‘out there,’ that is not contingent upon our perceiving or understanding it, and this outside world affects our rhetorical situations, then there must be more than just symbolic forms of communication. Peirce suggested three basic forms of signification, which he expanded upon and magnified later, but a general understanding of which shall suffice. These signs are the icon, the index, and the symbol (in order of removal from the concrete). An icon is, as it sounds, an image of the object in question, or at least something that reminds one of that object. A simple example of this would be a photograph of a loved one. While this photograph is clearly not the actual person, it seems like that person in a very direct comparison. An index is one step removed from this direct imagery. The foundation of indices is association or perceived correlation. If you smell smoke, you are likely to assume there is fire. Smoke is not fire, and fire is not smoke. However, the existence of smoke is almost always a good indication that somewhere nearby something is burning. In the final step of abstraction, we meet the symbol. Symbols are abstract and untethered to reality. That is not to say they cannot refer to anything real, just that the real is an unnecessary prerequisite to symbolicity. Symbols, like the chevrons of a sergeant in the army, could have real historical significance, as an implement of medieval heraldry. Or, they could arise out of nothing more than a need to name a new thing or concept, such as the idea of a chocaholic (a somewhat perverse naming practice, as it implies an addiction to chocahol, which is a combination that does exist by several other names, including chocolate liquers or liquor-filled chocolates). The combination, chocaholic, arises out of symbols that are arbitrary, in order to create additional arbitrary symbolicity. This is another important conclusion of the idea of the symbolic—the arbitrary nature of this type of sign allows for multiple symbolicity and unlimited semiosis. A sign can mean multiple things, and signs can arise out of other signs. Thus for Saussurean duality. Saussure, of course, followed Descartes in his breaking up of things into two parts (often diametrically opposed). However, most biosemioticians and zoosemioticians attempt to break out of the influential Cartesian

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tradition in the humanities and social sciences, because of its history of treating animals as mere automata. The theory of duality has long enchanted the humanities, especially in its later formulations by philosophers such as Heidegger, and is still the governing principle of most scientific methods (either a thing is or is not, and empirical tests can show us which). However, this mode of thinking lends itself to hierarchy and exploitation, as there is always an us and a them, a have and a have-not, when we bifurcate reality. A contrary position to Cartesian dualism takes shape in the Enlightenment, with the emergence of thinkers who have been largely criticized for their “scientism.” John Locke begins the disruption by disputing Descartes’s notion that animals are mere machines.37 While not proposing that they are on equal footing as humans, nonhuman animals at least have, in Locke’s view, a sort of animus, or spirit that moves them. They are not clockwork machines covered in fur and scales. Likewise, David Hume presages the modern ethological stance when he claims that the difference between human and nonhuman animals is merely a matter of degree, not a matter of kind.38 There are even some strains of Darwinian thought (beginning with Charles Darwin himself, in Descent ) that hold that some actions of animals are guided by perception, taste, and will.39 That is, animals choose their actions intentionally. As I will discuss later in this book, Darwin even suggested that earthworms exercise taste in judgment of which leaves were most suitable as doors for their burrows.40 Derrida would later challenge the idea of instinct as it is usually opposed to rationality when he rightly notes that all responses to signals have some level of “automaticity” or instinctual reaction involved. Communication, he claims, is severely complicated when one “gives credence to the materiality of speech and to the corporeality of language.”41 In addition to the physical and mental “automaticity” features Derrida presents, I would add the rituality of communication, the unconscious utterances, the sub-vocalizations, the indistinct “uh-huhs” we utter without thought, and the pro forma phrases that escape our mouths in social situations. Speaking only for myself, the ‘cruise control’ of interpersonal communication seems to be on more often than may be advisable. (I’ve actually agreed to some fairly onerous tasks in my life because I felt I was too busy to pay attention long enough to say no. I refuse to believe I am alone in this failing of foresight.)

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While arguing at once for animals acting out of judgment and humans out of instinct may seem like I want to have my cake and eat it too, this should be seen as a gentle nudging in both directions, as all animals must reside somewhere in between the isolated extremes of the purely mechanical or the purely free. Humans are less thoughtful than we give ourselves credit for, just as animals probably do not operate on a single computer program that runs every aspect of their lives. Thus, we must consider that which exists between the poles, as a simple dualism explains much in isolated experimentation, but very little in the realm of complex interactions between living, thinking beings. While the concept of Cartesian dualism will not be laid to rest anytime soon, it is just one of the several debates the field of zoosemiotics has complicated in order to bring us closer to understanding the underlying forces of signification. Another major contribution to understanding animal behavior, including communication, comes from the Umwelt theory of Jakob von Uexküll. Umwelten (from German Umwelt, or “environment”), if we remember, refer to the perceptive environments of each species, their way of sensing and interpreting their world, based on the meanings of objects in their lives. Their worlds and their communicative practices, like ours, are shaped by this embodied and subjective interaction with environment—just as a human might see a wooden table as something to eat dinner upon, or set down objects to work on, a termite would potentially see this same object as a home or a source of food, thus creating an object-relationship that differs significantly from the human’s. Umwelt theory thus supports a pluralistic view of human and nonhuman animal communication, rather than a more common gradualistic or discontinuous view leading to a human-supremacist doctrine.42 A subject finds within its umwelt objects that become meaning-carriers. Von Uexküll’s example is of an octopus that finds water in its environment, which holds particular meaning to it because it cannot be compressed— therefore, the muscular swim-bag is possible as a propulsion device.43 Thus, even neutral objects can transform into meaning-carriers, when encountered by a living subject. Moreover, the meanings carried are based on relationships that vary by individual, species, gender, or age. If we accept Umwelt theory, we gain a way of viewing animals based not on human relationships with objects (and the associations and connotations that come with them), but based on the animals’ own abilities and relationships with their environment. This is what inspired von Uexküll’s student, Konrad Lorenz, to begin the modern research program known

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as ethology, which studies animal behavior with preference for observations that exist in as natural and unaltered an environment as possible. Lorenz, along with two other founders of the discipline, Karl von Frisch and Nikolaas Tinbergen, won a Nobel prize in 1973 for their work explaining animal behavior in non-mechanistic and non-behaviorist ways. It is because of this line of thinkers that we are able to today view animals as the rhetorical creatures they are, rather than mere products of instinct and behavior reinforcement (although each plays its part in all animal behavior, including our own). The debate, then, between animals as actors or animals as dumb machines, is also reflected in the beginnings of biosemiotics and zoosemiotics as a single discipline (with very minor differences between people who adopt either name—the details are unnecessary to the understanding of the lay reader). While it has been explained that Saussure and Peirce were early initiators of semiotic theories, and that one difference can be simplified as dyadic versus triadic (or multi-adic) views of signaling practices, the implications for the animal are important. Biosemiotics was founded on a Peircean cosmology that places humans back into nature, in response to the artificiality of humans in the Cartesian tradition.44 One reason for this choice is, as Thomas Sebeok argues, that the Saussurean tradition neglects the sign activity of around two million extant species.45 Sebeok was very forgiving of animal difference, something which most humans cannot claim to be. However, later proponents of biosemiotic theory, like Danish microbiologist Jesper Hoffmeyer, do still attempt to deny that animals have access to the most complex sorts of signification. Hoffmeyer argues against the “privileging” of humans as the only signifying animals. “The human talent for semiosis,” he claims, “is not miraculous and cannot be absolutely unique in the world of living organisms, for such talent must necessarily have arisen through an evolutionary process involving prior life forms.”46 Hoffmeyer does not draw the human/animal distinction at the locus of the self, as many philosophers do, but imagines it resides more in the human ability to see beyond the self into a world that exists with no regard for whether we live or die.47 This suggests that something more than just a symbol divides human and nonhuman animal. Hoffmeyer takes very seriously the argument of Terrence Deacon, in his important contribution to this debate by resituating the border zone from mere language use to the specific ability of symbol use.48 However, Hoffmeyer, with the boon of hindsight, is able to see that even symbol use is not specific enough, as there are many types

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of symbol that animals have been shown to use (this will be discussed later in this chapter, and further examples will be discussed throughout the text). One part of the reason why humans overlook this ability in other animals is our pre-occupation with human language—our “fixation,” as Hoffmeyer puts it, “with the anomaly that is human [linguistic] communication leads us to analyze animal communication as a kind of deformed or deficient language.”49 Thus, many semioticians after Peirce have traditionally rejected the notion of symbolic activity in nonhuman animals. One example that runs counter to this was studied by the aforementioned Nobel Laureate, Karl von Frisch. The behavior he was so interested in is the waggle-dance of the honeybee, who performs dances whose lengths, motions, directions, and intensities all stand for realworld distances, trajectories, and quantities in a symbolic fashion. Many philosophers, including Lacan, have argued that bees do not respond to a message, only react—they “merely obey a fixed program,” ingrained in instinct.50 Much research has demonstrated that this is not the case. For instance, the bees will alter their dance based on differences in distance or relative position of the sun. They use round dances for short distances, and figure-eight ‘waggle’ dances for food sources longer than 50 meters away. “Longer distances are expressed symbolically by longer tail wag times” and by a slower rhythm, says von Frisch.51 Direction as a metaphor made in relation to the sun’s position, and when hives are repositioned on their sides by researchers, the bees will respond with an appropriate 90 degree change in waggle orientation. Bees, of course, are not the only symbol using animal. I discussed in my first book another case wherein one species of animal is able to understand symbolic relationships: Dolphins commonly imitate within and across species, deceiving for fun or for rewards when held in captivity. Trained dolphins have been known to spontaneously imitate their human trainers, which is not necessarily that surprising, considering their close and constant contact. What is amazing is that dolphins naturally know to substitute flipper movements for the actions of human arms and legs.52 Their sophisticated abilities as mimics, who are able to represent things as other things (that is, to think and represent symbolically), is likely tied to their ability to transmit knowledge culturally through teaching and imitation, and enhanced synchrony may aid in cooperative foraging or prey capture.53 Most animals with

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such obvious morphological differences would be unable to make such an association...54

To reiterate this point, dolphins have no difficulty understanding that they can represent a human foot stomping by making their dolphin tailfin slap the water, or that their pectoral fins can represent human arm movements. The dolphins, we should imagine, understand that an arm is a “human fin,” just like a tail is a “dolphin foot” (although they likely do not think of these concepts in the same way humans linguistically represent them). Another debate biosemiotics has brought to the fore is the classification of highly contextualized communicative efforts. Because communication almost always occurs in a highly contextualized rhetorical situation within one or more discourse ecologies, it is important to realize what we gain and lose when extracting elements of speech or gesture to analyze its rhetorical utility. Often represented by rhetoricians as the schism between rhetorica docens (rhetorical theory or classification) and rhetorica utens (which implies the actual use of effective persuasion), the divide between what works best and how we classify it often elides a whole world of context. Nonetheless, reduction to individual stylistic elements allows for the microrhetorical study that future communicators can build on and elaborate. Appealing to Aristotelian stylistics, the biosemiotician Kalevi Kull suggests that it may be fruitful to examine biotropes—trope-like figures used in biological communication—in various situations when animals rely on ‘stock phrases’ that can later be elaborated upon.55 The songs of many birds operate in this fashion, with potential cultural differences elaborated on by individuals when attempting to attract mates. Kull also suggests other elements of style are adaptable to animal rhetorics with further study. Biohyperbole, bio-onomatopoeia, and mimicry are easy to envision being useful. Jeanne Fahnestock’s work on evolutionary psychology and style lends itself to cross-species considerations, as well. Suggesting that language is an overlapping concern for both rhetoricians and cognitive scientists, Fahnestock found that cognitive scientists noted that elements we normally consider part of linguistic communication (such as tone of voice, emotional speech) actually originate in separate areas of the brain from most other linguistic features.56 This might suggest that tone and heightened emotion could be precursors to the more precise ‘rational’ elements of style. Even in our vision of sophisticated human language, we are not

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speaking merely to fulfill rules or as expressions of modules that crop up spontaneously at some point in the development of the modern H. sapiens brain—we communicate to fulfill needs, to enable transactions with others, and potentially, as Cicero has it, to inform, delight, and persuade. Rhetoricians and biosemioticians are not entirely alone in their quest to incorporate the animal into the humanistic study of persuasion. In the field of communication studies, Hickson and Stacks explain four approaches to including biological studies and animal studies in the study of persuasion.57 1. The biosocial approach posits that the brain and body interact to produce communicative patterns. This approach is modeled on Darwinian and neo-Darwinian work in modern evolutionary theory.58 This is the approach that most closely resembles the biocultural approach I put forward in my first book.59 2. The communibiological approach of McCroskey and Beatty relies heavily on classical personality theory.60 Each person, according to this idea, has his or her own communicative personality, with corresponding measurable traits. The three defining factors of these traits are extraversion, neuroticism, and psychoticism. Much of this research, like Jungian personality theory in psychology, relies on the reported feelings of communicators, which may be susceptible to bias or inaccuracy. 3. The communication gene approach suggests that there are a series of genes coding for communicative behavior, which are strongly linked to the development of empathy.61 These genes can be traced back to even very simple life forms that communicate. This approach leads to several conclusions about human communication, especially the idea that our closest relatives in the Animal Kingdom will often communicate most like us. 4. The endocrine approach tracks hormonal effects on communication.62 A very simple example is the aggression-causing effects of increased testosterone. According to endocrine theory, increases in this hormone may lead to more confrontational communicative responses.

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These various approaches in communication studies obviously share certain traits, and there is much overlap in both method and results. As they develop, it will be important to compare their results to those in other disciplines with similar research interests.

Animal Studies and Modern Rhetorical Theory In my own discipline of rhetoric, there was a long pre-modern tradition of thinking about the role of animal communication in rhetorical theory, from the pre-Socratic philosophers through the Renaissance, and even as recently as the late ninetieth century. With the rise of the neoDarwinian synthesis (that is, the nexus where natural selection meets work on genetics), and the anti-scientific humanistic reactions to the misapplication of science (or just bad science) in the World Wars, animals fell by the wayside. For much of the twentieth century, the academy knew only a very limited sort of anthroporhetoric, one that generally shied away from any scientific input for fear of “scientism.” There were exceptions. As is generally the case, these exceptions in the later twentieth century were some of the more well-read in the literature of classical rhetoric, who understood how central the concept of animality was to various early thinkers. Aristotle being the best-preserved, his extant work is crawling with life beyond the human. In our recent past, Kenneth Burke and Walter Ong, undoubtedly two of the most significant figures in twentieth century rhetorical theory, were both more open-minded about the place of animals in humanistic studies of persuasion. Burke grappled with the differences and similarities, and was both most vulnerable and effective when he considered the failings of humans in relation to other animals. I have noted elsewhere, following Debra Hawhee, that Burke even praised the simple elegance of fish brains compared to the overly complex thought of human beings, whose big stupid brains (to paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut, from his novel, Galapagos ) get in the way as often as they help out.63 Walter Ong, likewise, commended animals for their clever semiotic abilities, many of which humans are incapable of performing. However, he does draw a firm line between the concepts of marking as communication (such as with urine, to define territorial boundaries) and writing as the representation of an utterance.64 Language was a firm dividing line between human and nonhuman animal for Ong, and he seemed to subscribe to a code-transmission theory of language evolution (also called

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a conduit theory, as language is viewed as a means to encode ideas, and then send them to a receiver by some technology, which the receiver will decode and understand based on shared meaning). We know this is likely not the way language operates now (or at least not how it operates in the very specific case of human language use), as work into ostensive communication is showing promising results. The difference between these views is fairly simple, although it presents some major implications for those interested in theory. To put it simply, encoded communication is meant to trigger associative responses (I associate the word ‘cat’ with a familiar set of felines that exist in the real world), while ostensive communication is meant to change mental states (I want you to believe that this stereo is a very wise purchase).65 The former is ubiquitous in nature, but many researchers into pragmatics insist that ostensive communication is likely only available to humans, and perhaps a select few primates, cetaceans, and birds. The important distinguishing trait is the ability to mindread, or to have a theory of mind—the idea that another individual has beliefs and ideas that can be altered by communicating your own beliefs or ideas to them. I anticipated the growing importance of theory of mind to the future of evolutionary linguistics in the extended discussion I presented in my first book, but suffice it to say, the combined study of cognition and communication will only grow in the future and those who are interested in continuing work on persuasion would be well-advised to follow some of the truly astounding work being published in several related disciplines.66 While Burke and Ong could be called cautiously supportive of the animal, another key figure in the animal renaissance in rhetorical theory went ‘all-in,’ as they say in Las Vegas. George Kennedy had a long career as a highly respected teacher, translator, and synthesizer of classical rhetorical theory. After a life of demonstrating the utility of the classics, he made the bold move of attempting to gather theories from around the world under the umbrella of a general, or universal, rhetoric. This included deep thought into the origins of rhetoric, which of course brought his research into contact with ethology and evolutionary linguistics. And animals. Kennedy attempted to show how rhetoric was an essential energy moving all forms of persuasive behavior (speech, gesture, involuntary emission, etc.) in the animal world. Even untheorized rhetoric could be very sophisticated, but he felt much of the thought early human cultures put toward effective persuasion culminated in the highly-codifed, complex, and sophisticated rhetorical theories of the Greco-Roman world.

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He earned some criticism for presenting the evolution of rhetorical behaviors teleologically, with the end being the drive toward reaching these sophisticated rhetorical practices of the West. Some of this criticism could have been avoided by taking better care to separate strictly biological and strictly cultural arguments from the more nuanced biocultural methods of modern ethologists and cognitive psychologists. Moreover, explaining that biocultural evolution is grossly misunderstood by many highly educated people would have helped soothe the ruffled feathers of cultural critics who are not used to the language of the modern life sciences—there is no ‘fittest’ in nature, and there is no natural hierarchy or Great Chain of Being, which is what a seemingly progressivist argument could imply. Kennedy should have made clear that those species that exist at present do so because they are currently the best at exploiting an evolutionary niche that is now in existence, but may not last (or they may be surpassed by another species that becomes even better at filling that gap in the ecosystem). Despite any misunderstanding or miscommunication on the part of Kennedy or his readers, his work is massively important for several reasons. One such reason is that it planted a seed of legitimacy in what had in the last half-century been a somewhat unspoken, and perhaps taboo, line of thinking in rhetoric and communications departments: communications skills, to paraphrase Lucretius, do not arise out of nothing. There is no spontaneous evolution of such complex behaviors as language use, gesture-speech, or body language. Like Burke and Ong before him, Kennedy knew that if we wanted to see potential precursors or cognates to human communication, we need only look at some of the other intelligent animals on Earth. Moreover, it might not be fair to judge the sophistication of other species’ communicative practices based on our own criteria—what is important in a human environment (or Umwelt, though Kennedy never used that term) may be utterly meaningless to a nonetheless highly intelligent animal who lives in the water or flies through the air. Another contribution Kennedy made was to question the “why” of persuasion. That is, why would such a varied and complex suite of behaviors evolve among pretty much every known species? What does communication gain an individual, and what does it replace? For many species, there could be several reasons communication evolved so consistently and predictably, and these have been thoroughly explained elsewhere.67 One pervasive feature of animal rhetorics is that the ability to communicate

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is a far less costly alternative to fighting.68 Animals come into conflict for various reasons—mating rights, food, territory, and other resources— but engaging in potentially deadly fights every time one encounters an adversary can be dangerous to all of the participants in a fight. Kennedy explained an alternative process of resolving conflict, based on perception and communication, that would help explain at least one of the major “why’s” of rhetoric, and it has helped to expand the ways we can think about specifically human conflicts, as well, since most human conflicts are about resources, territory, and the like. Perhaps the most important contribution of all, in Kennedy’s Comparative Rhetoric, is his insistence on the validity and importance of non-written texts. Literate societies vastly undervalue non-linguistic communication, yet every known literate culture also has art of some sort that communicates deeply held communal beliefs, customs, mores, and taboos (and often tweaks them, or even outright breaks them). If literacy was truly the pinnacle of communicative behaviors, stingy Mother Nature would have long ago discouraged humans from investing so very much time creating other forms of persuasive art. Some artists dedicate their entire lives to creating abstract images, songs, or textures that appeal to any number of senses, that evoke strong emotional response and even action. Empires of body and spirit commission endless hoards of objects to reinforce belief and inspire what Orwell might call goodfeeling among their members. Fellowship, love, loss, hatred, community pride… the things that visual or musical art can communicate rival that of the written word, but it is often neglected by scholars of the Western rhetorical tradition. Kennedy suggested there is a general rhetoric that precedes invention. It can be channeled to any number of outputs, and transmitted to any sense organ (including one’s own). What this means for this book’s project of expanding and contextualizing human and nonhuman animal rhetorics is foundational, and will unfold especially in the chapters on sense perception. For now, it is enough to note that rhetoric is so much more than the written and televised. It is a lived, ever-evolving suite of behaviors that appeal to all manner of senses found in nature. And it is inextricably bound to perception, limited by the sensorium. While animal rhetorics did not come racing immediately to the fore of humanistic study after Kennedy, a spark was kindled that is now growing into a vibrant community of scholars across several disciplines. Early reactions to Kennedy were sparse—some reviews and a few scattered articles referencing his animal revival—but several major contributions had been

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made to the field by the early 2010s. In 2011 JAC (formerly the Journal of Advanced Composition) published a special double-volume on “the Human-Animal Encounter,” which included the usual suspects in early disciplinary forays into animal studies (cats, dogs, horses, and primates), as well as some related commentary on how minorities, women, or the developmentally disabled are animal or bestial in western cultures. The journal Philosophy & Rhetoric published a symposium on bestial and creaturely rhetorics which included many fine animal examples, and in the presentations at the 2010 Rhetoric Society of America conference in Minneapolis, where this symposium began to take shape, there was even some mention of werewolves and their diets. Much of this early work laid the foundations for further examinations of embodiment across, well, different types of bodies. That we can read the body language of a primate, a dog, or a dolphin (and especially a werewolf, since they are human most of the time, after all), suggests something shared. There is a physical basis to all communication, and because we share physical traits with many close, and some distant, relatives means that the behaviors based on these traits should be scrutable to human beings. Expanding on these foundations, my Adaptive Rhetoric (2013) argued for a more openly scientific and humanistic interdisciplinary approach to understanding persuasion. Taking such a tack would allow us to resituate human communication in the context of animal communication. We are one species among many, and we are not as special as we like to think we are. As a result, I argue for a large dose of human humility when approaching communication, instead of following a tradition of assuming that our ways of communicating are always the best available. (Anyone who has had a significant romantic relationship should be able to conjure a vast supply of memories of bad communication—their own or others’— causing problems in their lives. To be human often means being less than perfect at vocalizing our needs and desires, and sometimes downright rotten at listening to the needs and desires of others.) Working from these basic premises (that we are animals, that we share some communicative traits with close relatives, and that we need both science and humanism to understand such behaviors fully), I broadened the scope of rhetoric, leaving many gaps in my wake that need explaining. The major task of the present book is to fill one of those gaps in our understanding by demonstrating how the medium is the message (if you recall the discussion of McLuhan’s famous saying in the introduction), how any species’ rhetoric must be shaped and constrained by their sensorium. While we can send

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innumerable signals we cannot decipher ourselves, someone else in nature can; moreover, it is only those signals that we can perceive readily which we will value as a species. Around the same time as my Adaptive Rhetoric came out, two other relevant books were released. One of these is Louise Westling’s Logos of the Living World (2014).69 In this excellent monograph, Westling explores several philosophical issues of human and nonhuman animal communication in terms of the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty’s environmental and semiotic ideas were heavily inspired by Charles Sanders Peirce (discussed above), and lend themselves to a more ‘natural’ semiotics than that which was otherwise held by less pragmatic thinkers. Peirce, of course, had a significant influence on the formation of modern biosemiotics, so connections between his and Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy are of especial importance to those interested in animal communication. Since I discussed several of Westling’s contributions in the first chapter of Part I, rehashing that conversation here should not be necessary. The second book to come out around this time was Emily Plec’s edited collection on what she calls “internatural communication,” which is to say, communicating across species boundaries.70 Hers is among the first serious looks at human and nonhuman animal rhetorics in the field of communication studies. She establishes her purpose for this collection is to “open up this area of investigation through consideration of a wide range of communication perspectives on human interactions with animals.”71 While I have previously reviewed this work elsewhere, I should add some brief reflections on this collection for the benefit of those who do not have access to the full review.72 While all edited volumes are of varying quality, and include essays that mesh with varying degrees of success with the overall theme the editor has chosen, the vast majority of contributions to this collection are on point. There is a significant divide between essays that treat animals as topics for exploring human intraspecies communication inspired by or about animals as a subject, and those that treat the communication of humans with animals as agents. Both genres can be useful and enlightening, depending on the audience, but the more important topic (for this discussion, anyway) of communication with other animals is represented especially well in essays by Nick Trujillo on communicating with dogs, and Tema Milstein’s essay on an incident of close identification between school children and a gorilla they had a very special interaction with at

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a local zoo. But, while these two essays are great examples of interesting scholarship based on human-animal communication, the real value of this collection is the breadth of perspectives. Because there is no unified viewpoint about the treatment, intelligence, autonomy, or even abilities of animals, the topic of animal communication will long be explained by a chorus of strong individual voices who can agree on most tunes, if not always their arrangement. Toward the end of this first big push in animal rhetorics, the journal Philosophy & Rhetoric revisited the “creaturely” theme of their forum of three years previous, this time in an expanded format. An entire issue of the journal was dedicated to the topic of “extrahuman” rhetorics, which included essays not only on human and nonhuman animal communication, but also about object-agents, the dead, and perceptions of the divine. This issue strengthened existing relationships between rhetoricians working in the field of animal studies and those interested in new materialism, object-oriented ontology, actor-network theory, religious studies, critical theory, embodiment, and several others. Greg Goodale followed this trend of interdisciplinary inquiry in his 2015 offering on the rhetorical invention of “man.”73 Expanding on several of the distinctions made by Kennedy, and which I commented upon in my first book, Goodale charts a history of the often pointless, and sometimes cruel, effort so many humans have made in order to divide ourselves from our fellow animals. While not of direct bearing on how animals communicate and persuade, understanding the history of making this distinction sheds light on the history of animal cruelty and the drive toward hierarchy enabled by the rhetoric of many cultures, but especially within the Abrahamic traditions of the West and the Middle-East. With the help of my colleague and coeditor, Kristian Bjørkdahl, Lexington published recently (2018) an edited volume titled, Rhetorical Animals: Boundaries of the Human in the Study of Persuasion, which explores the place of nonhuman animals within the framework of an existing field of rhetorical theory. Essays examine cross-species, interspecies, and multi-species persuasion, beginning at the micro level with the internal rhetorics of gut bacteria and human DNA, to the macro level, examining the sweep of persuasive practice across many disparate species. Particular attention is also given to non-Western and crosscultural perspectives on human and nonhuman animal communication. Several other books have been published while this one was in press,

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which shows that efforts at understanding more-than-human rhetorics have greatly accelerated over the last few years. While I am excited that so much energy and talent is being poured into this program of study, more work needs to be done. In the next two parts of this book, I will begin to introduce topics that will require much further study to understand their full value to scholars of communication and persuasion: sense perception in human and nonhuman animals, and how varying abilities to sense can shape and constrain rhetorical practice. I wish to stress that these chapters can only represent hints and suggestions of the vast sea of opportunities for scholars interested in animal rhetorics; they cannot in so short a space hope to reconcile many of these directions to the current state of any single field, and should thus be taken as future areas where rhetorical theory needs to explore, not as established footholds by any means. To set up this discussion, we will turn, in the final chapter of Part I, to an investigation of the reasons signaling or persuasion happens in the wild—to inform, to manipulate, and to deceive—with the expectation that these basic goals will help guide our investigation into the importance of the sensorium on persuasiveness.

Notes 1. Dominique Lestel, “The Biosemiotics and Phylogenesis of Culture,” in Readings in Zoosemiotics, ed. Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli, and Aleksei Turovski (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011), 382–85. 2. Celeste M. Condit, “Contemporary Rhetorical Criticism: Diverse Bodies Learning New Languages,” 2006, 370. 3. Jeremy G. Gordon, Katherine D. Lind, and Saul Kutnicki, “A Rhetorical Bestiary” (Taylor & Francis, 2017). 4. Lestel, “The Biosemiotics and Phylogenesis of Culture,” 381. 5. Jacques Derrida and Marie-Louise Mallet, The Animal That Therefore I Am (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 11. 6. I have dealt previously with Spencer’s ideal of fitness in my discussion of perceived hierarchies in the work of George A. Kennedy. See Alex C. Parrish, Adaptive Rhetoric: Evolution, Culture, and the Art of Persuasion, Routledge Studies in Rhetoric and Communication (New York: Routledge, 2013), 25–26. 7. Natasha Seegert, “Play of Sniffication: Coyotes Sing in the Margins,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 47, no. 2 (2014): 160. 8. Ibid.

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9. Raymie E. McKerrow, “Corporeality and Cultural Rhetoric: A Site for Rhetoric’s Future,” Southern Communication Journal 63, no. 4 (1998): 315. 10. Ehren Helmut Pflugfelder, “Is No One at the Wheel?: Nonhuman Agency and Agentive Movement,” in Thinking with Bruno Latour in Rhetoric and Composition, ed. Paul Lynch and Nathaniel Rivers (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2016). 11. Ibid., 122. 12. Lestel, “The Biosemiotics and Phylogenesis of Culture,” 387. 13. McKerrow, “Corporeality and Cultural Rhetoric: A Site for Rhetoric’s Future,” 317. 14. Seegert, “Play of Sniffication: Coyotes Sing in the Margins,” 159. 15. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968). viii. 16. Louise Hutchings Westling, The Logos of the Living World: Merleau-Ponty, Animals, and Language (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 3. 17. Ibid., 6. 18. Ibid., 4. 19. Emily Plec, Perspectives on Human-Animal Communication: Internatural Communication (New York: Routledge, 2013), 1. 20. Elisabeth Oberzaucher, “Sex and Gender Differences in Communication Strategies,” in Evolution’s Empress, Darwinian Perspectives on the Nature of Women, ed. M. Fisher, J. Garcia, and R. Sokol Chang (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 346. 21. Jane Goodall, My Life with the Chimpanzees (New York: Pocket Books, 1996), 68. 22. Jane Goodall, “Early Days,” The Jane Goodall Institute, http://www.jan egoodall.org/janes-story. 23. I must thank my coeditor on the Rhetorical Animals collection, Kristian Bjørkdahl, for bringing this discussion to my attention. 24. Donald R. Griffin, “Is Man language?,” in Readings in Zoosemiotics, ed. Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli, and Aleksei Turovski (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011), 346. 25. Kalevi Kull and Peeter Torop, “Biotranslation: Translation Between Umwelten,” in Readings in Zoosemiotics, ed. Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli, and Aleksei Turovski (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011), 422. 26. Griffin, “Is Man Language?,” 348. 27. Seegert, “Play of Sniffication: Coyotes Sing in the Margins,” 168. 28. Hesiod, Works and Days, 278. 29. Adrian M. Wenner, “The Study of Animal Communication: An Overview,” in Readings in Zoosemiotics, ed. Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli, and Aleksei Turovski (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011), 120.

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30. There are, of course, exceptions. Taxonomy operates on some basic principles, one of which suggests that the offspring of two different species should not be able to create viable offspring itself, but this is not always the case, and taxonomy should be conceived of as an argument in progress rather than the classification of all life, written in stone. 31. Heini Hediger, “The Animal’s Expression,” in Readings in Zoosemiotics, ed. Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli, and Aleksei Turovski, Semiotics, Communication and Cognition (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011), 124. 32. W. John Smith, “Animal Communication and the Study of Cognition,” in Readings in Zoosemiotics, ed. Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli, and Aleksei Turovski (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011), 280–1. 33. D. Brian Lewis and D. Michael Gower, Biology of Communication (New York: Wiley, 1980), 2. 34. Thomas Sebeok, “The Word ‘Zoosemiotics’,” in Readings in Zoosemiotics, ed. Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli, and Aleksei Turovski (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011), 95. 35. Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli, and Aleksei Turovski, Readings in Zoosemiotics (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011), 1. 36. Ibid., 4. 37. Ibid., 25. 38. Ibid., 26. 39. Ibid., 27. 40. Charles Darwin, The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms, with Observations on Their Habits (New York: D. Appleton and company, 1896). 41. Derrida and Mallet, The Animal That Therefore I Am: 125. 42. Maran, Martinelli, and Turovski, Readings in Zoosemiotics: 11. 43. Jakob von Uexküll, “The Theory of Meaning,” in Readings in Zoosemiotics, ed. Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli, and Aleksei Turovski (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011), 67–68. 44. Jesper Hoffmeyer, Biosemiotics: An Examination into the Signs of Life and the Life of Signs, Approaches to postmodernity (Scranton: University of Scranton Press, 2008), 320. 45. Sebeok, “Zoosemiotics: At the Intersection of Nature and Culture,” 78. 46. Hoffmeyer, Biosemiotics: An Examination into the Signs of Life and the Life of Signs: 265. 47. Ibid., 268–69. 48. Terrence William Deacon, The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain, 1st ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997). 49. Hoffmeyer, Biosemiotics: An Examination into the Signs of Life and the Life of Signs: 282. 50. Derrida and Mallet, The Animal That Therefore I Am: 123.

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51. Karl von Frisch, “Decoding the Language of the Bee,” in Readings in Zoosemiotics, ed. Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli, and Aleksei Turovski (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011), 145. 52. Louis M. Herman, “Exploring the Cognitive World of the Bottlenosed Dolphin,” in The Cognitive Animal: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives on Animal Cognition, ed. Marc Bekoff, Colin Allen, and Gordon M. Burghardt (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). 53. Ibid. 54. Parrish, Adaptive: 81. 55. Kalevi Kull, “A Note on Biorhetorics,” Sign Systems Studies 29, no. 2 (2001): 699. 56. Jeanne Fahnestock, “Rhetoric in the Age of Cognitive Science,” in The Viability of the Rhetorical Tradition, ed. Richard Graff, et al. (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005), 161–67. 57. Mark Hickson and Don W. Stacks, “Biological Views of Communication,” Review of Communication 10, no. 4 (2010): 269–72. 58. Don W. Stacks, Sidney R. Hill, and Mark Hickson, An Introduction to Communication Theory (Fort Worth: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1991). 59. Parrish, Adaptive. 60. James C. McCroskey, Communication and Personality: Trait Perspectives, Interpersonal Communication (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 1998). 61. Ross Buck, The Communication of Emotion, The Guilford Social Psychology Series (New York: Guilford Press, 1984). 62. Kory Floyd, An Evolutionary Approach to Understanding Nonverbal Communication. The SAGE Handbook of Nonverbal Communication. SAGE Publications, Inc (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage). 63. Parrish, Adaptive: 48. 64. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, New accents (London and New York: Methuen, 1982), 77–92. 65. Thom Scott-Phillips, Speaking Our Minds: Why Human Communication Is Different, and How Language Evolved to Make It Special (Palgrave MacMillan, 2015), 12. 66. Parrish, Adaptive: 104–26. 67. Ibid., 40–46. 68. George A. Kennedy, Comparative Rhetoric: An Historical and CrossCultural Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). 69. Westling, The Logos of the Living World: Merleau-Ponty, Animals, and Language. 70. Plec, Perspectives. 71. Ibid. 72. Alex C. Parrish, “Perspectives on Human-Animal Communication: Internatural Communication, edited by Emily Plec,” Journal for Critical Animal Studies 12, no. 4 (2014).

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73. Greg Goodale, The Rhetorical Invention of Man: A History of Distinguishing Humans from Other Animals (Lexington Books, 2015).

References Buck, Ross. The Communication of Emotion. The Guilford Social Psychology Series. New York: Guilford Press, 1984. Condit, Celeste M. “Contemporary Rhetorical Criticism: Diverse Bodies Learning New Languages.” 2006. Darwin, Charles. The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms, with Observations on Their Habits. New York: D. Appleton and company, 1896. Deacon, Terrence William. The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain. 1st ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. Derrida, Jacques, and Marie-Louise Mallet. The Animal That Therefore I Am. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Fahnestock, Jeanne. “Rhetoric in the Age of Cognitive Science.” In The Viability of the Rhetorical Tradition, edited by Richard Graff, Arthur E. Walzer, Janet M. Atwill and Steven Mailloux, 159–79. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005. Floyd, Kory. An Evolutionary Approach to Understanding Nonverbal Communication. The Sage Handbook of Nonverbal Communication. Sage Publications, Inc [in English]. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Frisch, Karl von. “Decoding the Language of the Bee.” In Readings in Zoosemiotics, edited by Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli and Aleksei Turovski, 141–55. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011. Goodale, Greg. The Rhetorical Invention of Man: A History of Distinguishing Humans from Other Animals. Lexington Books, 2015. Goodall, Jane. “Early Days.” The Jane Goodall Institute, http://www.janego odall.org/janes-story. ———. My Life with the Chimpanzees. New York: Pocket Books, 1996. Gordon, Jeremy G, Katherine D Lind, and Saul Kutnicki. “A Rhetorical Bestiary.” Taylor & Francis, 2017. Griffin, Donald R. “Is Man Language?”. In Readings in Zoosemiotics, edited by Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli and Aleksei Turovski, 343–56. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011. Hediger, Heini. “The Animal’s Expression.” In Readings in Zoosemiotics, edited by Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli and Aleksei Turovski. Semiotics, Communication and Cognition, 123–40. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011.

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Herman, Louis M. “Exploring the Cognitive World of the Bottlenosed Dolphin.” In The Cognitive Animal: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives on Animal Cognition, edited by Marc Bekoff, Colin Allen and Gordon M. Burghardt, 275–83. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Hickson, Mark, and Don W. Stacks. “Biological Views of Communication.” Review of Communication 10, no. 4 (2010): 263–75. Hoffmseyer, Jesper. Biosemiotics: An Examination into the Signs of Life and the Life of Signs. Approaches to Postmodernity. Scranton: University of Scranton Press, 2008. Kennedy, George A. Comparative Rhetoric: An Historical and Cross-Cultural Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Kull, Kalevi. “A Note on Biorhetorics.” Sign Systems Studies 29, no. 2 (2001): 693–704. Kull, Kalevi, and Peeter Torop. “Biotranslation: Translation between Umwelten.” In Readings in Zoosemiotics, edited by Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli and Aleksei Turovski, 411–25. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011. Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968. Lestel, Dominique. “The Biosemiotics and Phylogenesis of Culture.” In Readings in Zoosemiotics, edited by Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli and Aleksei Turovski, 377–410. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011. Lewis, D. Brian, and D. Michael Gower. Biology of Communication. New York: Wiley, 1980. Maran, Timo, Dario Martinelli, and Aleksei Turovski. Readings in Zoosemiotics. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011. McCroskey, James C. Communication and Personality: Trait Perspectives. Interpersonal Communication. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 1998. McKerrow, Raymie E. “Corporeality and Cultural Rhetoric: A Site for Rhetoric’s Future.” Southern Communication Journal 63, no. 4 (Summer 1998): 315. Oberzaucher, Elisabeth. “Sex and Gender Differences in Communication Strategies.” In Evolution’s Empress, Darwinian Perspectives on the Nature of Women, edited by M. Fisher, J. Garcia, and R. Sokol Chang, 345–67. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. New Accents. London and New York: Methuen, 1982. Parrish, Alex C. Adaptive Rhetoric: Evolution, Culture, and the Art of Persuasion. Routledge Studies in Rhetoric and Communication. New York: Routledge, 2013. ———. “Perspectives on Human-Animal Communication: Internatural Communication, edited by Emily Plec.” Journal for Critical Animal Studies 12, no. 4 (2014): 157–64.

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Pflugfelder, Ehren Helmut. “Is No One at the Wheel?: Nonhuman Agency and Agentive Movement.” In Thinking with Bruno Latour in Rhetoric and Composition, edited by Paul Lynch and Nathaniel Rivers, 115–31. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2016. Plec, Emily. Perspectives on Human-Animal Communication: Internatural Communication. New York: Routledge, 2013. Scott-Phillips, Thom. Speaking Our Minds: Why Human Communication Is Different, and How Language Evolved to Make It Special. Palgrave MacMillan, 2015. Sebeok, Thomas. “The Word ‘Zoosemiotics’.” In Readings in Zoosemiotics, edited by Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli and Aleksei Turovski, 95–98. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011. ———. “Zoosemiotics: At the Intersection of Nature and Culture.” In Readings in Zoosemiotics, edited by Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli and Aleksei Turovski, 77–86. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011. Seegert, Natasha “Play of Sniffication: Coyotes Sing in the Margins.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 47, no. 2 (2014): 158–78. Smith, W. John. “Animal Communication and the Study of Cognition.” In Readings in Zoosemiotics, edited by Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli and Aleksei Turovski, 279–302. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011. Stacks, Don W., Sidney R., Hill, and Mark Hickson. An Introduction to Communication Theory. Fort Worth: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1991. Uexküll, Jakob von. “The Theory of Meaning.” In Readings in Zoosemiotics, edited by Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli and Aleksei Turovski, 61–75. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011. Wenner, Adrian M. “The Study of Animal Communication: An Overview.” In Readings in Zoosemiotics, edited by Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli and Aleksei Turovski, 111–22. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011. Westling, Louise Hutchings. The Logos of the Living World: Merleau-Ponty, Animals, and Language. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014.

CHAPTER 4

Information Sharing, Manipulation, and Deceit

The late Thomas Sebeok often argued that life is defined by the replication and variation of information. As one of the founders of the field of biosemiotics, he studied the natural world in terms of signs and signals. The broad existence of which, taking into account nature’s frugality, implies great benefits to both senders and receivers.1 That is to say, if it did not pay to speak, nobody would, and if it did not pay to listen, why would anyone bother? Life, we must conclude, is inherently rhetorical. “Reproduction itself,” says Sebeok, is “a matter of communication, the molecular code being one of the two master sign-systems on earth.”2 The other one, of course, is language (broadly defined). If life is defined by the ability to communicate, then it is worth asking why, which is one of the foundational questions of classical rhetorical theory. Why and how do we persuade? What qualities do our persuasive efforts take on? Can they be more successful? So on. We often attempt to answer such questions in usefully reductive ways. We divide rhetoric into genres, like forensic, deliberative, and epideictic. We parse it into modes of proof, in order to classify our efforts as appeals to logos, ethos, or pathos. Our canons of rhetoric arrange the activities of speechmaking into a hierarchy of concerns: first we must invent an argument and its support, then we must organize it logically, on down the line. Following the Aristotelian tradition, we separate out the rational © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. C. Parrish, The Sensory Modes of Animal Rhetorics, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76712-9_4

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from the irrational, because it was long the custom to assume only rational animals produced rhetoric. But this is not the case. All animals attempt to persuade.3 Many even persuade “to attitude,” as Burke suggests is more important (i.e., rather than convincing someone to take a particular action, convincing them to change their mind).4 Animals identify with groups and associate in ways that could be considered political.5 And, most importantly, human and nonhuman animals marshal their rhetoric not in isolation, but in reaction to an environment filled with friends, foes, objects, and natural forces.6 To share information, then, is to create a sort of compact: “If you listen to me, I will provide useful knowledge that you might not have otherwise gained.” Likewise, if I continually lead you astray, the compact is broken and you will no longer be persuadable. Yet deception happens all of the time in the animal world—most of all in human communities. One reason for this is because deceptive communication likely requires conscious thought, whereas honest signals need not.7 We understand the great survival value that is placed on honesty and reputation, and yet we choose to ignore these forces in order to deceive one another. The primary purpose of this chapter is to interrogate why this should be: why are human and nonhuman animals so apt to deceive one another, and why has deception become one of the primary drives in human communication? Answering this question will allow us some insight into how human and nonhuman animals can share similar responses to evolutionary pressures and environmental challenges, but that these may express themselves in wildly different frequencies and intensities because of the further demands of human and nonhuman cultures, which can vary significantly.8 To interrogate the problem of deception may be helpful in reconsidering the role of rhetoric in human and nonhuman relationships. Cicero gave us three offices of rhetoric—to inform, to delight, to persuade— but these do not reflect the realities of practice outside the Forum and Curia. Rhetoric is manipulation for ends both base and moral. Or it is “the manipulation of signs in the service of social influence.”9 Persuasion is a tool that can be used for good or ill, or none of the above. Rhetoric transcends ethics because it pre-exists philosophical dwelling, or the concepts of good and evil. Thus, it needs releasing from these monolithic binaries. If Thomas Sebeok is correct, then rhetoric is itself the stuff of life, and in order to properly understand it, we must study life outside of the laboratory. Persuasion in its natural environment will yield more information than it will divided and vivisected. Indeed, to paraphrase Yogi

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Berra, we can observe a lot about rhetoric just by watching it. I would argue that the best place to watch it is within its own Umwelt. This will remove some of the challenges to external validity studying stylistics in isolation presents, just as behavioral observations of nonhuman animals in the wild add depth to the information we learn in a laboratory.10 In order to reevaluate, then, the purposes of rhetoric and communication, it will be necessary to explore three modified “offices”—those of information sharing, deception, and manipulation. In many ways, these categories are permeable, but all attempts to communicate and persuade end up fitting at least one of these categories. Information sharing is the basis of life, but it is also susceptible to the negative. Deceit is an attempt to derail the life processes of others, in order to serve one’s own ends. Just as some animals will withhold information based on audience, others will set out to actively deceive.11 Moreover, all of these actions, whether they are life-affirming or life-subverting, are attempts to manipulate when they are performed for an audience. Communication is aptly named, as it is useless when only one individual can do it—evolutionary pressures would have seen it die out long before the rise of mammals like us. Thus, I will not be the first to claim this: we need to expect that, when we communicate, there is always a motive, which can be simply described as an internal state driving action or attitude, but can be more complicated in Burkean rhetorical theory.12 Among most communicative animals, that motive is to call others to action or change their attitude, according to our needs and desires. Underlying all of this are the ways human and nonhuman animals inform, deceive, and manipulate, in order to get their own way. What follows is a brief manifesto calling for further inquiry into the way human and nonhuman animals communicate in terms of these three motives. While this endeavor may serve to ask more questions than it answers, the argument should be clear: human persuasion, as a form of animal signaling, expresses similar behavioral drives to those of our relatives on the tree of life, so we should study rhetorical practice in context, rather than as something disconnected from the natural world. An exploration of information sharing, manipulation, and deception in the animal world will start us along that path.

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Information Sharing Some scholars have argued that animal communication is primarily self-interested, sharing “sexual, individual, or motivational information,” while human communication focuses on “environmental information (referring to something separate from the sender as well as the receiver).”13 I would take issue with this distinction on two grounds. First, that I am not convinced these types of information are disconnected sufficiently to make such a distinction. That is, information about oneself is environmental information with a specific focus. Humans assume they are disconnected from nature, and from natural impulses, and it is easy to fall into the trap of feeling “above” such basic compulsions. However, as much as we enjoy feeling like rational beings, most of our hours are passed on autopilot. We spend a significant portion of each day submitting to, preparing for, or hoping to get to give in to our various physical urges—some days one feels like sleeping, working, preparing food, washroom use, and the quest for coffee are all one has time for, but where does that leave our contemplative selves? Those of us in higher education can say we think for a living, but let’s be honest with ourselves about how our days on campus are spent. Teaching, committee work, and fielding student complaints during office hours rarely seem like rational activities, let alone sublime explorations of the mind. Moreover, the way we subject these activities to rigid schedules creates routines that liberate us from unnecessary thought. It is easy for professional thinkers to forget that the mind is a support system for the body, not the other way around.14 The second objection to the claim that human communication is primarily environmental, while all other animal communication is selfinterested, is that our environmental communication is often merely a disguise for our true intentions. Close observers of human interpersonal communication will easily note that most human talk is sexual, individual, or motivational—we merely camouflage our desires in cloaks of complexity. Because of the way human language has developed, it is often a bad strategy to be direct about, for instance, wanting to mate with someone. Complicating factors for humans attempting such a straightforward approach can be both environmental (say you’re in a public place when asked) and individual (perhaps you’re not feeling very sexy right now), but this is true of a great variety of species, who have a “right place and a right time” for mating, and do so only after certain communicative rituals have been performed.

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Kalevi Kull also disagrees with the suggestion that nonhuman animal communication is merely information sharing. He suggests that it “is often very likely that animal behaviour is designed [by the animal] itself to attract, to pay attention, to deceive.”15 Information sharing is potentially useful, but only in limited contexts. There are several reasons for this, including the idea that information, once shared with its intended audience, can be overheard and used by unintended audiences. Eavesdropping is an effective strategy for gathering information that is not meant for one’s own ears, and it is a strategy employed throughout the animal kingdom. The symbolic content of information is also difficult to control. If we think of the transition from Saussurean to Peircean semiotics discussed in the previous chapter, the most fundamental advance (from the rhetorician’s point of view) was that of audience interpretation, by means of the term interpretant, or the sense a receiver makes of a sign. Charles Sanders Peirce, whose system of understanding signs was elaborated shortly after Ferdinand de Saussure’s, reflected a more embodied, ecologically aware system of understanding signals, both in concrete ways and abstract. Saussure, on the other hand, did not imagine a connection between material reality and sign meaning.16 The interpretant is an important innovation because it injects concrete reality back into the basic Saussurean structure of signified and signifier; the signified can be completely arbitrary unless tied to an environment in some way, and the addition of some body or bodies interpreting the signifier (representamen), which refers to the signified (object), is only as significant as the “ground” of the representamen.17 That is to say, language is built on the concrete, but with each reference, metaphor, sign, and simile we use to stand for, abstraction builds.18 Moreover, each listener brings his or her own connotations and interpretations to each utterance, tweaking meanings of signifiers in often very fine, but personally meaningful, ways. Charles Ogden and I. A. Richards follow a Peircean mode of interpretation when they treat signals as either symbolic or affective.19 Sometimes signals send information about their referents (behavior patterns, physical characteristics, or external stimuli), and other times they are emotive, meaning that they would unlock feelings or attitudes that lay dormant in other individuals.20 This second, affective, type of signal is what ethologists originally assumed was the only type of animal signal that existed outside of a laboratory—this represents the “release” theory of animal signaling.21 Rather than a nonhuman animal interpreting a signifier, the

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signifier itself would act like a key to unlock a pre-set behavior. It was a rather robotic view of life, perhaps a holdover from earlier views of a clockwork universe, which humans had previously excused themselves from, but had not excused even their closest relatives on the tree of life. Again, context matters. In the case of intraspecific communication, human and nonhuman animal alike communicate much of their information in order to secure and reinforce mutual obligations and duties. In pre-verbal mammals, “their discourse is primarily about the rules and contingencies of relationship,” just as it is among humans.22 The reasons one’s cat meows when one returns home are essentially the same as why one’s toddler shouts “Mommy!” and raises her arms. These vocalizations and gestures stand for things.23 There is a sense of much-needed familiarity.24 There is dependency.25 There is desire for attention. There is affection (whether or not one believes felines or toddlers can truly show such things, they can).26 There are multiple levels of information, more or less concrete, being shared with one delighted scream of a toddler, or one insistent meowing of a beloved cat, upon one’s return home from work each day. (And it must be noted that “meow” is merely human shorthand for a large suite of domestic cat vocalizations that could provide much more information if attended to closely.) The types of information are not limited to that which is “unlocked” with a symbolic key, although some keys tend to work better on some doors than others (and this is what the study of rhetoric often concerns itself with). Oral communication is contextually and environmentally rich, and not necessarily dependent on predictable patterns of behavior.27 There are, of course, other ways of viewing information sharing in the human and nonhuman world. Peter Marler applies what he calls animal pragmatics to the study of communication—a way of abandoning semantic enslavement to propositional meaning, in order to highlight the relationship between the utterance and its deployment and reception— which allows him to identify four major types of sign used throughout the animal kingdom.28 a. Identifiors, which serve as spatiotemporal locators. b. Designators, which are the most common signals among all animals, provide characteristics such as species or sexual information. c. Prescriptors, which define a desired action for the receiver to take.

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d. Appraisors, which provide a preferential response to certain objects. For instance, in signals where whomever sings the most or loudest is the most dominant or desirable for some other quality. These four types of information sharing cover much behavioral ground and go well beyond the automatic, instinctual responses previously ascribed to nonhuman animals—especially when one considers that there must be ranges of honesty and dishonesty in all signifying events. Evaluating the honesty of signals is important to any individual. Information sharing is often a form of manipulation. As we are prone to tell our students in writing courses, “everything is rhetorical”; by doing so, we are implying that information is not shared willy-nilly, but with an end in mind. There is a manipulative urge underlying all communication, whether it is designative, prescriptive, or any of the types of sign Marler supposes exist. It is therefore important that we better understand this cunning undercurrent in our communicative urges.

Manipulation While information is shared in order to manipulate, it is important to understand the caveat that the ability to manipulate is amoral, as is any neutral technology (as opposed to, say, a nuclear bomb, which has little going for it in the way of positive uses).29 Manipulation need not be detrimental to either party, nor malevolent in any way. It can be as innocent as one female colleague at a conference signaling to a male colleague to politely excuse himself from his current conversation so that she can introduce him to a person she knows who shares his research interests. She would not do it if she thought she was harming anyone, and he would not follow along if he thought his current conversation partners would be offended. Nonetheless, her act of signaling induces him to action. While one could quibble with the term, manipulation is the operative concept if we use it without negative connotation in this instance. (Sometimes it deserves the implication, but not this time.) It is up to each receiver to manage the dance between his own desires and the new information presented by each signal. In the life sciences, the idea that communication is a form of manipulation is long established. J.R. Krebs and Richard Dawkins argue that communication’s chief purpose is to do exactly that—rather than merely

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sharing information, animals (including humans) signal in order to manipulate.30 This leads to ritualized responses—for example, shaking one’s fist at someone is symbolic of actually hitting them—that can become predictable to receivers.31 In some cases what they call evolutionary arms races can develop, wherein a receiver begins to realize it is being manipulated through ritualized communication events, and so ignores the signaling attempts, only to cause the signaler to redouble its efforts (which, of course, causes the receiver to develop skepticism toward that new, stronger signal, ad infinitum). A common example of manipulation leading to ritualization, and eventually an “arms race,” comes from domestic canines. When a dog raises its upper lip to expose its teeth, possibly accompanied by a growl or snarling sound, it is indicating that it may bite if a conspecific does not back off or discontinue its current behavior. It likely only took a few actual bites for these behaviors to correlate: Exposed Teeth --> Bite. Thus, it became sensible to back off when other dogs raised their lips and displayed their teeth. The problem is that dogs observed that this little trick worked to fend off competitors for resources, and so began exposing their teeth even when they had no intention of biting.32 That is, they used the lip raising signal, symbolizing the intention to bite, deceptively. Of course, when situations become dire—a food shortage, perhaps—it doesn’t take long before another individual calls their bluff, or for two individuals to display the same signal simultaneously. This short circuits the communication system, which is meant in part to help avoid conflict, and causes more fervent signals to be necessary to warn off potential invaders. It also causes a lot of unwanted bitings of individuals who thought the signaler was bluffing. Again, it’s when we are unable to manipulate one another through communication that violence occurs, so manipulation can often be a good thing.33 The astute reader may suspect the author protests too much, especially considering this chapter ends with a discussion of deception as if it were one of the main purposes of rhetorical practice. It is, but among one’s own species it must also be less common to deceive than to be honest. George Kennedy rightly linked this to social species that maintain reputational information on individuals: “An inveterate liar, or even a well-intentioned individual whose judgment has often proved wrong, soon loses authority in the hierarchical world of social animals, human and nonhuman.”34 The reason some humans are able to so openly and repeatedly deceive others is because we have in some situations been removed

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from our environment of evolutionary adaptedness, so there is no need to work very hard at disguising their attempts to deceive; humans developed in close-knit groups of 30–40 individuals, and most transactions among group members occurred face to face. This meant reputation was an important factor in early human life, and individuals could easily keep track of the actions of such a small number of people. Favors, misbehaviors, coalitions, and grudges were everyone’s business and were constantly at the fore of daily interactions. This is why the development of big brains is thought to mostly occur in highly social species—a theory known as Machiavellian intelligence.35 (There is an opposing theory that focuses on social cooperation as the driving force in the development of high intelligence, which is called Vygotskian intelligence.)36 Today, many people in the West shop on the Internet, work from home, and mostly interact with the celebrities on their television. Even if they wanted a small group of 30–40 individuals to call a “tribe,” it would be difficult to find a living situation that replicates the close-quarters of early human life. Some communes may fulfill this function, but even they are only an approximation.37 Other primates that are removed from their natural environments feel the same disorientation, and will often include extraspecifics in the group of social animals they keep track of. “In zoos, captive apes have come to know the personalities and hierarchies of their human keepers as well as they know their own kin and kind,” notes Kirksey.38 For creatures wired to monitor social and political information, removal from a natural tribe causes them to seek out other ways to model their social environments in their minds. Nonetheless, in personal interactions involving two or more individuals who must maintain reputations for trustworthiness, signals must be honest more often than not. There are several reasons for this, including the concept of costly signals—some signals are unable to be falsified because of the resources it takes to make them. In the human world, we might think it’s difficult to impress someone by pretending we own a private jet, because one cannot just conjure one from thin air. We also cannot pretend to be extremely strong when we are not, because it is very easy to verify whether someone can bench press 300lbs or if they’re merely bragging that they can. As Searcy and Nowicki point out, it is also the case that some signals cannot be faked because their intensity is defined by the level of need.39 Some bird chicks will beg more desperately for food when they have not yet received any, in comparison with their nestmates who have already been fed. In some species, baby birds have

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learned to exaggerate their need, in order to receive a larger share of the spoils, too. This happens especially often in cases of imposter species, like cowbirds or cuckoos, in a nest with chicks of another species.40 Some signals are honest because they are direct indices of some ontological state, in that the signal is actually constrained by the mechanisms producing them. An example of this is the roar of a bullfrog: as females tend to prefer those individuals who produce a deeper tone, male bullfrogs call out to them to lure them away from competing males. The tone the frog creates is dictated by his size, and so cannot be faked. Smaller, less fit frogs are unable to win out against their larger competitors when signs are indexical rather than symbolic.41 Sometimes signals are honest because of the simple fact that there is no conflict of interest. This happens fairly often in human interactions, so it is not difficult to imagine. For instance, if two people are walking along the beach on a hot summer day, and they spy a gelato cart selling their favorite flavors, it will likely take little convincing that they are speaking honestly when one person claims “I’d like a gelato!” If they claimed they wanted the basil gelato over the pistachio, there may be some debate. But, generally speaking, both people know the other likes gelato, they know it’s a hot day, and they know that it generally doesn’t hurt anyone else to wait a moment while someone makes a quick purchase, even if they don’t care for a gelato at the time. The likelihood of coming into conflict over such a mundane statement is low, so there is little pressure to signal dishonestly. In fact, it may be beneficial to point out the gelato cart, as the other person may not have realized that is what was on sale and would have otherwise missed out (thus raising the status of the speaker, however slightly). There are many, many potential interpretations of the situation, but without any reason to believe there is more to the “gelato” statement, the simplest interpretation seems most reasonable. Beyond the reasons a signaler and receiver can provide for keeping most signals honest, there are external factors to think of. The threat of signal interception, which could cause additional costs to the signaler, may also help to ensure signal reliability.42 One never knows who (or what) is apt to overhear what one communicates, so it is sometimes best to be honest and to the point. In the wild, it is easy to see any intercepted signal as potentially harmful. Making loud noises on the African savannah could attract the attention of any number of fearsome predators that are stronger, faster, and sharper of tooth and claw than humans. In the more likely scenario of chatting with coworkers in the office break

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room, spreading lies about another coworker is a sure way to multiply the social costs of that piece of communication, should the lies one is telling be overheard or reported. Finally, manipulative signals may at times transcend the true/false dichotomy. They may be partly honest. They may be more honest than not, or they could even be honest to the best of someone’s knowledge, or honest for certain scenarios but misleading for others. W John Smith suggests that the information a receiver takes from any persuasive effort is evaluated based on past experience. It is his suspicion that animals simulate potential events, creating scenarios in their minds based on the signal information they are perceiving and the performance of past signals in similar contexts and environments. “It would not be surprising if, for any signal… an individual [animal] could predict (in some sense) a number of possible events and rank them by their relative probabilities of occurring and by the potential costs of predicting wrongly.”43 Indeed, it may occasionally be the case that it is better to pick the harmless deception, rather than a harmful truth, because the costs associated with belief in the honesty of a signal can at times be very high. A simple example comes from the multitude of species, such as domestic cats, that make a hissing noise that suggests a potentially venomous snake is about to strike. When hearing the hissing noise, an observer can think its message is true, false, or even false or uncertain but not worth calling the bluff. If one is stumbling around in dense underbrush in the dark, it is far less costly to act as if there is a real snake when uncertain than it is to move toward the hissing noise and potentially get bitten. “Better safe than sorry” is a maxim that guides us through many of life’s uncertainties by replacing truth and falsehood dichotomies with spectra of risk and reward. We can perhaps conclude that while humans are manipulative, we are mostly honest when dealing face to face. Without an actual human standing before us, our actions slip quickly to the deceitful, the unethical, and indeed the violently hostile. One need only witness the effect of dividing ourselves from other human beings through the windshield of an automobile to see how easy it is to turn off our humanity. Actions that are common courtesy in-person, such as allowing someone to go ahead of you when traveling in the same direction, become games of chicken between two angry humans surrounded by thousands of pounds of metal fueled by a highly inflammable substance that has been known to ignite after needless accidents. All this because someone has signaled that they would like to turn into the lane in front of someone else, and that person

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wants to prevent that from happening. We should all find this scenario wildly absurd, but it happens every day. It is a common dispute. Yet we humans are normally okay. If not always rational, we are mostly reasonable and predictable, most of the time. Our signals are predominately honest, especially if we know the people with whom we are communicating, or those people have some power over us or our reputations. Like all animals, we speak because it helps us get our way; it is an act of manipulation, which need not be selfish or harmful. But there are times when we feel we must deceive, and these situations often arise because there is more at stake. As I noted above, there is no point in lying if everyone wants the same thing, or if there are unlimited resources. We choose to deceive when it is most important to our survival, our relationships, or our reputations—of all the new (or modified) offices of rhetoric I propose, deceit may be the least common, but it may be the most necessary and interesting locus for future research.44 I want to next echo what other researchers have concluded and suggest some ways the study of deception in the animal world may enhance our knowledge of human rhetoric in particular.45

Deceit Umberto Eco famously defined the field of semiotics as “the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie.”46 Somewhat less famous is the sentence that directly follows: “If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth; it cannot in fact be used ‘to tell’ at all.”47 The distinction Eco makes is important for several reasons. One is that the act of communication is always at once a positive and negative act. We define both what something is and what it isn’t when we name it. In the telling of lies that Eco suggests, we are also untelling that aspect of the thing that is allowing us to tell the truth. This idea of telling and untelling becomes easily more comprehensible when considered in a perceptual context. Our senses notice a very tiny fraction of the information available in our environments at any given time. Moreover, individuals are apt to rely on the senses of other members of their social group. This phenomenon is very strong in dolphins, who when schooling employ a sort of “sensory integration system” through communication, mimicry, and keen awareness of the sensory information of the other dolphins nearby.48

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Even the actions we have in mind alter the way our senses work, thereby further limiting what we sense depending on the situation.49 We respond selectively, and to relatively few stimuli because our sense receptors constrain what features are extracted, thus sacrificing any unsensed information. “It is not surprising that the capabilities of a given receptor,” note Brian Lewis and Michael Gower, “…are closely correlated with the effective parameters of the conspecific message. Indeed, knowing one (the message or the receptor characteristic), the other can often be predicted and in many instances receptors have evolved in parallel with the signals they are required to detect.”50 Our bodies have evolved to tell and untell in equal measure, so any quest for the truth must take into consideration the many forms of deception, misinformation, and missing information in the natural world. Put simply, rhetoricians must also study everything which can be used in order to lie, and that is no small order. Deception appears in forms that are structural/morphological, behavioral, and more often a combination of both.51 Any sort of false information provided by an individual who benefits can be considered deceptive.52 Structural deceit is nonrhetorical unless intentionally deployed and often comes under the heading of mimicry, which manifests in at least three well-known types: Batesian, Müllerian, and Mertensian. Batesian mimics have been selected to produce physical or behavioral aspects that suggest a poisonous or venomous species. In the case of warning colors (called aposematic signaling in the life sciences), there are two ways these false signs are produced: either mimics are selected for their resemblance to a poisonous species, or previously poisonous species stop producing their costly toxins because they are no longer necessary— that is, the warning coloration is working so well, that no one calls their bluff, so they need not back it up anymore (nature, I should repeat, is a frugal mistress). Mimicry like this need not be just visual, and it need not be passive. Wickler provides the example of tits that hiss if disturbed on their nests, emulating (like the cat in the example above) the warning vocalization of a potentially venomous snake.53 It is often the case that the fewer the mimics in any given location, as compared to honest signalers, the more successful the mimics will be.54 Mertensian mimics are a special type of Batesian mimic that copy the coloration of low-to-moderate poison-yielding coral snakes. While this seems a very specific niche, it is important because of the great variety of species of snake all adopting this particular form of deterrent coloration. Müllerian mimics are less focused than Mertensian. They

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consist of multiple unpalatable species all sharing a pattern or color that reinforces the danger to predator receivers. This works through standardization, rather than single-species imitation, and can become quite uniform across species (such as moths and butterflies, several of whom will share identical patterns or colors in a sort of unintentional act of solidarity). This happens because of predator species’ ability to learn quickly from their mistakes, which has the side-effect of making it more worthwhile to be, or mimic, a species that is moderately poisonous. Predators that eat highly toxic species and die learn nothing. Those who get very ill but survive take very few attempts to learn their lesson. Behavioral forms of deception in nature are more interesting to rhetorical theory for several reasons. It is often possible to spot intraspecific imitations of behavior, whereas physical structures are almost always meant to deceive other species alone.55 Another reason is because social animals are more likely to respond to interspecific communication, as is readily apparent in the relationships between humans and nonhuman animals, such as dogs, cats, and parrots.56 This is because larger brains, and more complex forms of communication, tend to evolve in more highly social animals. It takes far more brain power and communication skills to manage a social group than to operate as an individual, so social animals are often smarter and more receptive to the communication attempts of other species. This makes it easier for humans to be deceived not only by other humans, but by our pets, our livestock, and our few remaining predators—because we pay such close attention. Biologist Robert Mitchell believes that intelligence among human and nonhuman animals involves the intentional adaptation of means to ends, allowing us to profit from individual experience.57 This mirrors Jeanne Fahnestock’s definition of the art of rhetoric as advice on the “intentional use of persuasive language.”58 By listening to the signals of other animals, we are able to make predictions about their intent. As George Campbell insists in his Philosophy of Rhetoric, “In speaking, there is always some end proposed, or some effect which the speaker intends to produce upon the hearer.”59 However, there are problems associated with signal reception: signals are conditional, they are probabilistic, their information can be used to mislead, and signals differ in the extent to which their information leads us to detailed and trustworthy predictions.60 While some would criticize the idea that animals intend to deceive, to a growing number of ethologists it is obvious. Especially among our closest relatives—the primates—deception grows more common as

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a species is more likely to attribute intentional states to others.61 The behavioral phenomena we categorize as deceptions are attempts to make others “believe” what is not so.62 When speaking of behavioral forms of deceit, there is no way to avoid referencing mental states. Deception is the act of implanting false beliefs in another mind; thus, it is necessary to believe those minds exist, that they hold beliefs. This is known in cognitive psychology as “theory of mind”—I believe that you are capable of holding beliefs, feelings, and ideas, and that those ideas are potentially alterable through communication or experience.63 It has been shown that it is very difficult for most humans to attribute such cognitive abilities to animals, unless the animal is their own pet.64 If animals are able to intentionally deceive one another for their own gains, it is important to examine the types of deception they are able to deploy. A. Whiten and R. W. Byrne have identified five basic ends of deceit, which are non-exhaustive but cover a wide range of behaviors.65 Animals may use deception for purposes of concealment, in order to hide from view for defensive or predatory purposes. They can distract others through looking away, calling or leading another away, or by using intimate behavior as a ruse. Animals may create images to one another, as if they were actors—they present themselves as neutral or affiliative when they are in fact aggressive. They can also deceive in order to use another individual as a social tool, manipulating one individual in order to influence the behavior of another. Finally, animals can deceive in order to deflect negative attention, or divert that attention onto a “fall guy.” Broadly speaking, we may subvert the responsiveness of another being in one of the two ways: through misinforming or through selective informing.66 Misinformation tactics can include strategic deception or tactical deception. Strategic deception is fairly inflexible and involves securing long-term goals. Competitive begging or bluff displays are examples of strategic deception.67 Tactical deception, on the other hand, is a method for quick gain that needs to happen far less frequently than honest signaling in order to be effective.68 The main perpetrators of this form of deception are monkeys, apes, and other highly intelligent and gregarious species, like humans.69 While it is often harmful and misleading to treat humans as a special case in cross-species studies of communication, our ability and willingness to deceive outstrip that of most other animals. To recall Umberto Eco’s point from the beginning of this section, to study successful communicators is to study the ablest liars and manipulators. Not only do humans

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employ their own physical powers in order to mimic and deceive, we also take from other animals, plants, and our environments. Consider camouflage: like many animals, humans have a long history of covering themselves with leaves, furs, snow, or any number of materials to disguise their natural coloration, the heat they give off, or the very fact that they are living beings at all. This indicates one of the separating forces between persuasion and some forms of camouflage—intent. George Kennedy’s definition of rhetoric as a form of pre-communicative energy has been criticized for being too broad, that it does not allow us to distinguish between the rhetorical and nonrhetorical, but one way to make such a distinction is to interrogate the division between structural and intentional deceit.70 That is, figuring out whether camouflage is merely an evolved body trait, or whether it is something that needs to be deployed or used behaviorally. For humans, the modern fabrication of camouflage clothing requires an intent to cause deception in multiple stages of the production. Farmers grow cotton, which is often woven together with synthetic fabrics because they are cheaper (thus tricking the end consumer into thinking it is a quality textile, when it is partially petroleum-based filler). Patterns are applied to the finished fabric, in order to make it resemble leaves in a forest, treebark, or the broken monochrome of an urban conflict site. Hunters, soldiers, and SWAT teams will dress themselves in camouflage clothing, and sometimes paint the remaining exposed skin, in order to mimic their surroundings. They deceive the primary perceptive mode humans use to navigate their environment—the sense of sight. Hunters of nonhuman animals will often need to use additional camouflage to confuse prey that have more reliable senses of smell, through the application of urine from does in estrus, for example, or by means of other cloaking fragrances. “Essence of leech” is an example from my own childhood that I will never forget, due to a specific interaction with the liquid. My family and friends sometimes applied this scent to our bait when fishing walleye in the Boundary Waters of Minnesota, in order to cover the scent of human handling of the leeches or minnows we used to catch fish. One day, while preparing lunch in the boat, the person who was making the sandwiches had forgotten to wash the leech essence off of their hands first. We did not discover this oversight until each of us had bitten into our sandwiches; the resulting taste was not primarily that of ham or cheese, as we had expected, but of leech-flavored oil. If humans had a better sense of smell, this disgusting accident would likely

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never have happened. But in this case we were tricked by our own ruse, which thankfully led only to a boatload of fisherpersons going hungry that afternoon. (Although some of us lost our appetites entirely, the seagulls seemed thankful for our donations of mostly-uneaten sandwiches.) As mentioned above, mimicry often works because patterns of structure or behavior are made as uniform as possible. I was tricked into eating a leech-flavored sandwich because I was used to accepting sandwiches from the designated cook for that day, and I had no perceptive ability that allowed me to detect that anything was amiss over the other smells on the water—fish, cool air, pine trees, gasoline, sunscreen, and (sadly) essence of leech. In spoken or written rhetoric, or the formal study thereof, these patterns of mimicry are represented by the technical rhetorics of the classical era, in style. Tropes, topics, commonplaces, and artistic modes of proof must follow recognizable patterns in order to not only convey their messages within a conventional symbolic system, but also to “mimic experience, rather than prove,” according to Art Walzer.71 Walzer was discussing appeals to reason in particular, but mimicry is the heart of style, and has long been a tool for learning the “moves” that allow us to persuade within our chosen discourse communities. While many rebel against teaching in what they perceive to be a prescriptive fashion, rhetoric and composition instructors rely heavily on paradigms. First-year composition primers, such as Graff and Birkenstein’s They Say, I Say, are wildly popular precisely because they lay out explicit examples for students to copy, which they can later adapt to suit their own needs once the basic rhetorical moves are internalized and incorporated in their writing processes.72 Emulation, a specific form of mimicry, is an effective teaching tool, when combined with other approaches. Mimicry, like manipulation and deception, need not be malevolent. Most human deception seems to be done in order to save time, or to avoid uncomfortable conversations that would benefit nobody. In the case of the latter, children learn at a very young age how to lie in order to be polite.73 These are called prosocial lies (or “white lies”).74 In the workplace, the question “How are you today?” is almost always answered with something along the lines of “Fine, thank you!” even when there is truly something wrong with the person being asked. These pro forma responses serve a social purpose that allows people who are not intimately connected to nonetheless maintain friendliness or collegiality. If one knows the questioner somewhat better, the answer could go deeper, but it is generally unwise to “overshare” with someone one barely knows.

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What Walzer was referring to, then, follows closely the resemblance theory of rhetoric George Campbell developed in the eighteenth century, in order to explain a feature of persuasion akin to what we now call identification. Walzer reads Campell as saying that an audience’s ability to believe a rhetorician’s claims are “critically influenced by the extent to which the audience’s response to verbal stimuli that the rhetor provides resembles the mind’s ordinary response to actual experience.”75 In his own words, Campbell asserted that the rhetor needs to lure an audience into a desired action by appealing to resemblances in their understanding, passion, imagination, or will.76 Augustine of Hippo anticipated the idea of resemblance through his discussion of natural and conventional signs. He elaborated on these in his De doctrina christiana. In it, he claims that natural signs are those that occur without a guiding intent or desire behind them. Just as thunder recalls lightning, so do natural signs serve as what Charles Sanders Peirce would later classify as an index—a sign that corresponds to a symbol directly, or that indicates or points to the object being signified. When you smell smoke, there is fire. Natural signs are those that correlate directly to their objects. Conventional signs, on the other hand, are used by human and nonhuman animals to convey the “feelings of their minds, perceptions, or thoughts.”77 There is substantial evidence suggesting many nonhuman animal species can understand and communicate abstract concepts, too.78 For one human to persuade another, their signs must conjure similar perceptions or thoughts in the minds of their audience. Even abstract ideas can be communicated between minds by means of rhetorical devices, such as metaphors, which place the abstract idea or event in terms of some familiar bodily experience.79 Diane Davis makes a similar point from a different direction: she says rhetoric is dependent on being responsive, that it relies on the “exposedness of corporeal existence.”80 We must perceive the other before we can respond, and these perceptions are grounded in our bodily natures, not disconnected abstractions. Debra Hawhee expands on this claim, noting that “nonhuman animals are expert in the bodily economies of perception and action.”81 Robert Innis (following Polanyi) warns us that “language and other formal systems involve a kind of ‘break’ with perception,” but he does not mean a material break, but a formal, systematic one, as of mental categories.82 He continues by insisting that language does not constitute an additional layer, or “veneer,” added to perception; language is permeated

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by perception just as language permeates perception.83 Innis maintains continuity exists in pragmatic semiotic theory by noting that Polanyi did not read sense perception in terms of language, but language in terms of perception (which itself is read in terms of meaning), thus creating “a sort of Polanyian analogue to the Peircean notion of semiotic closure.”84 In light of our previous conversation, then, it seems clear that the sign is at once a form of mental mimicry and an invitation to mimic the mind of the speaker. We speak, sense speech, and attempt to incorporate sensed speech into data to be used for future speechmaking (which others will sense and attempt to make sense of). Mimicry shows an understanding of other minds and the behaviors they produce, or at least an attempt to understand them. Mimicry can also provide a borrowed ethos for those who wish to deceive. In the animal world, this is fairly common. A study of two species of bird (Lanio versicolor and Thamnomanes schistogynus ) that hunt for insects in the canopy and understorey of the Amazonian forest demonstrates how borrowing another species’s status is advantageous. 85 Acting as sentinels for mixed-species groups that hunt for arthropods in the foliage, these birds provide alarm calls when hawks are spotted, allowing the hunting birds to take cover in time to save themselves from predation. Sometimes, however, these sentinels will use false calls in order to distract other birds and consume the prey that would otherwise have gone to the birds that were not vigilant. “Crying wolf,” as these birds do, has been shown to be effective in a number of different species’ communication strategies.86 By borrowing the ethos of a hawk, or purporting that a hawk is arriving, these birds are able to deceive the others in their group because the costs of reacting to a false warning are far lower than not reacting to a true warning. By playing the odds, the receiving birds are ensuring their survival at the expense of a meal. Even so, too many false alarm calls in a particular period of time will cause that call to become less effective; at least one species of bird has gotten around this, however, by alternating various types of alarm call, not using the same type of predator alarm twice (thereby adopting the ethos of multiple species in order to scare off competitors for resources).87 Humans mimic other humans in order to borrow the ethos or authority of another figure, as well. This happens in the workplace or home equally often. Simple statements like, “The shift leader wants us to do X,” or, “Mom said I was in charge, so you have to listen to me,” coopt the authority of a higher power, in order to convince another to act

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a certain way. Taking on the mantle of an expert is another way of forming a false impression to deceive or manipulate in human interactions. Kenneth Burke addressed the realities of providing misleading information in order to get one’s way, but he called it an act of mystification, rather than manipulation. He divided mystification into two types. General mystification is very common and consists of a “pleader” seeking a boon from a “pled-with.”88 The person in authority grants an audience to the person asking for help or resources. This means that the ability to manipulate a situation rests more heavily not with the signaler in this case, but with the receiver, who holds more power. Thus, the signaler must be especially careful to construct a meaningful appeal that resembles the thoughts, feelings, or experience of the receiver. The second form, special mystification, consists of the idea that “language can be used to deceive.”89 The attempt at deception must be good—it must resemble perceptions of the real world—in order to be believed. We may both use and misuse symbols, much like several other species, and our misuse can be intentional, in order to mystify a receiver. What rhetorical criticism can achieve, then, according to Burke, is to locate those places where asymmetries of power or imperfect resemblances are exploited to deceive or manipulate others. By understanding the ways we are commonly manipulated through clever rhetoric, we can glimpse the true motives of a speaker or author, demystifying the symbols he or she has used to persuade us.

Conclusion I opened this chapter with an observation by Thomas Sebeok, that life is defined by the replication and variation of information. If this is the case, then deception is a destructive force that willfully coopts information and repackages it with the intent to manipulate for an individual’s own benefit (and possibly at the expense of others). But why would such a destructive force continue to exist, if it does not benefit the receiver to listen to the lies a deceiver tells? Sadly, the question is not that simple, and several potential answers need further exploration. First, it would be wise to consider what portion of human speech is deceptive or manipulative, and of that portion, how much of it is malevolent or merely selfish? Moreover, is this manipulation all for one’s own benefit, or can kin or group selection also be responsible for some forms of deceit? We know we deceive for our own benefit, and for our

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family’s, and the groups extend much further than that: nation-states, religions, even entire species are promoted by the deceptive practices of their members. But for evolution to have allowed communication to develop, it must be mostly honest, most of the time, otherwise who would bother to listen? Another interesting question, then, comes from the idea that sexual selection, too, must be a driving force in many human activities. Based on an asymmetry of resources invested in child rearing, it seems very obvious that humans, like all sexually-reproducing animals, would have drives to invest in children that vary by sex, status, class, and culture. How these social forces collide with our evolutionary drives to reproduce creates a wide variety of reproductive strategies. Moreover, as many human cultures have removed themselves from certain environmental crises (lack of food, early death from disease or complications during childbirth, etc.), have their strategies for cooperation and competition altered within and among various genders? Clearly, potential mate interactions must fall on a broad spectrum of strategies from “one night stand,” to lifelong monogamy, to multi-family childrearing, and beyond. What effects the cultural norms have on signal honesty is a rich area for further exploration. Deception, manipulation, and information sharing in the workplace are especially important in fields like academia, because of the high demands of status due to extreme specialization. Does the “small world” phenomenon increase the likelihood of honest signaling, or does it merely push deception underground through greater attempts at mystification or less transparency in professional competition (for advancement, publication, awards, etc.)? Is deception a necessary evil when there are limited resources and an ever-growing demand for them, such as in the case of securing tenure-track employment over the last decade? What is clear is that human communication is rarely mere information sharing. One can often identify an ulterior motive, or an attempt at manipulation—harmless or not—when receiving a signal from another person. This should be taken for granted. Actions as innocent as holding hands have many different significations attached to them, some of which are meant to send clear signals to others who might otherwise be persuaded to act inappropriately. To the couple holding hands, the action may merely mean trust or friendship. It might also symbolize love. But it could also mean fear or shock, as in the case of two passengers on an airplane that has lost an engine and needs to make an emergency landing. To others, the act of holding hands can signal that these two people are a

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couple, that they are committed to one another, or even that they represent a unified cause. Hands Across America, a charity event held in 1986 for which organizers wanted to form a human chain stretching from coast to coast, is a famous instance of people clinging to one another in solidarity over an issue of mutual concern. While not meant to deceive, the action was meant to manipulate others into taking action, mainly in the form of donating to charities fighting against hunger and homelessness. Multiple symbolicity like this complicates our efforts to divine intentions. This can only increase the effectiveness of attempts to deceive. Such difficulty even understanding each other’s simplest signals may lend insight into the problem of why humans are so persistent and successful in their efforts to deceive one another: more complex and abstract forms of signification allow for a greater variety of deceptive activities, with a far lower ability to scry the potential results of allowing oneself to be persuaded. In short, humans lie for many reasons and in many ways. It is telling the truth that is often the most difficult feat of communication. While that is unfortunate, rhetoric often suffers from its greatest strength—its flexibility of meaning and response. Thus, it would behoove us to continue to interrogate deception and manipulation in human and nonhuman animals, providing us insight into the rhetorical energy underlying our communicative efforts. This energy responds strongly to perceptual input. Our senses are indeed our best friends and worst enemies in nature. Because others are constantly attempting to deceive and manipulate us through our senses, we must take this input as foundational to all rhetorical activity. I argue this in a similar vein to Thomas Rickert’s apology for material rhetoric: “Rhetoric, while traditionally taken as a discursive, intentional art, can and indeed must be grounded in the material relations from which it springs, not simply as the situation giving it shape and exigence, but as part of what we mean by rhetoric.”90 Just as Rickert might claim that the material world precedes and saturates all rhetorical activity, I would assert that the senses of any individual or group are the locus of the material boundaries between individual and environment, as well as the bottlenecks of persuasive data and the touchstones of our communicative biases. Thus, I have dedicated the bulk of this exploration of animal rhetorics to the very foundations of those similarities and differences I wish to highlight in the next two parts of this book—the senses.

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Notes 1. P. Carazo and E. Font, “‘Communication Breakdown’: The Evolution of Signal Unreliability and Deception,” Animal Behaviour 87 (2014): 17. 2. Thomas Sebeok, “‘Talking’ with Animals: Zoosemiotics Explained,” in Readings in Zoosemiotics, ed. Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli, and Aleksei Turovski (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011), 87. 3. George A. Kennedy, Comparative Rhetoric: An Historical and Cross Cultural Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 12–13. 4. Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969). 50. 5. F. B. M. de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes, 1st U.S. ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1982). 6. Lori Marino and Toni Frohoff, “Towards a New Paradigm of Non-captive Research on Cetacean Cognition,” PloS one 6, no. 9 (2011). 7. Donald R. Griffin, Animal Minds: Beyond Cognition to Consciousness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 213. 8. A. Whiten et al., “Cultures in Chimpanzees.,” Nature 399, no. 6737 (1999): 682. 9. Jo Liska, “The Role of Rhetoric in Semiogenesis: A Response to Professor Kennedy,” Philosophy & Rhetoric, no. 1 (1993): 34. 10. Marino and Frohoff, “Towards a New Paradigm of Non-captive Research on Cetacean Cognition.” 11. M. D. Hauser and D. A. Nelson, “‘Intentional’ Signaling in Animal Communication,” Trends in Ecology & Evolution 6, no. 6 (1991): 186. 12. William Benoit, “A Note on Burke on “Motive”,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 26, no. 2 (1996). 13. Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli, and Aleksei Turovski, Readings in Zoosemiotics (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011), 248. 14. Diane Pecher and Rolf A. Zwaan, Grounding Cognition: The Role of Perception and Action in Memory, Language, and Thinking (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1. 15. Kalevi Kull, “A Note on Biorhetorics,” Sign Systems Studies 29, no. 2 (2001): 698. 16. For the benefit of the lay reader, think of Saussure’s theory of the sign as a pair of terms: the signified is the concept or thing being referred to, while the signifier is the thing indicating that concept or thing. Think of the Idea [to stop] and the word [Stop], or the red light of a U.S. traffic signal—the idea [to stop] is the signified, while the red light is the signifier. Under Peirce’s system, we also need to add a mind to interpret the perceived connection between the signs. This is the interpretant, which can be thought of as a translation from sign into meaning. I hedge above, because there is often no single meaning to be taken from any one

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17. 18. 19.

20.

21.

22.

23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

sign, so the relationship between signal and meaning is often subjective or polysemous. Charles S. Peirce, ed. Collected Writings (8 vols.) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931–58), 2.228. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). C. K. Ogden et al., The Meaning of Meaning; A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism, 4th ed. (London and New York: Harcourt, Brace & company, inc., 1936). It should be mentioned that Richards would later abandon the distinction between symbolic and affective signs, but this has little bearing on the argument at hand. W. John Smith, “Animal Communication and the Study of Cognition,” in Readings in Zoosemiotics, ed. Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli, and Aleksei Turovski (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011), 285–87. Gregory Bateson, “Problems in Cetacean and Other Mammalian Communication,” in Readings in Zoosemiotics, ed. Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli, and Aleksei Turovski (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011), 305. Michael Argyle, Bodily Communication (Routledge, 2013). 3–5. Sarah LH Ellis et al., “AAFP and ISFM Feline Environmental Needs Guidelines,” Journal of feline medicine and surgery 15, no. 3 (2013): 220. Desmond Morris, Cat Watching, 1st American ed. (New York: Crown Publishers, 1987). John Bradshaw, “More Than a Feline,” New Scientist 219, no. 2934 (2013): 44. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: 30th Anniversary Edition (Taylor & Francis, 2013). 38. Peter Marler, “The Logical Analysis of Animal Communication,” in Readings in Zoosemiotics, ed. Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli, and Aleksei Turovski (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011), 259. Alex C. Parrish, Adaptive Rhetoric: Evolution, Culture, and the Art of Persuasion, Routledge Studies in Rhetoric and Communication (New York: Routledge, 2013). 88. Richard Dawkins and J. R. Krebs, “Animal Signals: Information or Manipulation?,” in Behavioural Ecology: an Evolutionary Approach, ed. J. R. Krebs and N. B. Davies (Oxford: Blackwell Scientific, 1978). John Maynard Smith and David Harper, Animal Signals, 1st ed., Oxford series in ecology and evolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 9. The idea of animals intending things is hotly contested. I have explained the debate surrounding animal intentionality and the withholding of

4

33.

34. 35.

36. 37.

38. 39.

40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49.

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information at much greater length in my first book: Parrish, Adaptive: 75–88. For a very different, behaviorist interpretation of this scenario, cf.: George Herbert Mead and Charles W. Morris, Mind, Self & Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1934), 42–44. George A. Kennedy, Comparative Rhetoric: An Historical and CrossCultural Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 17. Richard W. Byrne, Machiavellian Intelligence: Social Expertise and the Evolution of Intellect in Monkeys, Apes, and Humans (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 227. Office cultures and other microcultures would be more representative of early human life if we actually lived with, ate with, and slept nearby all of our officemates. The key is, most people don’t live where they work, and many do not socialize with their coworkers—it is a choice for most people. Stefan Kirksey and Stefan Helmreich, “The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography,” Cultural anthropology 25, no. 4 (2010). William A. Searcy and Stephen Nowicki, The Evolution of Animal Communication: Reliability and Deception in Signaling Systems (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 16. Gabriela Lichtenstein and Spencer G. Sealy, Nestling Competition, Rather Than Supernormal Stimulus, Explains the Success of Parasitic BrownHeaded Cowbird Chicks in Yellow Warbler Nests, vol. 265 (1998), Journal Article. Maynard Smith and Harper, Animal Signals: 1–2. Searcy and Nowicki, The Evolution of Animal Communication: Reliability and Deception in Signaling Systems: 183. Smith, “Animal Communication and the Study of Cognition,” 292–94. For a fuller discussion of deception in the animal world, see: Parrish, Adaptive. Daniel N Jones, “Predatory Personalities as Behavioral Mimics and Parasites Mimicry–Deception Theory,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 9, no. 4 (2014). Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Indiana University Press, 1979), 7. Ibid. Whitehead and Rendell, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins: 124. Anna M. Borghi, “Object Concepts and Action,” in Grounding Cognition: The Role of Perception and Action in Memory, Language, and Thinking, ed. Diane Pecher and Rolf A. Zwaan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 16.

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50. D. Brian Lewis and D. Michael Gower, Biology of Communication (New York: Wiley, 1980). 26. 51. Tim Caro, “Antipredator Deception in Terrestrial Vertebrates,” Current Zoology 60, no. 1 (2014). 52. Jaeeun Shim and Ronald C Arkin, “Robot Deception and Squirrel Behavior: A Case Study in Bio-inspired Robotics,” (2014). 53. Wolfgang Wickler, Mimicry in Plants and Animals, translated from the German by R. D. Martin, World university library (New York: McGrawHill, 1968). 9. 54. Ibid., 47. 55. Mikael Mokkonen and Carita Lindstedt, “The evolutionary ecology of deception,” Biological Reviews (2015). 56. Irene Pepperberg, “Cognitive and Communicative Abilities of Grey Parrots,” in The Cognitive Animal: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives on Animal Cognition, ed. Marc Bekoff, Colin Allen, and Gordon M. Burghardt (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 247. 57. Robert W. Mitchell, “A Framework for Discussing Deception,” in Deception: Perspectives on Human and Nonhuman Deceit, ed. Robert W. Mitchell and Nicholas S. Thompson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), 4. 58. Jeanne Fahnestock, “The Rhetorical Arts of Cooperation,” JGE: The Journal of General Education 62, no. 1 (2013): 14. 59. George Campbell, The Philosophy of Rhetoric, ed. Lloyd F. Bitzer, Landmarks in rhetoric and public address (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1963), 1. 60. W. John Smith, “An ‘Informational’ Perspective on Manipulation,” in Deception: Perspectives on Human and Nonhuman Deceit, ed. Robert W. Mitchell and Nicholas S. Thompson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), 75. 61. Hauser and Nelson, “‘Intentional’ Signaling in Animal Communication,” 189. 62. Lily-Marlene Russow, “Deception: A Philosophical Perspective,” in Deception, Perspectives on Human and Nonhuman Deceit, ed. Robert W. Mitchell and Nicholas S. Thompson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), 42. 63. Simon Baron-Cohen, Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995). 64. Maria Maust-Mohl, John Fraser, and Rachel Morrison, “Wild Minds: What People Think about Animal Thinking,” Anthrozoös 25, no. 2 (2012). 65. A. Whiten and R. W. Byrne, “Tactical Deception in Primates,” Behavioral & Brain Sciences 11, no. 2 (1988): 236–41. 66. Smith, “An ‘Informational’ Perspective on Manipulation,” 79.

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67. See Searcy and Nowicki, The Evolution of Animal Communication: Reliability and Deception in Signaling Systems; R. Steger and R. L. Caldwell, “Intraspecific Deception by Bluffing: A Defense Strategy of Newly Molted Stomatopods (Arthropoda: Crustacea),” Science 221, no. 4610 (1983). 68. R. W. Byrne and A. Whiten, “Tactical Deception of Familiar Individuals in Baboons (Papio ursinus),” Animal Behaviour 33 (1985): 672. 69. R. W. Byrne and A. Whiten, “Cognitive Evolution in Primates: Evidence from Tactical Deception,” Man 27 (1992): 621. 70. Liska, “The Role of Rhetoric in Semiogenesis: A Response to Professor Kennedy,” 31–32. 71. Arthur E. Walzer, “Campbell on the Passions: A Rereading of the Philosophy of Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 85, no. 1 (1999): 82. 72. Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein, “They Say/I Say”: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing, 1st ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006). 73. Michael Lewis, “The Origins of Lying and Deception in Everyday Life,” American Scientist 103, no. 2 (2015): 129. 74. Gerardo Iñiguez et al., “Effects of Deception in Social Networks,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences 281, no. 1790 (2014). 75. Walzer, “Campbell on the Passions: A Rereading of the Philosophy of Rhetoric,” 79. 76. Campbell, The Philosophy of Rhetoric: 72–80. 77. De doctrina christiana II.ii.3. 78. Edward A. Wasserman, “General Signs,” in The Cognitive Animal: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives on Animal Cognition, ed. Marc Bekoff, Colin Allen, and Gordon M. Burghardt (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 176. 79. Raymond W. Gibbs, “Embodiment in Metaphorical Imagination,” in Grounding Cognition: The Role of Perception and Action in Memory, Language, and Thinking, ed. Diane Pecher and Rolf A. Zwaan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 65. 80. Diane Davis, “Creaturely Rhetorics,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 44, no. 1 (2011): 89. 81. Debra Hawhee, “Toward a Bestial Rhetoric,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 44, no. 1 (2011): 85. 82. Robert E. Innis, Pragmatism and the Forms of Sense: Language, Perception, Technics, American and European Philosophy (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 22. 83. Ibid. 84. Ibid., 23. 85. Charles A Munn, “Birds That ‘Cry Wolf’” (1986): 143–44.

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86. Culum Brown, Martin P Garwood, and Jane E Williamson, “It Pays to Cheat: Tactical Deception in a Cephalopod Social Signalling System,” Biology letters (2012). 87. Tom P Flower, Matthew Gribble, and Amanda R Ridley, “Deception by Flexible Alarm Mimicry in an African Bird,” Science 344, no. 6183 (2014): 514. 88. Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives: 178. 89. Ibid. 90. Thomas J. Rickert, Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013). x.

References Argyle, Michael. Bodily Communication. Routledge, 2013. Baron-Cohen, Simon. Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind [in English]. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995. Bateson, Gregory. “Problems in Cetacean and Other Mammalian Communication.” In Readings in Zoosemiotics, edited by Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli and Aleksei Turovski. 303–12. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011. Benoit, William. “A Note on Burke on ‘Motive’.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 26, no. 2 (1996): 67–79. Borghi, Anna M. “Object Concepts and Action.” In Grounding Cognition: The Role of Perception and Action in Memory, Language, and Thinking, edited by Diane Pecher and Rolf A. Zwaan. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Bradshaw, John. “More Than a Feline.” New Scientist 219, no. 2934 (2013): 44-47. Brown, Culum, Martin P Garwood, and Jane E Williamson. “It Pays to Cheat: Tactical Deception in a Cephalopod Social Signalling System.” Biology letters (2012): rsbl20120435. Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. Byrne, R. W., and A. Whiten. “Cognitive Evolution in Primates: Evidence from Tactical Deception.” Man 27 (1992): 609-27. ———. “Tactical Deception of Familiar Individuals in Baboons (Papio Ursinus).” Animal Behaviour 33 (1985): 669-73. Byrne, Richard W. Machiavellian Intelligence : Social Expertise and the Evolution of Intellect in Monkeys, Apes, and Humans. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. Campbell, George. The Philosophy of Rhetoric. Landmarks in Rhetoric and Public Address. edited by Lloyd F. Bitzer Carbondale,: Southern Illinois University Press, 1963.

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Carazo, P, and E Font. “‘Communication Breakdown’: The Evolution of Signal Unreliability and Deception.” Animal Behaviour 87 (2014): 17-22. Caro, Tim. “Antipredator Deception in Terrestrial Vertebrates.” Current Zoology 60, no. 1 (2014). Davis, Diane. “Creaturely Rhetorics.” Philosophy & Rhetoric 44, no. 1 (2011): 88-94. Dawkins, Richard, and J. R. Krebs. “Animal Signals: Information or Manipulation?.” In Behavioural Ecology: An Evolutionary Approach, edited by J. R. Krebs and N. B. Davies. 282–309. Oxford: Blackwell Scientific, 1978. Eco, Umberto. A Theory of Semiotics. Indiana University Press, 1979. Ellis, Sarah LH, Ilona Rodan, Hazel C Carney, Sarah Heath, Irene Rochlitz, Lorinda D Shearburn, Eliza Sundahl, and Jodi L Westropp. “Aafp and Isfm Feline Environmental Needs Guidelines.” Journal of feline medicine and surgery 15, no. 3 (2013): 219–30. Fahnestock, Jeanne. “The Rhetorical Arts of Cooperation.” JGE: The Journal of General Education 62, no. 1 (2013): 11–27. Flower, Tom P, Matthew Gribble, and Amanda R Ridley. “Deception by Flexible Alarm Mimicry in an African Bird.” Science 344, no. 6183 (2014): 513–16. Gibbs, Raymond W. “Embodiment in Metaphorical Imagination.” In Grounding Cognition: The Role of Perception and Action in Memory, Language, and Thinking, edited by Diane Pecher and Rolf A. Zwaan. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Graff, Gerald, and Cathy Birkenstein. “They Say/I Say”: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing. 1st ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006. Griffin, Donald R. Animal Minds: Beyond Cognition to Consciousness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Hauser, M. D., and D. A. Nelson. “‘Intentional’ Signaling in Animal Communication” [in English]. Trends in ecology & evolution 6, no. 6 (1991): 186–89. Hawhee, Debra. “Toward a Bestial Rhetoric.” Philosophy & Rhetoric 44, no. 1 (2011): 81-87. Iñiguez, Gerardo, Tzipe Govezensky, Robin Dunbar, Kimmo Kaski, and Rafael A Barrio. “Effects of Deception in Social Networks.” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences 281, no. 1790 (2014): 20141195. Innis, Robert E. Pragmatism and the Forms of Sense: Language, Perception, Technics. American and European Philosophy. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002. Jones, Daniel N. “Predatory Personalities as Behavioral Mimics and Parasites Mimicry–Deception Theory.” Perspectives on Psychological Science 9, no. 4 (2014): 445-51. Kennedy, George A. Comparative Rhetoric: An Historical and Cross-Cultural Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

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———. Comparative Rhetoric: An Historical and Cross Cultural Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Kirksey, Stefan, and Stefan Helmreich. “The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography.” Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 4 (2010): 545-76. Kull, Kalevi. “A Note on Biorhetorics.” Sign Systems Studies 29, no. 2 (2001): 693–704. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Lewis, D. Brian, and D. Michael Gower. Biology of Communication. New York: Wiley, 1980. Lewis, Michael. “The Origins of Lying and Deception in Everyday Life.” American Scientist 103, no. 2 (2015): 128–35. Lichtenstein, Gabriela, and Spencer G. Sealy. Nestling Competition, Rather Than Supernormal Stimulus, Explains the Success of Parasitic Brown-Headed Cowbird Chicks in Yellow Warbler Nests. Vol. 265,1998. Journal Article. doi:https:// doi.org/10.1098/rspb.1998.0289. Liska, Jo. “The Role of Rhetoric in Semiogenesis: A Response to Professor Kennedy.” Philosophy & Rhetoric, no. 1 (1993): 31. Maran, Timo, Dario Martinelli, and Aleksei Turovski. Readings in Zoosemiotics. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011. Marino, Lori, and Toni Frohoff. “Towards a New Paradigm of Non-Captive Research on Cetacean Cognition.” PloS one 6, no. 9 (2011). Marler, Peter. “The Logical Analysis of Animal Communication.” In Readings in Zoosemiotics, edited by Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli and Aleksei Turovski. 253–78. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011. Maust-Mohl, Maria, John Fraser, and Rachel Morrison. “Wild Minds: What People Think About Animal Thinking.” Anthrozoös 25, no. 2 (2012 June 1): 133–47. Maynard Smith, John, and David Harper. Animal Signals. Oxford Series in Ecology and Evolution. 1st ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Mead, George Herbert, and Charles W. Morris. Mind, Self & Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago press, 1934. Mitchell, Robert W. “A Framework for Discussing Deception.” In Deception: Perspectives on Human and Nonhuman Deceit, edited by Robert W. Mitchell and Nicholas S. Thompson, 3–40. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986. Mokkonen, Mikael, and Carita Lindstedt. “The Evolutionary Ecology of Deception.” Biological Reviews (2015). Morris, Desmond. Cat Watching. 1st American ed. New York: Crown Publishers, 1987. Munn, Charles A. “Birds That ‘Cry Wolf’.” (1986): 143–44.

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Ogden, C. K., I. A. Richards, Bronislaw Malinowski, and F. G. Crookshank. The Meaning of Meaning; A Study of the Influence of Language Upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism. 4th ed. London, New York: Harcourt, Brace & company, inc., 1936. Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: 30th Anniversary Edition. Taylor & Francis, 2013. Parrish, Alex C. Adaptive Rhetoric: Evolution, Culture, and the Art of Persuasion. Routledge Studies in Rhetoric and Communication. New York: Routledge, 2013. Pecher, Diane, and Rolf A. Zwaan. Grounding Cognition: The Role of Perception and Action in Memory, Language, and Thinking [in English]. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Peirce, Charles S., ed. Collected Writings (8 Vols.). edited by Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss and Arthur W. Burks. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931–1958. Pepperberg, Irene. “Cognitive and Communicative Abilities of Grey Parrots.” In The Cognitive Animal: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives on Animal Cognition, edited by Marc Bekoff, Colin Allen and Gordon M. Burghardt, 247–51. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Rickert, Thomas J. Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013. Russow, Lily-Marlene. “Deception: A Philosophical Perspective.” In Deception, Perspectives on Human and Nonhuman Deceit, edited by Robert W. Mitchell and Nicholas S. Thompson. 41-52. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986. Searcy, William A., and Stephen Nowicki. The Evolution of Animal Communication: Reliability and Deception in Signaling Systems. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. Sebeok, Thomas. “‘Talking’ with Animals: Zoosemiotics Explained.” In Readings in Zoosemiotics, edited by Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli and Aleksei Turovski. 87–98. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011. Shim, Jaeeun, and Ronald C Arkin. “Robot Deception and Squirrel Behavior: A Case Study in Bio-Inspired Robotics.” (2014). Smith, W. John. “Animal Communication and the Study of Cognition.” In Readings in Zoosemiotics, edited by Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli and Aleksei Turovski. 279–302. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011. ———. “An ‘Informational’ Perspective on Manipulation.” In Deception: Perspectives on Human and Nonhuman Deceit, edited by Robert W. Mitchell and Nicholas S. Thompson. 71–86. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986.

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PART II

The Senses We Think We Know

CHAPTER 5

The Audio-Visual Norm

People who want to understand how animals communicate must abandon the layman’s traditional notion of the ‘five senses.’ Many more than five are already known to science, and many others undoubtedly remain to be discovered.1 —Thomas Sebeok

On Being Seen and Heard My father often told me, growing up, that children should be seen but not heard. He seemed to be half-joking about three quarters of the time (which isn’t half bad), but as a product of a dirt poor immigrant farm family, he grew up in an era when children, like livestock, were bred for a purpose—mainly as a tool for farm labor. Some of the utilitarian outlook this practice inevitably breeds ultimately bled into his own parenting techniques (and likely will rear its head when I am a parent, to my and my children’s horror). While the similarities between my ancestors and the Zen Buddhists are few, they might coincidentally both delight in the observation that rhetoric among humans is a child-like affair, in that it is most often seen but not heard. We instinctively grasp an audio bias in our own communication because of the great importance we have traditionally placed upon language use as a marker of our own humanity. The spoken is personal, and interpersonal, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. C. Parrish, The Sensory Modes of Animal Rhetorics, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76712-9_5

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and the piped-in, corporation-packaged music of everyday life is almost impossible to escape. Visual rhetorics are indeed slightly more common than oral/aural registers, but together they represent the vast majority of activity humans commonly recognize as rhetorical. We have a strong audio-visual bias that at once allows us to concentrate our attention on important sources of information, and prevents us from recognizing a vast wealth of information that others send (and we often receive, without consciously understanding—more on that in the next few chapters). While my father had other working class dad-isms beyond the idea that we should be seen but not heard—my favorite being “Shut your mouth when you’re talking to me!”—there was always a sensory message behind his imperative statements; I should not see, taste, touch things, or I should not make so much noise. More fine-grained advice sometimes came during specific situations—often when I was misbehaving. However, the monolith of the five senses prevailed in my early communicative models, my parents. In later childhood, communication becomes less about what one should or should not do, and more about the exchange of ideas, needs, and desires. These sorts of conversations open us up to other sensory information: pressure, balance, warmth, hunger, and the like. Often, like the standard Five Senses, our other senses join forces to create a sensory milieu. Imagine eating your oatmeal and scrambled eggs in a bustling fish market in Honolulu, as opposed to a hammock near a quiet beach a few miles away with a gentle breeze rolling in. No doubt these breakfasts would “taste” different, but not primarily because of your sense of taste. How animals, including humans, sense the world is more complex than a simple pentafurcation of incoming data. We can speak usefully in many cases of a single sense, but rarely are they acting alone, and almost never are we only using five of them. “People who want to understand how animals communicate must abandon the layman’s traditional notion of the ‘five senses,’” writes one notable zoosemiotician.2 Human views of rhetoric are contained entirely within their own perceptive abilities, which are extremely limited, and are subject to failure. But within this alreadylimited point of view, humans further privilege two senses over all others when we think about communication and persuasion. Humans are not alone, of course, in having more than five senses, and there are many that exist in the plant and animal worlds that we cannot claim to have. Bees, for instance, have a sense of time, which is supported by their ability to see polarized light. Humans are less precise in

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their ability to track time change without tools, because our ability to see is limited to our own visual spectrum. For humans, the sky is generally blue, and only fades or intensifies very gradually between the horizon and zenith. For bees, the blue sky is patterned, allowing them to know the sun’s position without needing to see it. The sun’s position in the sky thus allows them to calculate the hours in the day in a much more accurate manner.3 Despite seeming deficient compared to bees and other creatures, with regard to our sight and hearing, Thomas Sebeok argues that there is good reason for human audio/visual bias. These senses are powerful because, while they are processed in different domains within the human mind, they are both necessary prefigurements of what we call human language.4 And while he did not note the difference in the discussion I’ve cited, I believe it would be fairer to his work to say that the above statement implies cause and effect backwards: humans don’t have an audio/visual bias because of language, but rather our language(s) take the forms they do, which are mostly verbal and pictorial, because of the way we privilege vision, and to a slightly lesser degree, hearing. This corresponds better to his argument (and the argument of this book) when he earlier in the same essay notes that “in all living systems that I know of the characteristics of the signs employed are inseparably joined to the kind of information they carry.”5 So, what happens when humans do not have full audio or visual capabilities? Worse yet, other senses that the species is missing entirely? I would argue that any animal’s ability to persuade is embodied and limited foremost by its physical attributes. The category of embodied languages (which is terribly misleading as all languages are unintelligible without bodily mediation), representing systems such as American Sign Language, is often a category restricted to primary sense substitutions, such as gestures for the deaf or braille cells of raised dots for the blind. When disability goes beyond our audio/visual biases is when humans have historically had the most difficulty coping. Much of this problem is natural because of our heavy reliance on those two senses; one can imagine navigating the modern world without a sense of taste, which would create very few life-threatening situations. However, navigating a world without eyesight would be much more dangerous, especially in places where accounting for differences in ability is not considered a priority.

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Notable examples of communication efforts beyond the audio/visual arise when people are held up for overcoming what is considered crippling disability, such as in the case of Helen Keller. Culturally, humans in the West have rarely, and often incompetently, addressed the needs of those whose sensoria differ from what is considered normal—what biologists have historically called a normally developed human being. This term is not meant to be pejorative, but signifies the different areas of focus in species-level studies in the sciences versus individual-level analysis in the humanities. Nevertheless, I would reiterate here that the point of discussing disability in this book is not to reinforce hierarchy, or even to replace one hierarchy with another—throughout the work my statements that humans aren’t as sophisticated as they think they are, when it comes to persuasion, is meant to fight against existing oppression, not to encourage greater oppression of people whose “not sophisticated” rhetoric is then somehow better than those with disabilities, making them in any way “less than.” The intent should be clear, but it seems important to make certain no wildly ungenerous readings (or even willful misinterpretations) crop up and distract from the good work of alleviating animal cruelty. This can be done without setting up hierarchies that place people with disabilities on a lower footing than others. It has been argued that “like disability” in general, “language is material and embodied, as well as culturally made.”6 If we are to work with a naturalistic definition of rhetoric—that rhetoric is “the intentional communicative act of an animal whose purpose is to inform, or to manipulate the behavior of, one or more members of a real or imagined category of hearers called ‘audience’”—then we must think of language as not merely an ability to communicate, but a path to manipulation and individual identity.7 Psychologist and animal communication expert Michael Owren similarly repositioned our view of communication not solely as a form of information encoding and distribution, but as a means of influencing others.8 Rarely is information shared without purpose, which is perhaps the primary nexus that brings together the work of modern ethologists and rhetoricians—what Kenneth Burke might call “motive” and Krebs and Dawkins would call “manipulation.”9,10 If one’s abilities lie outside the human audio/visual bias, then one is more susceptible to manipulation by being ignored or unsuccessfully having their desires mediated, and on the reverse side one is also less able to assert oneself in these sensory realms humans give the most weight to.

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What is tragic, then, for nonstandard communicators of our species is that humans are so very ignorant of our species’s universal weaknesses of perception compared to a good portion of what is possible within the animal kingdom. Even in our primary sensoria, we cannot claim to be better than other species. In the creation and reception of sound signals, to use one example, we differ from a great many animals, and normally it is human ability which is deficient. For instance, the unmodified voice of a human can travel distances of several hundred meters over open ground. By contrast, the blue whale can communicate with other individuals over distances of thousands of kilometers.11 Even on land, working under the same constraints of sound traveling through air instead of water, our voices are weak compared to elephants, lions, and many other creatures. Because we often focus on the audio and visual to the exclusion of everything else, we are ironically blind and deaf to what Thomas Rickert calls the ambient rhetorics going on around us at all times.12 The natural world does not operate with an audio/visual bias, and those species that have additional strong senses to work with will often have an advantage in their particular niche that generalists like humans will rarely have. As communication studies scholar Emily Plec argues, we need to “expand our understanding” of what she calls “internatural communication by rethinking our anthropocentric grip on the symbolic and becoming students of corporeal rhetorics of scent, sound, sight, touch, proximity, position, and so much more.”13 It is the “so much more” of Plec’s argument that will make up the third section of this book, but there is also so much more left to say about the audio/visual bias that this discussion indeed requires a chapter of its own. In the study of persuasion, Lisa Phillips has also weighed in on our distinct audio/visual bias in rhetorical scholarship. She suggests that if we “shift our focus to consider how our senses are entwined, then we need to consider the distribution of sensory attention.”14 In her opinion, there are major gaps in the rhetorical theory where smell, touch, and taste are concerned. This oversight causes us to be blind to the ways our other senses affect our “rhetorical understanding of communication, people, and material embodiment.”15 How animals, including humans, see and hear is sometimes of primary importance—like it is for us—but sometimes other senses take precedent. Even the most familiar species, like dogs and cats, for instance, have senses that meet or surpass the importance of sight and hearing. It is likely that dogs actually “see” better with their noses than their eyes. That is, when their mind maps the external

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world based on sensory input, the sense of smell could contribute more than their other senses. Imagining this in theory is easy enough, but for an able human to consider how much more powerful a nose would need to be to supplant one’s eyesight is too alien for us to fathom. When these biases become liabilities is when other species are able to exploit them. It is now widely held that many animals are able to reshape sign relations of other beings to suit their own needs.16 This activity is innately rhetorical and embodied, and is but one of many reasons the later explorations of sensory abilities in this book is necessary to the broadminded rhetorician. I touched on mimicry and parasitism in the third chapter of this book, and elsewhere, but one pointed example should help illuminate how signs are altered by some species in order to “put one over” on another species.17 Researchers have found that mice infected by the parasitic alveloate, Toxoplasma gondii (which is a protist, not an animal itself) become attracted to the smell of cat urine, which will often cause tragic results for the mice who are thus lured into areas frequented by one or more cats.18 However, for the parasite it is necessary for cats to ingest the infected mice, as this allows the parasites to complete their life cycle. The sign relation of urine to dirtiness, or an area to avoid, in this situation is altered to make urine scent an attractant, thus reversing the relationship. In a species that places great importance on its sense of smell to secure food and shelter, Toxoplasma gondii represents a genuine threat to rodent safety. It also, I would argue, represents an embodied form of rhetorical manipulation.

Animal Signal Categories If we want to explore the impact of asymmetrical preference in sensation, it is important to understand how sensory phenomena are categorized by researchers who study animal communication. One such researcher, Heini Hediger, classifies animal signals by their four most common types: acoustic, optic, olfactory, and internal. A brief overview of her division follows, which will help organize some examples of animal audio/visual rhetorics that I would like to provide as we go.19 These will suggest further context for readers who are perhaps unfamiliar with some of the varied forms of signaling that may not be lingered over in any depth in this particular chapter. Acoustic phenomena can be vocal, nasal, dermal, sounds produced by using objects, or by idiosyncratic means in rare cases. Vocal sounds

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are those produced through the larynx or syrinx: dogs barking, humans crying, cats purring are all good examples of what Hediger considers vocal. Walter Ong was quick to treat these sort of phenomena as obviously rhetorical, comparing the “oral bravado” of humans, seeking to bluff challengers in order to avoid a potentially costly fight, with the defensive songs of birds warding away potential incursions into their territory.20 Likewise, George Kennedy dramatizes the vocal signals of red deer stags during rut in order to emphasize the role vocal cues can play in reducing the costs of signaling activities (because the alternative could be to engage in dangerous physical conflict).21 In terms of acoustic signals, potentially surprising sophistication is found in sub/species like the domesticated chicken (Gallus gallus domesticus ). These birds are wonderful examples of complex vocal signalers, leading some researchers to conclude that they possess “communication skills on par with those of some primates.”22 Chickens use sophisticated signals in order to convey their intentions to others, signals that are tailored to (or withheld from) particular audiences, including such calls as “clucking,” which is a usual response to ground predators (which is why approaching humans hear this one so often); “eee,” which is a highpitched noise warning of the presence of an air predator; and the “dick dock” sound, made in the very specific situation when a male has found food in the presence of a female he would like to impress.23 So far, researchers have deciphered 24 of the chickens’ distinct sounds, which when added to the birds’ physical movements or dispositions combine to form contextualized meanings—the calls “appear to create a mental picture” of the objects that are important to their Umwelt, conveying information that is important to chickens, while perhaps sometimes confounding to human beings.24 Other types of acoustic phenomena include nasal (such as the whistling of ibex, blue sheep, or marmots), dermal (as witnessed in the rattling of porcupines’ quills, the beak clapping of toucans, or the rattle of certain snakes), those produced with objects (like a beaver tail slapping on water, rabbit thumping its hind legs on ground, or the spring drumming of male grouse on hollow logs). Other types of sounds that fall outside obvious categories of Heniger’s taxonomy include the noises some fish make by expelling air through changes in pressure, or an ostrich inflating its esophagus to produce a lion-like roar. In the realm of optical signals, Hediger divides signs into three main categories: facial, gestural, and chromatic. Facial signals should be easy

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for a human to understand. Our brains have evolved to recognize facial structures so strongly that we imagine we see faces in the grain of wood in furniture, or the face of the virgin Mary in our tortillas. For purposes of judging beauty there are some things left to individual taste, but there are also human beauty universals, such as right-left symmetry in facial formations. Other species, Hediger notes, place importance in facial signals (both voluntary and structural) beyond what humans value. One important aspect is ear position in cats and elephants. Using the example of bobcats (Lynx rufus ), it is widely believed that the distinctive white spots or tufts on the ears of various subspecies of bobcat actually evolved to signal in a similar manner to the sclera, or whites, of human eyes. These white areas add contrast to the observable directional dispositions of the parts in question, in order to make it more obvious what the signaler is attending to. To bears and rhinoceroses jaw and lip position seems to hold some importance. Whiskers in cats or sea lions help separate individuals, just as crest feathers in cockatoos. Eye opening or eye position matters to cats, apes, parrots. As does the tongue in snakes, or noses in elephants, tapir, and seals. Finally, yawning sends distinct signals in animals such as hippopotami and monkeys. Gestural signals come in two main forms: static and dynamic. Static signals include things like one’s general bearing, stamping, or tail movements. Dynamic signal reception is concerned with things like the speed and direction of motion, or the kind of step, as in a goose-stepping deer. Chromatic signals are the final type of optical signs Hediger outlines. These can take a wide variety of forms, such as aposematic (warning) coloration, muted colors in female birds versus the brightness of their male counterparts, or camouflage coloration to blend into specific environments.

Audioception and Orality in the Rhetorical Tradition Hearing the spoken word is the one ability that garners almost as much attention as reading and producing the written. In thinking about the importance of orality in modern rhetorical theory, there are two examples that stick out for their pertinence to the subject of this chapter. The first is Walter Ong’s discussion of how a strictly oral society would differ from a literate one. What Ong helps us discover is that the ability to translate language into visual codes does several important things, but two are

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worth thinking about in terms of this book’s argument. The first is that writing saturates our worldview so thoroughly that we take for granted a world with writing. Imagine, if you can, a world in which nobody could “look up” anything.25 While there was no Wikipedia around yet in 1982 when Ong published his masterful Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, he was already able to see how reference materials in print are able to significantly reshape human knowledge and behavior. With the advent of the Internet, Ong has been shown even more correct in his first point—even for digital non-natives like me. Growing up without an Internet before I reached adulthood allows me to reflect on what life was like a mere two decades ago, before the web was fast, inexpensive, and ubiquitous. However, I now cannot imagine living life without it. Or writing a book without word processing software, bibliography software, online library access, or the like. That we are consumed with literacy is a fact, and this makes Ong’s second point even more disturbing: literacy disconnects us from the material world by allowing us to separate thoughts from people, ideas from environments. He noted that oral societies, when viewed by people raised in literate ones, seemed agonistic in their communication methods. This is because ideas were worked out by people standing in front of a gathering, not between one person and a book in a quiet library. Moreover, literacy allows for more, and more complex, abstraction. Oral communication does not allow for the deep structure the written word accommodates, and thus must be repetitive and less complex. Oral innovations and assertions exist in a natural world of people, places, and things, not swimming in a metaphorical ocean of ideas. That visual signs can disconnect us from ourselves, can make us lose ourselves in abstraction, separates it from other modes of persuasion. If such a familiar medium can do this, one can imagine the importance of understanding little-studied perceptual media, as we will began to explore in Part III. The other important idea I would like to note in this brief discussion of audioception and persuasion comes from Victor Vitanza’s fairly recent interpretation of George Kennedy’s famous assertion that rhetoric is an energy that exists prior to speech. Vitanza reads this “energy” as “the ‘stuff’ of the unconscious” that “precedes, as well as wants, a camera.”26 While Vitanza’s meanings here, as usual, are multiple, one important way to read this statement is one of nonlinearity in some persuasive efforts, or the dangers of thinking about perception and reaction as immediate cause and effect. To say that rhetoric needs a camera is to acknowledge

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the analog nature of symbol use. Rhetoric is generally not [OFF] or [ON] like a switch, but requires certain fundamental conditions to succeed (or to even be noticed). These conditions must be ongoing, at least for a time, in order for discourse or “co-munication” to be possible. The camera, although a metaphor in Vitanza’s usage—I think—is apt as an introduction to audioception in the rhetorical tradition for several reasons. Not least of which is the subordinate but indispensable role audio plays in the reception of moving pictures (not even mentioned in the category’s title, we could just as easily call “movies” something like “talkies,” as they did when sound was first introduced in film). Sound is clearly the second sense to most humans: always present, but treated mainly as an enhancement of the visual. But its importance is only completely clear when it is gone. If you can imagine the frightening shower scene in the movie Psycho without the screeching violins and cellos of the soundtrack, it does not seem as scary (although part of the art of this scene was that the shower curtain limited Janet Leigh’s vision, just as the noise of the shower masked all but the faintest, and therefore creepiest, sounds of intrusion). Like ballet without classical music, the horror film would suffer greatly from a lack of sound. While one would expect a total lack of sound to enhance a horror film by adding to the tension, it often does the opposite; silence is so unnerving to humans that it in fact draws us out of a story because it feels too unnatural even for speculative fiction. There is good reason for the unnatural feelings that disconnection of sight and sound produce, especially during interpersonal communication. The way we learn to interact with other people (and dogs and cats, if we are fortunate enough to have pets) at a very young age is through a long process of learning through joint reference. Gesture-speech, pointing and naming of objects, help small children develop a vocabulary and orient them to a culture through observational learning. As early as 18 months of age, children begin to realize that other people attend to objects differently than they. If a parent and child focus on two different objects and the adult utters a novel word, the child applies this as a label to what the adult is attending to.27 Imitation of sight and sound is in many ways the basis of our linguistic ability.28 This talent for imitating in order to learn is innate in humans, among many other species.29 The ability to follow pointing occurs around 9 months of age, while the ability to point on one’s own starts around 14 months.30 Thus, joint attention develops very quickly once the prerequisite physical developments have occurred. This initial pointing provokes

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responses from adult humans, such as pointing and naming in response, that facilitate language acquisition.31 The infants intend to manipulate the attention of others, and between 18–24 months of age joint attention becomes sufficiently complex to begin paying off in the form of early language use.32 Kenneth Burke suggests that gestural forces decrease by degrees as we use more abstract ideas, but dealing with the abstract is something children do only gradually in developing communication skills.33 Children spend their earliest years in a primarily oral cultural state, reinforcing Walter Ong’s observations above. This early language, like fully developed adult versions, is verbal and aural, social and biological, physical and mental, and all of it is necessary to create a shared context of language in the developing mind. This shared context later acts as a building block for more complex, written codes to be learned. In addition to gesture and body language, sound also enables our second-most-common form of communication: spoken language. Linguistic traits in humans are highly heritable, including such abilities as the potential to develop and wield a large vocabulary.34 This makes them likely owe a great debt to sexual selection rather than random mutation and natural selection, as language is “much too elaborate for merely sharing information.”35 Language is indeed an important tool in our ability to manipulate social situations. But hearing is not limited to receiving linguistic information alone. When someone utters displeasure sotto voce, we nonetheless hear their breathy murmurs. A sigh indicates that one’s partner may be fed up and an argument is near. Many cultures have a tongue-clicking or shooing sound that parents use to express displeasure in their children (tut, tsk, or shee are a few examples).

Visual Signs in the Rhetorical Tradition It is an interesting paradox that, while the fields of rhetoric, writing studies, communication, and related disciplines are interested primarily in visual rhetoric in the form of written language, little exploration of early human visual signaling has thus far been accomplished. Those who wish to understand the origins of language—which would seem a likely precursor to understanding modern languages—must expand their reading lists into disparate fields like anthropology and archaeology, paleolinguistics, and the like. While it is not necessary to rehash the discussions here, people from well outside the field of rhetorical theory

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contribute very interesting ideas that highlight the necessity of studying the whole scope of human communication, rather than a narrow band of Western history beginning with the Greeks and ending up often in modern Europe and America. Paul Shepard suggests that “early humans may have marked places with words as the wolves marked them with urine.”36 If true, this presents another fine example of how our bodies constrain rhetorical practice. Sure, humans are fully capable of urinating on things, but it cannot serve the same purpose as wolf marking—we do not have a nose for it, to pervert an old maxim. Because humans cannot smell the nuances that urine communicates to wolves, we had to find another way of naming, or claiming ownership, or warding off enemies. So it may be the case that we invented some pictograms and began drawing on the things that were important to us, rather than lifting our legs from time to time, when we wanted to communicate important information. This, of course, supports the idea that visual cues are our primary mode of communication, and points to some differences a purely olfactory language might entail. While it may seem laughable to some human readers, we are very few evolutionary steps away from urinating on things to communicate with one another, rather than writing or speaking. Steven Mithen understands this human proximity to what modern readers might consider base or unseemly topics. Some of the earliest examples of visual rhetoric, such as cave art, include not only drawings of animals and the weapons our ancestors used to hunt them, but also terrain, vegetation, and even animal excretions.37 Mithen suggests that, because the most frequently seen animal depictions are of those species that would have either been rarely seen or seasonal, that cave art was quite likely a teaching tool and a storehouse of knowledge that speaks to the classical rhetorical canon of memoria. While visual characteristics took a place of pride among these (visual) representations, we also can note such elements as vocalizations, when animals were depicted frequently as bellowing or calling out. Since motifs of environment and behavior recur throughout much of the cave art we know of, it seems that Upper Paleolithic artists were taking cues from their material world in order to communicate to later generations the best method of tracking, for instance, a rhinoceros, which was uncommon but did exist on the Iberian peninsula tens of thousands of years ago. Because they were rarely seen, the knowledge was in danger of being forgotten in a primarily oral culture, and so a sort of protoliteracy was devised. One need not make

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much of a leap from this sort of knowledge retention through metaphorical representation of animals and environment through the medium of painting on cave walls to the earliest known examples of pictographic writing systems. That these depictions of animals were persistent and always available would have lent them educational value. They could demonstrate to children a sort of “learning how to learn” about their environment.38 These images also allowed the adult artists to stress the most important aspects of animal signs—many examples show exaggerated body parts where hunters will be interested in assessing the health or strength of an animal—in order to help children develop selective attention, or search behavior.39 For the adults of the community, these visual aids might also have served as reminders about what to look for when shifting from group harvesting techniques to individual stalking tactics. If the early history of human visual communication is often neglected in humanistic disciplines, it is in good company. Other important concerns for the visual rhetoric scholar have only recently come under close scrutiny. An example of this neglect is in body language—a primarily visual set of cues that are said to make up the majority of information humans gain from interpersonal communication. Facial expression in humans, like all primates, conveys a great deal of information. Even more interesting is that the use of facial expression develops differently for the sexes. Researchers have found that women, on average, are more expressive and send more social and communicative signals with their bodies. This makes them better at decoding such signals, but far worse at hiding their intentions from a social or conversational partner.40 While acknowledging population-level gender differences might be uncomfortable to some, it becomes easier if we remember that these sorts of findings are not always meaningful in individual cases, but do show interesting developmental information that could yield insight into gendered communication practices. The vast majority of body language expressions are unisex within most cultures, so the differences might signal important social and developmental differences in the ways men and women communicate with their bodies. Most applications of visual rhetorical theory take as their subjects modern advertising in print and film media. One specific example of such visual rhetorical analysis examined how the group, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), constructs advertisements that are meant to “break down the visual differences” between human and nonhuman

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animals.41 PETA’s primary goal in these ads is to change the way people view animals (as an Other), by making humans identify more strongly with their furry and feathery cousins on the tree of life. The visual, in the form of images and words, worked both separately and in conjunction to presenting shared emotions with the animals, in order to erode “the barrier between subjectivities” by presenting images suggesting humans being held in cages much like the factory-farmed livestock PETA is trying to protect.42 By viewing the animals and their cruel worlds, which is something that the grocery store era of food purchasing hides from the vast majority of consumers, we are forced to think. And thinking about the material conditions of animals places them at the front of our minds because of a visual intervention designed to fill in the elisions of modern marketing. More generally, visual rhetoricians Kostelnick and Hassett have attempted to build a structured framework for studying visual languages, expanding their subject matter to include formal text, line graphs, illustrations, and other forms of technical writing. Understanding that there are a wide range of conventions and practices in constructing visual rhetoric, Kostelnick and Hassett wanted to organize our understanding of visual signs as a whole, so we could apply that knowledge in specific case studies.43 Thus, they set out to explain fundamental ideas, such as: how all design languages embody conventional elements, how rigid these conventions are and when they can be deviated from, as well as the factors shaping conventions, such as discourse community and practical constraints.44 Classical theorists were also concerned with visual input, but the applications were not as self-conscious as modern visual rhetoric, which often uses the “seen” in isolation—a decontextualization that allows for reductive practice, useful as a microscope that helps us focus on the very specific workings of the visual, provided we remember that reduction is most useful when later reincorporated into the larger milieu. The closest we come in the classical world to an applied theory of visual rhetoric is, of course, Aristotle. Poulakos and Crick argue rightly that Aristotle glorifies the senses. They claim he emphasizes “especially sight” as the most reliable tool for the empirical study of rhetoric.45 Yet Aristotle was also addressing “a vexing exigency of his time – the inability of some people to appreciate the empirical study of animal life.”46 The irony of this observation will not be lost on modern humanists, who have survived a second half of the

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twentieth century that saw a kneejerk reaction away from the empirical, toward an isolated idea of culture as something above or separate from the material world. Unlike Aristotle, both the Platonists and Sophists shunned the empirical study of nature, bound as it was to sensory input and a belief in an outside world that exists whether or not one participates in its construction. Aristotle (and I feel for him in this regard) was thought to be squandering his time on trivial, unseemly details when observing animal behavior, Poulakos and Crick argue.47 Better to have achieved the truth through dialectic, as his master Plato suggested, and Socrates before him. To Aristotle the sensory—especially the act of visual observation—was an essential step toward the scientific (as we would call it today). “Whereas logic classifies, arranges, and clarifies for us the already known, rhetoric can reveal to us the beauty of what we have yet to perceive.”48 Thus, science is built up from the observed facts (inductive reasoning), and a rhetorical theory that places the senses at its heart allows for the accumulation of evidence, not merely its dissemination. Aristotle’s visual rhetoric was to his mind epistemic. Visual, and to a lesser degree audio, bias persisted throughout the history of rhetorical theory, cropping up consistently in every major time period. In its more productive side, we see Aristotelian visual preoccupation ignite several sparks that aided the construction of several scientific disciplines. For instance, Jeannie Fahnnestock argues that classical rhetorical concepts help explain why there was a renewed interest in botany in Europe of the sixteenth century. There was in fact a reciprocal relationship between the language arts of early humanists and the development of botanical science.49 Of great importance to early botanists was the practice of visualization, which served as a means of definition.50 A plant must be “placed under the eyes,” according to Melanchthon, through rhetorical skill, when physical plants and drawings are unavailable.51 In a way, this practice flips the discussion of this chapter on its head by examining words to form images of plants (or animals) and not vice versa.

Other Directions Studying research into the senses over time, using articles in the Quarterly Journal of Speech as a case study, Debra Hawhee argues for a more holistic treatment of the sensorium. Following Joseph Dumit, she suggests that considering a being’s sensory package as a whole would

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contribute a new way to view the “connective, participatory dimensions of sensing,” and how that could affect communication.52 The rise of epistemic rhetoric in the 1960s temporarily divorced the field from sensation, writes Hawhee. Rhetoric was a way of knowing in itself, disconnected from environmental input.53 The new millennium has seen a shift back toward sensation, and embodiment generally, as well as a rise in environmental or ecologically-informed approaches to explaining the interactions of beings and environments. This shift toward materiality, which I can see represented by the work of so many of the young professors and advanced graduate students in my field, will lead many back to the study of Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotic theory—especially his tripartite division of the properties of signs. While the names are only vaguely useful, Peirce called sign properties firstness, secondness, and thirdness, referring to the order of impression from first contact to a deeper metaunderstanding of sign systems.54 Firstness is simply a sign’s feeling or one’s sense of a sign. Secondness is the level of physical fact, of a sign’s material reality. Thirdness is the level of general rules that governs firstness and secondness in any given object. One can think of firstness through thirdness as representing initial obvious qualities, the brute facts, and finally the laws governing a given sign. What makes Peirce important, among many other reasons, is that he moved the study of signs beyond abstraction in order to ground them in reality. Peirce’s contemporary Ferdinand de Saussure is often better known to humanists, but his early work is very difficult to take seriously because it is infused with idealistic thinking that refuses to acknowledge any connection between communication and a material world. As I argued in the previous chapters, to Saussure the sign is completely arbitrary and ungrounded. What we call a bicycle could be called a bus could be called a petunia and none of it would matter. While this might work for naming, many modern linguists and semioticians have argued forcefully for a more grounded theory of language which is unavoidable when seeing communication in practice. Even when we use language figuratively, it is often grounded in material reality. Lakoff and Johnson’s influential treatise, Metaphors we Live By, lays out a methodical and straightforward argument that shows how even figures of speech are almost always either grounded by physical metaphors (such as conduit metaphors or orientational metaphors), or they are built from the combination of several physically grounded ideas—while we can delve further

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and further into abstraction, we are often using the building blocks of physical reference to do so.55 There is no great mystery why humans, even the highly educated among us, vacillate between the material and the spiritual. The institutions we have established for thousands of years demand faith in something beyond the material world, while the power of reason dictates that, if we are honest with ourselves, we are little more than a complex construction of atoms, arranged in a way that makes us altogether too aware of our mortality. That this vacillation between the physical and the metaphysical seeps into our work is no surprise, either. Like Tennyson bemoaning the sudden rise of evolutionary thought, it is startling to note that: The hills are shadows, and they flow From form to form, and nothing stands; They melt like mist, the solid lands, Like clouds they shape themselves and go.56

It is far more comforting to think that we are more than a single form that will be reshaped over the course of millennia into something new and inhuman, but the alternative may be more dreadful than merely evolving into one or more new forms. If we do not pay more heed to the material world as humanists, as the keepers of morality and culture, humans may destroy their opportunity to continue to be shaped and reshaped like the clouds; we may just evaporate. The trend back toward acknowledging the material basis of communication and persuasion is an important one, especially in our current political climate, where natural environments are increasingly being opened up to corporate plunder, and the warning signs of massive climate change are being ignored by those in power. Before we can cure these ills, we need to think beyond the solipsism of individual abstraction and deal with the brute facts. While Locke did not have the opportunity to understand that the perception of other animals was not impaired, but enhanced by superior sensory input, when he wrote his Essay on Human Understanding, he nonetheless allowed that perception exists to varying degrees in “all sorts of animals.”57 If he had benefited from ethology and the other branches of what was then known as natural history, he perhaps would have extended his argument to include different forms of intelligence, expressed in managing different Umwelten, or environments.

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My own approach to studying animals in environments will continue by first visiting some of our less discussed, but still well-known senses, such as taste and touch, before exploring in the next section some sensory modes of communication that are so alien to human experience that they might be called extrasensory, or even superhuman, sensations. What these brief surveys will suggest by example, rather than exhaustive rehearsal of the literature of several discourse communities, is that effective communication depends on many factors—environmental, cultural, perceptual, and more. To attempt to rank order species as best, or even “most sapient,” is both misguided and unfruitful. It serves no cause other than to justify the subservience of others, which is not a proper application of knowledge for a moral being.

Notes 1. Thomas Sebeok, “Talking with Animals: Zoosemiotics Explained,” in Readings in Zoosemiotics, ed. Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli, and Aleksei Turovski (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011), 92. 2. Thomas Sebeok, “‘Talking’ with Animals: Zoosemiotics Explained,” in Readings in Zoosemiotics, ed. Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli, and Aleksei Turovski (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011), 92. 3. Karl von Frisch, “Decoding the Language of the Bee,” in Readings in Zoosemiotics, ed. Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli, and Aleksei Turovski (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011), 151–52. 4. Sebeok, “Prefigurements of Art,” 230. 5. Ibid., 198. 6. Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson, “Rethinking Rhetoric Through Mental Disabilities,” Rhetoric Review 22, no. 2 (2003): 158. 7. Alex C. Parrish, Adaptive Rhetoric: Evolution, Culture, and the Art of Persuasion, Routledge Studies in Rhetoric and Communication (New York: Routledge, 2013). 4, discussed further at 78ff. 8. Michael Owren, Drew Rendall, and Michael Ryan, “Redefining Animal Signaling: Influence Versus Information in Communication,” Biology & Philosophy 25, no. 5 (2010): 756. 9. Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969). 10. J. R. Krebs and R. Dawkins, “Animal Signals: Mind-Reading and Manipulation,” in Behavioural Ecology: An Evolutionary Approach, ed. J. R. Krebs (Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates, 1984). 11. Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 75.

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12. Thomas J. Rickert, Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013). 13. Emily Plec, Perspectives on Human-Animal Communication: internatural Communication (New York: Routledge, 2013). 7. 14. Lisa L. Phillips, “Smellscapes, Social Justice, and Olfactory Perception,” in Rhetoric Across Borders, ed. Anne Teresa Demo (Anderson, SC: Parlor Press, 2015), 39. 15. Ibid., 37. 16. Alexei Sharov, Timo Maran, and Morten Tønnessen, “Organisms Reshape Sign Relations” (Springer, 2015). 17. Parrish, Adaptive: See especially Chapter V. 18. Sharov, Maran, and Tønnessen, “Organisms Reshape Sign Relations,” 2– 3. 19. Heini Hediger, “The Animal’s Expression,” in Readings in Zoosemiotics, ed. Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli, and Aleksei Turovski, Semiotics, Communication and Cognition (Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011), 127–30. 20. Walter J. Ong, Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981). 107. 21. George A. Kennedy, Comparative Rhetoric: An Historical and CrossCultural Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). 13–14. 22. Carolynn K. lynn L. Smith, and Sarah L. Zielinski, “Brainy Bird,” Scientific American 310, no. 2 (2014): 60. 23. Ibid., 60–62. 24. Ibid., 61. 25. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, New accents (London and New York: Methuen, 1982). 37ff. for full discussion in this section. 26. Victor J. Vitanza, “Imagine A Re-Thinking of Historiographies (of Rhetorics) as Atemporal, Anachronistic Post-Cinematic Practices,” RSQ: Rhetoric Society Quarterly 44, no. 3 (2014): 281–82. 27. Dare A. Baldwin, “Infants’ Contribution to the Achievement of Joint Reference,” 1991, 875. 28. Valerie Corkum and Chris Moore, “Development of Joint Visual Attention in Infants,” in Joint Attention: Its Origins and Role in Development, ed. Chris Moore and Philip J. Dunham (New York: Psychology Press, 1995), 61. 29. A. N. Meltzoff and A. Gopnik, “The Role of Imitation in Understanding Persons and Developing a Theory of Mind,” in Understanding Other Minds: Perspectives from Autism ed. S. Baron-Cohen, H. Tager-Flusberg, and D. J. Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 335ff. 30. Corkum and Moore, “Development of Joint Visual Attention in Infants,” 63.

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31. Stéphen Desrochers, Paul Morissette, and Marcelle Ricard, “Two Perspectives on Pointing in Infancy “ in Joint Attention: Its Origins and Role in Development, ed. Chris Moore and Philip J. Dunham (New York: Psychology Press, 1995), 86. 32. Michael Tomasello, “Joint Attention as Social Cognition,” in Joint Attention: Its Origins and Role in Development, ed. Chris Moore and Philip J. Dunham (New York: Psychology Press, 1995), 105, 15. 33. Debra Hawhee, “Language as Sensuous Action: Sir Richard Paget, Kenneth Burke, and Gesture-Speech Theory,” The Quarterly Journal of Speech 92, no. 4 (2006): 334. 34. Benjamin P. Lange et al., “Words Won’t Fail: Experimental Evidence on the Role of Verbal Proficiency in Mate Choice,” Journal of Language and Social Psychology (2013): 3. 35. Ibid. 36. Paul Shepard, The Others: How the Animals Made Us Human (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1996). 37. Steven J. Mithen, Thoughtful Foragers: A Study of Prehistoric Decision Making, New studies in archaeology (New York: Cambridge University Press., 1990), 228–38. 38. Ibid., 252. 39. Ibid., 246. 40. Elisabeth Oberzaucher, “Sex and Gender Differences in Communication Strategies,” in Evolution’s Empress, Darwinian Perspectives on the Nature of Women, ed. M. Fisher, Garcia, J. & Sokol Chang, R. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 357. 41. Wendy Atkins-Sayre, “Articulating Identity: People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and the Animal/Human Divide,” Western Journal of Communication 74, no. 3 (2010): 311. 42. Ibid., 316–19. 43. Charles Kostelnick and Michael Hassett, Shaping information: the rhetoric of visual conventions (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003). 44. Ibid., 8–9. 45. Poulakos John and Crick Nathan, “There is Beauty Here, Too: Aristotle’s Rhetoric for Science,” 2012, 298. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid., 300. 48. Ibid., 305. 49. Jeanne Fahnestock, ““Forming Plants in Words and Images.” “ Poroi 10, no. 2 (2014): 2. 50. Ibid., 19. 51. Loc. cit.

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52. Debra Hawhee, “Rhetoric’s Sensorium,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015): 5. 53. Ibid., 10. 54. While Peirce’s work is distributed in several forms, and can become bogged down in terminology, there are some gentle introductions to his work that will satisfy the educated lay reader. One example that makes semiotic theory’s role in art, design, and visual rhetoric a bit more fun, and a bit less jargony, is David Crow, Visible Signs (Second Edition): An Introduction to Semiotics in the Visual Arts (Bloomsbury Academic, 2011). Discussion of the properties of signs begins in Chapter 2. 55. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors we live by (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). Conduit metaphors: pg 10. Orientational: pg 14. 56. In Memoriam A. H. H. CXXIII.123.5–8. 57. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding: In Four Books (Beecroft, 1775). II.12.

References Atkins-Sayre, Wendy. “Articulating Identity: People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and the Animal/Human Divide.” Western Journal of Communication 74, no. 3 (2010): 309–28. Baldwin, Dare A. “Infants’ Contribution to the Achievement of Joint Reference.” 1991, 875. Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. Corkum, Valerie, and Chris Moore. “Development of Joint Visual Attention in Infants.” In Joint Attention: Its Origins and Role in Development, edited by Chris Moore and Philip J. Dunham. 61–83. New York: Psychology Press, 1995. Crow, David. Visible Signs (Second Edition): An Introduction to Semiotics in the Visual Arts. Bloomsbury Academic, 2011. Desrochers, Stéphen, Paul Morissette, and Marcelle Ricard. “Two Perspectives on Pointing in Infancy.” In Joint Attention: Its Origins and Role in Development, edited by Chris Moore and Philip J. Dunham. 85–102. New York: Psychology Press, 1995. Fahnestock, Jeanne. “Forming Plants in Words and Images.” Poroi 10, no. 2 (2014): Article 11. Frisch, Karl von. “Decoding the Language of the Bee.” In Readings in Zoosemiotics, edited by Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli, and Aleksei Turovski. 141–55. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011.

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Hawhee, Debra. “Language as Sensuous Action: Sir Richard Paget, Kenneth Burke, and Gesture-Speech Theory.” The Quarterly Journal of Speech 92, no. 4 (2006): 331–54. ———. “Rhetoric’s Sensorium.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (January 2, 2015, 2015): 2–17. Hediger, Heini. “The Animal’s Expression.” In Readings in Zoosemiotics, edited by Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli, and Aleksei Turovski. Semiotics, Communication and Cognition, 123–40. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011. John, Poulakos, and Crick Nathan. “There Is Beauty Here, Too: Aristotle’s Rhetoric for Science.” 2012, 295. Kennedy, George A. Comparative Rhetoric: An Historical and Cross-Cultural Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Kostelnick, Charles, and Michael Hassett. Shaping Information: The Rhetoric of Visual Conventions. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003. Krebs, J. R., and R. Dawkins. “Animal Signals: Mind-Reading and Manipulation.” In Behavioural Ecology: An Evolutionary Approach, edited by J. R. Krebs. 380–402. Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates, 1984. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Lange, Benjamin P., Eugen Zaretsky, Sascha Schwarz, and Harald A. Euler. “Words Won’t Fail: Experimental Evidence on the Role of Verbal Proficiency in Mate Choice.” Journal of Language and Social Psychology (December 19, 2013, 2013). Lewiecki-Wilson, Cynthia. “Rethinking Rhetoric Through Mental Disabilities.” [In English]. Rhetoric Review 22, no. 2 (2003): 156–67. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding: In Four Books. Beecroft, 1775. Meltzoff, A. N., and A. Gopnik. “The Role of Imitation in Understanding Persons and Developing a Theory of Mind.”. In Understanding Other Minds: Perspectives from Autism edited by S. Baron-Cohen, H. Tager-Flusberg, and D. J. Cohen. 335–66. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Mithen, Steven J. Thoughtful Foragers: A Study of Prehistoric Decision Making. New Studies in Archaeology. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Oberzaucher, Elisabeth. “Sex and Gender Differences in Communication Strategies.” In Evolution’s Empress, Darwinian Perspectives on the Nature of Women, edited by M. Fisher, J. Garcia, and R. Sokol Chang, 345–67. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Ong, Walter J. Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981. ———. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. New Accents. London and New York: Methuen, 1982.

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Owren, Michael, Drew Rendall, and Michael Ryan. “Redefining Animal Signaling: Influence Versus Information in Communication.” Biology & Philosophy 25, no. 5 (2010). Parrish, Alex C. Adaptive Rhetoric: Evolution, Culture, and the Art of Persuasion. Routledge Studies in Rhetoric and Communication. New York: Routledge, 2013. Phillips, Lisa L. “Smellscapes, Social Justice, and Olfactory Perception”. In Rhetoric Across Borders, edited by Anne Teresa Demo. Anderson, SC: Parlor Press, 2015. Plec, Emily. Perspectives on Human-Animal Communication: Internatural Communication. New York: Routledge, 2013. Rickert, Thomas J. Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013. Sebeok, Thomas. “Prefigurements of Art.” In Readings in Zoosemiotics, edited by Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli, and Aleksei Turovski. 195–244. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011. ———. “‘Talking’ with Animals: Zoosemiotics Explained.” In Readings in Zoosemiotics, edited by Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli, and Aleksei Turovski. 87–98. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011. ———. “Talking with Animals: Zoosemiotics Explained.” In Readings in Zoosemiotics, edited by Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli, and Aleksei Turovski. 87–98. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011. Sharov, Alexei, Timo Maran, and Morten Tønnessen. “Organisms Reshape Sign Relations.” Springer, 2015. Shepard, Paul. The Others: How the Animals Made Us Human. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1996. Smith, Carolynn K. lynn L., and Sarah L. Zielinski. “Brainy Bird.” Scientific American 310, no. 2 (2014): 60–65. Tomasello, Michael. “Joint Attention as Social Cognition.” In Joint Attention: Its Origins and Role in Development, edited by Chris Moore and Philip J. Dunham, 103–30. New York: Psychology Press, 1995. Vitanza, Victor J. “Imagine a Re-Thinking of Historiographies (of Rhetorics) as Atemporal, Anachronistic Post-Cinematic Practices.” RSQ: Rhetoric Society Quarterly 44, no. 3 (2014): 271–86. Whitehead, Hal, and Luke Rendell. The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.

CHAPTER 6

Tactile Persuasion (Haptics)

Touch yourself. Go ahead. No one’s looking. Now, tell me this: where did you touch yourself? Did you use your hand or some other body part to do the touching—or did you even use an object, like a pen or the stapler on your desk? How hard did you press, and for how long? Did you apply consistent pressure, or did it vary? If you used your hand was it cold, or wet, or icy from walking around outside before settling in to read, or were you warm and dry from being indoors for a while? Did you rub or scratch the area you touched, or did you touch yourself only briefly (or not at all, only imagining touching yourself) because the thought made you uncomfortable? Did your touch feel good to you, or were you worried someone might see you? Have you been warned by your religious or social traditions that only certain types of self-touch are allowed, while others are immoral or even sinful? This is an awfully long series of questions about something we take for granted—our ability to touch ourselves in any number of ways—and the list of questions could go on for pages. While touching oneself seems a queer topic for a serious book, what we realize if we think about it for very long (perhaps scratching our heads while we do so, as primates are wont to do) is that while we do not often acknowledge the importance

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. C. Parrish, The Sensory Modes of Animal Rhetorics, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76712-9_6

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of haptics in our lives, the application of touch on ourselves or others, it is a fundamental aspect of being among all animals. We cannot help but be touching things at all times. Because our sense organs are so large and well-distributed throughout our bodies, we generally take them for granted, but they are amazing if we only stop and think for a moment about the information we are currently being sent. The touch of clothing on skin, for instance, tells us a great many things. Unless you are reading naked—which is for odd and ancient cultural reasons frowned upon unless done privately in my country of origin— you are being sent a stream of information about the softness of clothing, tightness of fit, wetness or dryness, how well your current clothes prepare you for the temperature and humidity of the air, whether you are at work or leisure (I can only assume that there are other people in the world, like me, whose skin sends them the message that formal business attire is their mortal enemy). Our sense of touch is intimately tied to our sense of well-being, belonging, and self. To touch others is a necessity for the psychological health of humans and other animals, and to be denied that touch can propel humans to great acts of cruelty. Diane Ackerman, whose A Natural History of the Senses is an enthralling popular treatment of the commonly-discussed five senses of the human sensorium, relates a story of her visiting a hospital unit dedicated to prematurely born babies. In this particular hospital, “premies” receive three touch therapy sessions per diem, which basically amount to massages with a little stretching and joint movement thrown in. “Massaged babies,” writes Ackerman, “gain weight as much as 50 percent faster than unmassaged babies. They’re more active, alert, and responsive, more aware of their surroundings, better able to tolerate noise, and they orient themselves faster and are emotionally more in control.”1 Likewise, babies who are not handled enough in their formative years will not develop normally and may even stop growing altogether. Thus, hospitals have begun enlisting volunteers, especially from senior centers and youth organizations, to have people massage babies whose parents are required to work long hours, or otherwise cannot stay for extended periods in the hospital with their newborns. In other primates, as well, early touch is a basic requirement for continued health and well-being. Ackerman shares the results of a primate study at the University of Illinois, whose “researchers found that a lack of touch produced brain damage” in newborns.2 To go untouched literally damages the self, and to not touch others (politely and with permission

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in appropriate contexts, of course) is to deny them a necessary element of social contact. Primates are by nature gregarious; we naturally live in groups of around 30 individuals who are well known to us. We adapted to touch them and to be touched by them, and for humans, much of this connection is being lost, much to our detriment. While this is no doubt depressing, it’s nothing a good hug can’t fix, and just this once I suggest you should put my book down to go hug your children, or spouse, or kitties, or even just give yourself a neck massage—self-touch and touch across species lines are also beneficial in several physical and psychological ways. Research on touch is notoriously difficult, however. “Every other sense,” Ackerman complains, “has a key organ to study; for touch that organ is the skin, and it stretches over the whole body.”3 At the time she had published her book, she says that there were no research centers devoted solely to the sense of touch, despite the other four major senses all having at least one (and some have many, like vision). This seems odd considering the importance of touch. As a rhetorician, I learned almost nothing about the sense of touch in my formal training, but touch is the original form of communication. “Soon after we’re born, though we can’t see or speak, we instinctively begin touching.”4 We learn language through touch, pointing, and gesture-speech. Our language itself, of course, is “steeped in metaphors of touch. We call our emotions feelings, and we care most deeply when something ‘touches’ us.”5 Touch is our first method of relating to the world outside our own minds, and it remains firmly planted in the various ways we interact with our environment and the people in it. While we are obviously programmed to take pleasure in those sensory experiences that delight us, that which feels or smells or tastes good, we can also take perverse delight in new sensations, even when they hurt ourselves or others. Growing up on a ranch in Minnesota, we maintained electric fences around our pastures to (most of the time) keep the horses from escaping. As children are apt to do, we found other uses for the fences, which give a surprising but only mildly painful shock if touched while one is grounded. What came naturally for country boys and girls, who often leaped over the fences while using a hand to push the wires down while still in the air, was hilariously difficult for our friends raised in town. Invariably, when a city kid came over to play, we would show them how easy it was to jump and grab the fence while in the air, and then

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release your grip before you hit the ground, so you would not receive a shock. To this day, I have never seen a city kid release their grip in time when first shown the trick, meaning they all received painful shocks, to the delight of the kids who already had the timing down. Some clever city folk would figure it out after a few more demonstrations and unsuccessful attempts, but there were always a couple of kids who were that magical combination of stubborn and uncoordinated, who would get shocked over and over and nonetheless race to try it again. (As I write this as an adult, I realize how cruel this game sounds, but rest assured we never pressured anyone else to play—we merely showed them our trick and asked them if they thought they could do it—and the shocks, while briefly painful, were not powerful enough to be dangerous to healthy children.) No doubt this activity was somewhat twisted, but the country and city kids all enjoyed the game immensely, and it was not the only one we played with the electric fence growing up—this was, of course, before the advent of video game consoles and the widespread availability of cable television. Farm life definitely nourishes the imagination. For good or ill. It was a far simpler time, when one had to make one’s own fun, but fun it was, and the appeal had something to do with the novelty of the sensation of receiving a mild shock. This does not occur in nature, except in some very specific (and potentially deadly) situations. To return to Diane Ackerman’s work, I think she helps illuminate why such mild forms of sadism and masochism are appealing to children: “The senses,” she writes, “don’t just make sense of life in bold or subtle acts of clarity, they tear reality apart into vibrant morsels and reassemble them into a meaningful pattern.”6 The electric fence game was a way to concentrate touch, much like sports or the construction of art projects can sometimes harness a single sense in interesting ways, to focus the experience. Some Buddhists refer to meditation in various forms—jogging is meditative for some people, in that it shuts off active thinking in lieu of maintaining the rhythmic pulses of breath and foot. To isolate one or two senses is actually quite rare, as our bodies are constantly bombarded with information whether we want it or not. But each sense, as Ackerman says, cuts out a scrap of the external world, like a jigsaw cuts pieces to a puzzle. Only by combining these sources of information and processing them in the mind, distributed throughout the body but most powerfully in our brains are we able to come to some sense of what exists without ourselves—what will be left when we return to our constituent parts after death.

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This is why (continuing with this second chapter on the senses we think we know) I am treating the “five senses” humans commonly recognize in a book about animals and communication. We are only able to communicate through what we can understand, and our understanding is limited by three things: experience, sensory ability, and cognition. Experience obviously includes things like perspective and our relationship to our Umwelten. Because you do not have the ability to flap your wings and fly to the top of a redwood, your perspective will almost always be different from that of an eagle. Because you cannot efficiently sense heat unless it causes your skin to warm, you would not make a very good pit viper. Moreover, outside of movies that take up the topic, it is highly unlikely one would even think of the body heat one produces as communicating anything at all. But it does. If the senses cut our world into digestible pieces, communication relies on the energy produced by the consumption of these morsels of externality. Touch in particular is important for communication, for proper development, for thought and expression, for living healthy emotional lives connected to others (both of our species and not), and yet it is rarely studied by communications scholars or rhetoricians except in terms of disability—and most of that work is very recent. It is thus very important to linger a while on some of the themes modern researchers into haptic communication, into touching across species, are developing. The work on the sense of touch and its effects on communication is not concentrated in any single field, and to get a proper sense of what is being done in an interdisciplinary context requires vast amounts of peaking over fences, as well as some summary and synthesis, which means important work will inevitably be left out of this chapter or at least simplified. I have tried, however, to include what is most important to the argument of the book as a whole—that human and nonhuman animals are constrained and enabled to communicate based on their sensory abilities, and thus, we find many similarities in related species and differences in those of differing abilities.

The Importance of Touch and Disability Studies In the previous chapter, I suggested that humans have an overriding audio-visual bias, especially as it relates to communication. But to say that tactile signaling is simply overlooked is not enough; it is important to explore the depth of internalized resistance people who talk about

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communication have for acknowledging physical, gestural communication “language,” and why this may be so. This is important, because haptic communication is nearly universal among living organisms, including the tiniest microorganisms as well as some plants. Fortunately, there is some pushback against the idea that touch isn’t an important source of information about human and nonhuman animal communication. Taking up a position near the most accepting end of the spectrum, Joddy Murray argues that not only should ASL and other sign language systems be treated as languages, but also the “symbol systems of music, film, sculpture, dance.”7 Because of the depth of meaning these arts can communicate, the reflexivity of their languages, and the near infinite patterns of signification they can abstract from previous practices, tropes, or trends, Murray suggests that we study such physical and spatial art forms as we would linguistic communication. Murray asserts in her Non-Discursive Rhetoric (by suggesting many of the same points I have noted with regard to animal languages) how narrowly some experts attempt to define language, so as to exclude others. Because discursive language is “privileged in academia today,” she says there is strong resistance to calling other types of rich symbolization languages.8 By her usage, the term “discursive rhetoric” refers to a type of signaling that is “strung out” in logical, sequential arguments like sentences, paragraphs, and chapters in a book.9 It is true that this is a characteristic of prose more than it is a characteristic of language use in primarily oral cultures, but verbally spoken words are generally considered linguistic. Few would claim that human oral cultures don’t practice language. Thus, the way Murray sees non-discursive rhetoric is much more open than what we find in narrative prose: it has more freedom of order, it can all happen at once instead of proceeding in a linear fashion, and many non-discursive forms of rhetoric involve images. Yet, despite rhetorical theory often overlooking touch, Lawrence Frank argues that “Tactile sensitivity is… never wholly superseded, [but] it is elaborated by the symbolic process.”10 In interpersonal relations, touch communicates more robust meaning than symbolic means are often able to do. Words, according to Frank, merely remind the hearer of a previous sensory or affective experience. This argument from the mid-twentieth century anticipates later work on concrete communication leading to greater and greater degrees of abstraction, as we see in widely popular books on language, like Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By.

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The idea of rhetorical touch, which can be used generally to discuss any form of haptic communication meant to persuade or identify with others, also has a specific technical meaning to some researchers in disability studies who observe relationships that rely on mediated communication practices. This type of rhetorical touch is widely mistrusted by the general public for several reasons, some of which stem from bigotry or ignorance, while others come from genuine concern for the well-being of those who are being touched or doing the touching.11 When the abled mediate on behalf of disabled communicators, these motives can get very mixed up. Issues arise when the disabled and their teachers, their family members, or even their sexual partners are subjected to greater scrutiny than abled communicators would be. While there are obvious issues of being able to communicate consent and intent to mediators, it is also the case that those who attempt to help by employing methods such as facilitated communication are often discounted by those who do not understand the process. There have been several court cases in recent years involving the relationships between mediators and the mediated-for, some of which involve romantic or financial entanglements that further complicate an already controversial practice when mediating for those who cannot communicate by other means. While the vast majority of haptic or tactile communication scholarship focuses on disability, the media through which we interact with touch tech is varied and ubiquitous in the early days of the twenty-first century. Jessica Slentz discusses one intriguing application using giant touchscreen interfaces at a large museum in Ohio. One purpose of these touchscreens is to allow for a shift from the visitor as spectator model toward a model of co-production (or at least a more democratic system of curation in a museum’s space). The system the museum has implemented allows visitors to either follow custom tours that have been created by museum staff or previous visitors off the street, or people are allowed to customize and create their own tour experience, which will then guide them through the museum’s tablet-based tour. By providing this touchscreen system with its tablet satellites, museum staff have created an interpretive shift of power— where once only highly educated and trained experts could dictate how a tour was undertaken, now any uneducated visitor can actively participate in organizing the collections in ways they find meaningful.12 Slentz’s article focuses on the “affordances” of devices and inanimate objects for their animate, animal users; that is, what tools the new

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technology offers us that other media do not. While this approach is informative, it is limited in its scope. Touch operates on a one-way conduit from animate to inanimate beings rather than the more robust touch that occurs between two touchers. We might call this animate-inanimate approach a one-sided haptic (or perhaps, more appropriately, “halftics”), as it is interesting in terms of tool use among primates, but says nothing about interpersonal or interspecies contexts. All of this touch is mediated by the user interface, which is mostly static code. Where the truly interesting questions about such technologies arise is when Slentz discusses the affordances of the interface that encourage users to play particular roles in relation to the content of the digital catalogue of artifacts. Nonexpert connections become not only possible, but widespread and varied, which can open up the pieces of art to new interpretations and narratives. Of course, the democratization of ideas means there will be many uninspiring connections, as well, but it is up to users and the design of the interface to help weed out the uninteresting or unhelpful arrangements. While Slentz’s piece about museum haptics is not restricted to the disabled, there is a reason that many scholars recognize tactile rhetoric as important to disability studies, and why disability “makes a significant appearance” in texts about touch.13 Touch is commonly used as something of a replacement sense if one of our preferred senses is damaged or underdeveloped. While sight and hearing are overwhelmingly present in our communicative efforts, humans (unlike other animals) tend to overlook how powerful touching can be. Gerard Goggin argues that even Marshall McLuhan, who was very dialed-in on the importance of sensory input in communication, was nonetheless neglectful of tactile communication in many cases.14 Goggin steers us toward one important device in modern life—the ever-present smartphone—that acts as a haptic medium for almost all members of the developed world. Because of the necessity of using touch to control these devices, and their ability to produce feedback in the forms of visual stimulation to produce more touches, or in the actual “touchingback” of vibrations produced in the cell phone itself, they are a fertile location to uncover information about how touch engages disability. What Goggin’s research reveals is that devices like smartphones are often behind the times and one-dimensional. While haptic technologies should be revolutionary for blind users, for instance, companies like Apple have resisted making them accessible. It was not until 2005 when the iPhone 3GS came out that an iPhone

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included something as basic as a built-in screen reader to help users interact with the device.15 “There remains an assumption that developments in new media” laments Goggin, “will expand the worlds of all of us…. It is probably best to turn this idea on its head. Namely, it is evident through new media, even today, we only appreciate a small fraction of the human sensorium.”16 What we are missing with our touch technology doesn’t even require us to bring in other senses to replace touch. We could expand haptic systems by expanding the areas of interactivity to more than just the hands. Arguments have been made that the act of clicking to select objects on a personal computer interface, for instance, would be simpler if done with a foot pedal rather than a mouse, while fine motor control remains with the hands. Vibration could be located in places other than in the hand (or in the pocket holding the device). Because the human hands likely held a special place in our development of tools, including communication, our touch-based rhetorics are highly hand-centric. It takes little experience with other animals to realize how hyper-focused we are on hands, to the detriment of other forms of touch that are often equally rewarding—like nuzzling, manipulating objects with our teeth, or grasping with our feet. Some humans with hand and limb impairments, or spinal injuries, become very adept at blowing into a tube or even “touching” a keyboard with their eye movements in order to communicate or direct their motion, so it may be worthwhile to keep in mind Goggin’s criticism of our common design assumptions. The importance of touch goes well beyond issues of technology, ability, or the tunnel vision of human obsessions with hand-object interactions. In her reading of Étienne Bonnot, abbé de Condillac, Shannon Walters notes that touch is the power that connects all other sensations and helps to define the boundary of the “I” and the external world. It envelops and defines the body. “The beginning and the end of anyone’s life will most likely involve dependency, care, and personal assistance. These contingencies are frequently enacted by touch.”17 Walters has written one of the more complete explorations of haptic communication issues in her Rhetorical Touch: Disability, Identification, Haptics, and it would be worth lingering over several of the arguments she makes before turning our sights on the practice of touch among nonhuman animals. Touch, she writes, “is rhetorical because it is epistemic, creating knowledge, communication, and understanding about the widest ranges of embodiment and ways of being in the world.”18 It increases the means of persuasion, as all bodies are able to touch or be touched in some way. As

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discussed above, rhetorical agency also lends agency to the disabled, who are often excluded or discounted. Thus, one goal of Walters’ book is to reread rhetoric through disability studies to come to a new understanding, especially as rhetoric deals with the haptic.19 Touch brings bodies into contact, and it is relational, but when two things touch, a third space is created that helps to break down the standard subject/object binary that often traps studies of communication in a traditional speaker-to-audience mode of information transfer.20 Rather, persuasive speech, writing, and even touch do more than inform—they persuade, they delight, they help others to identify with another person, animal, or even an object. While Walters made no reference to the brief 1970s craze over the spoof “pet rock,” there were inevitably some people who became quite attached to these fake pets sold in stores all over North America (complete with bedding for one’s new pet, set inside boxes replete with breathing holes). There is no accounting for this sentiment over sediment, except that people grow fond of the things they caress, whether jokingly at first, or not. There are countless examples of such devotion to objects, both in real life and in literature. Just as one’s grandparents might collect, display, and handle their Hummel figurines, the poor, deranged creature Gollum in the Lord of the Rings series of books felt a magical compulsion to gaze upon and stroke his “precious” ring of power. Almost all humans are delighted by the touching of something—be it object or fuzzy baby bunnies—it is extremely easy to observe the behavior in public, often with no shame or resistance from the object of the touch. Because the inability to sense touch is so extremely rare in the natural world (among humans, it takes having an obscure neurological disorder to not feel some touches), if it is rhetorical in humans, it could be a universal language that should be explored in a cross-species context. Anyone with pets or children has likely already performed countless unscientific explorations of this sort by the simple act of touching their loved ones. The theory underlying Walters’s study of rhetorical touch leans heavily on Kenneth Burke’s idea that common sensations are a means of suggesting identification “among bodies.”21 What Burke meant by this is that in any given situation there is the potential to literally and figuratively share the substance of another (which eerily anticipates the conversation about grokking located in the next chapter, on gustatory rhetorics). When one identifies with someone else, one shares their substance, at least in part; he called this state one of consubstantiation.22 To identify by means

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of touch, then, suggests the possibility of a physical form of persuasionto-identify in material and discursive ways. Walters argues that taking this viewpoint opens the way to exploring touch on both “individual and social registers of embodiment.”23 Thinking about touch in this way leads to practical arguments later in the book, like how Walters views the ideal theory of design for haptic technology to be the practice of designing with rather than designing for.24 In order to demonstrate this, Walters often provides examples from disability studies, which, as I’ve mentioned above, has become one of the chief areas of inquiry for people invested in haptic technology studies, tactile rhetoric, and related fields. There are several reasons for this, but some should be obvious to the lay reader. Importantly for the arguments I am making in this book, there is a strong connection to be made between the sense of touch and early language acquisition that most abled people take for granted because they were able to abstract from early haptic technologies, like gesture-speech, by means of other senses enabling rich symbolic paradigms. Walters can help ground this theory in actual practice if we look at her recounting of one particularly famous story from the life of Helen Keller, a woman who despite being both deaf and blind was able to acquire language and put it to use as an author and activist. While Keller was walking with her teacher, Anne Sullivan, to a well nearby her house, Sullivan thrust her hand into the water. ‘As the cool stream gushed over one hand, she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten – a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that ‘w-a-t-e-r’ meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were barriers, still, but barriers that could in time be swept away.25

At the age of seven years old, Keller was finally able to connect language to external objects in ways that sighted individuals would have taken for granted because of early attention sharing mechanisms, such as pointing and naming followed by parental confirmation and reinforcement (e.g., “Yes, Billy! That’s a fire truck. Good job!”). Keller perhaps suffered cruelly from her late linguistic development. The human desire to communicate with others is very strong—we are a pathologically social species, it seems. Her own desire was so persistent

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that, once she learned to connect words written with fingers onto her palms to objects in the external world that she frantically tried to make up for years of lost communication about the world. Even when there was no one else with whom to communicate, she would stimulate herself by spelling words on her own hand.26 She continued to do this even after learning other communication techniques (like typewriter use). Eventually, she became worried that so much self-spelling was a bad habit and had herself restrained so she would stop drawing letters and words on her own hands. While she never fully broke the habit, she was at least able to exert some control over when it manifested. What Keller accomplished with touch is dramatic, but relying so heavily on one sense, when most humans communicate through combinations of several, could cause her problems, as well. One of the more disturbing problems to those of us who are able and of a classical liberal sentiment is when Keller reported a loss of the boundaries between herself and other individuals, or even the external world. There are several instances where Keller claimed to have difficulty understanding where her body ended and her teacher’s began when they frequently used palm writing to communicate with one another. Moreover, because of her sensory difference, Keller believed her humanity was under suspicion.27 Having dealt with the problem of ability-based theories of species membership in several other places in this book, it is nonetheless important to note that this is by no means a serious problem that only the disabled face, but is something many human and nonhuman animal groups have to worry about. While taxonomy is an interesting and helpful tool for classification of groups, individual abilities in most species vary dramatically. Species membership based on sight, hearing, or even learned skills, is a dangerous concept that allows others to ignore the different. By refusing to identify with someone, we are better able to distance ourselves from them, and with distance comes the potential for discrimination. Walters recalls that Aristotle’s definition of rhetoric is ability based, suggesting persuasion is a skill, not a product, so she suggests a rereading of Aristotle, with mixed results. Her argument is especially strong when she suggests likeness between Aristotle’s ability-based conception of rhetoric and the practice of touching being an ability or potential. While one traditionally counts on minds coming together, the other depends on bodies coming together to form a zone of contact. Where Walters stretches the metaphor is in treating figurative language as evidence for verbal rhetoric touching others. When Aristotle discusses “grasping” a

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concept, Walters seems to treat that as an earnest expression of tactile experience, as if a concept were a thing one could literally wrap one’s fingers around.28 This, of course, is not how figurative language works. While suggestive, metaphors cannot be taken as direct comparisons of all aspects of things; rather, they should be seen as a tool to compare certain aspects of likeness. If I were to “snatch” victory from my opponent while playing chess, I would not literally need to touch her (or touch the abstract concept of victory), but I could snatch victory in the poetic sense. Physical metaphors are too common, and manifest in all known languages, to be taken literally in Greek. Despite the odd literalism in some parts of her argument, Walters’s book is extremely valuable in its assertions that rhetoric, and touch, can be understood as dynamic. There is a “coming into being” when one touches—a sort of potentiality meeting actuality.29 Because of this dynamic nature, rhetorical touch can open possibilities for multiple authors and audiences instead of husbanding the perpetuation of the individual speaker and receiver model that more traditional readings of classical rhetorical theories tend to favor. In one review of Walters’s work, we uncover this dynamic process as a deviation from classical conceptions of rhetoric—especially in discussions of technical terms, such as kairos, which to Walters has important connections to proximity and physical contact, rather than simply representing a time and situation that might be appropriate for rhetorical intervention.30 Other scholars have argued for a similar expansion of kairos to account for sensory, physical information. Jennifer Lin LeMesurier, for instance, uses this idea to discuss “embodied memories” created through training in dance (or martial arts, or any number of physically demanding exercise routines).31 These memories are stored for future use during physical training sessions, which would be comparable to animal play in any number of species that use early physical play fighting to prepare youngsters for the serious demands of adulthood. When an actor has an encounter where a remembered movement would be useful, the body applies its “muscle memories” to guide the individual toward appropriate action in the form of movement or touch. This way of seeing kairos presents an embodied conception of rhetoric more appropriate to species that interact with an external world rather than treating rhetorical theory as abstract. These expansions of kairos are interesting and useful, but they do tend to stretch classical theories in new directions that may or may not have been intended.

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To return to the case of Walters’s work, her use of Burke is much more fitting with what one could infer is the intent of the original author than was her re-reading of Aristotle. Identification is ripe for exploration in terms of identification and consubstantiation. Touch, she writes, initiates “identification and interdependence on material, embodied levels and in symbolic, discursive registers.”32 It provides common sensations that lead to identification and to what Burke would call an actingtogether. To a lesser degree, these ideas support the work of several twentieth-century philosophers. For instance, Walters builds on the JeanLuc Nancy’s supposition that bodies exist and communicate largely at the sites of touch. Likewise, Maurice Merleau-Ponty emphasizes that touch forms a site for connection between bodies. The fact that touch is such an important sense for connecting, for “touching” another mind, suggests that it is wildly underexplored as a mode of perception that has much bearing on communication and human meaning-making. Perhaps the most important conversation for our purposes is when Walters, working through the previous connections made by Jay Dolmage and several others, turns her gaze on m¯etis, the cunning intelligence of the classical world, which could be embodied by famous characters like Odysseus, who used their minds and their knowhow to alter their fates. What Walters suggests is that m¯etis is primarily located in touch.33 Striking examples jump to mind when one considers handiwork or craftsmanship that accentuates the natural cleverness of the craftsman. A cunningly wrought piece of armor, or a clever flourish to a bit of needlework, can represent the nexus between a perspicacious mind and a deft hand. Nets, traps, and items that are physically made by means of touch but also operate through touching are where the proverbial rubber meets the road according to this way of thinking. That this idea held support in the ancient world is also clear, as the sophists found haptic cleverness similar to verbal cunning—terminology of the day spoke of interweaving words and twisting together sentences in order to fashion a cunning argument, just as one might weave or braid plant fibers to make a tapestry or basket. Another interesting image that combines touch and m¯etis is that of the octopus, who can easily take the appearance of anything she touches. This serves as a model for how tactile m¯etis can shape ethos in subtle and varying degrees. Like the octopus, the able rhetor should have the skills necessary to shape a public image in a number of ways in order to identify with people of various groups, beliefs, or professions. Seals, crabs, and

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fish are likewise good examples of physical m¯etis because of their ability to maneuver in unexpected manners. They are literally and figuratively slippery individuals, and are worthy of consideration—along with other nonhuman animal species—because of the interesting ways touch allows them to navigate an external world and the individuals residing in it.

Rhetorical Touch in Nonhuman Animals As the first sense, the sense most common across all animal species, a deep exploration of cross-species haptics could yield interesting results. While this is not the goal of this book, and the proper discussion of animal touch would definitely require a book-length effort to even scratch the surface, there remain several elements of human-animal and animalanimal touching that might enlighten and enliven the present argument. The idea that touch is a universal sense, that it takes extremely rare and crippling disabilities to deny the development of this sense in almost all animal species, is to recognize an ancient and proto-scientific truth: to touch is to live, and to be touched is both nurturing and dangerous, depending on who is doing the touching. According to Aristotle, it is the ability to touch that allows animals to exist. Without the capacity for feeling with our skin, our hair, our whiskers, fingers, feet, we would be unable to gather food, to seize prey, or to flee from predators.34 Touch is the basis of sentience—the ground floor for feeling beings. While other qualities elevate some species above others, according to Aristotle, it is the ability to touch that forms the basis of action and interaction. Without that ability, a thing can still live, but it would be passive, sedentary, like a plant. Movement, the forming of relationships with other creatures, and registering input necessary for the simplest fight or flight binary responses, all require at least touch, but often more specialized senses. To return to Diane Ackerman’s discussion of the sense of touch, once again, we see that she describes the ubiquity and the fundamental nature of touch’s interaction with the world: “sponges,” she says, “feel every quiver” of their watery environs; tapeworms may be guided solely by their sense of touch; and even some plants act in response to touch, like the carnivorous pitcher plants.35 A self-proclaimed sensuist, as opposed to a sensualist whose actions have sexual undertones, Ackerman nonetheless takes an almost orgasmic delight in her descriptions of the sensings and sense-offerings of her favorite playthings (she has also written very

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popular books on her garden and on the natural history of love and sex, among others). In the case of animals, her comments are much more restrained than when she discusses flowers or food, but she does not spare the reader her passion for the oddities of touch in the animal kingdom, and she seems as happy to hold forth on the subject of tapeworms as she is about orchids (although neither of these things can compete with the way she makes a conservative reader blush when discussing vanilla or chocolate). As entertaining as Ackerman’s prose is, it is also astute. The actions of “lesser creatures” like the humble tapeworm living in some unfortunate persons’ digestive tract should not be poopooed because of their simplicity or perceived inferiority (indeed, tapeworms will likely outlive Homo sapiens in part because of their simplicity of design), but should suggest an important source of information for those who are interested in touch—both in its own right and as a form of persuasion or identification. Because these creatures could navigate their Umwelten solely through this single sense, their abilities in that one purview could be impressive. (Or they could be simple because tapeworms simply require little guidance in completing their life cycles, as they depend on the natural movements and sensations of other creatures—which would be equally interesting, in that they could be thought to hijack the senses of their animal hosts.) Expanding our focus from the very small to a somewhat more humansized set of creatures, dolphins are of particular interest in this book mainly for their sophisticated use of sound. However, new research is turning up other interesting features of the sensorium of members of the delphinidae. Among what humans consider the most sophisticated nonhumans, cetaceans demonstrate extremely refined communication practices across several (and mixed) media. Karen Pryor discusses the physical practice of “bubbling” by dolphins, who will create bubble patterns to communicate alone, to amplify a whistled message, or to help others identify a speaker when traveling in large pods. Bubbling, she explains, consists of “stereotyped patterns of bubble production [which] constitutes a mode of communication in dolphins.”36 These bubbles are doubly-interesting rhetorically, because for dolphins they have the potential to transmit information across multiple sense-pathways; not only can fellow dolphins note bubbling visually, but they can detect them using echolocation, which is often a stronger and more precise sense for the various dolphin species. Bubbling on its own can convey certain affective or cognitive states, and scientists have identified some common formations, like the query

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balloon. These spherical emissions are released in response to surprising or striking sights or sounds. When combined with whistles or other forms of acoustic communication, bubbling can amplify or modify single-medium messages, causing other dolphins to pay greater attention to a message, or to “tighten up” desirable behaviors.37 Whistle trails are one example that marine biologists have identified as modificatory. They consist of the unnecessary release of air bubbles during an acoustic signal. As a dolphin is traveling, the air bubbles trail behind, leaving a tell-tale sign of who communicated and intensifying the acoustic message the bubbles accompany. Moving even closer to the dolphins in order to discuss not only the touching of air and water, mutual touching is a very common practice both among conspecifics and with other friendly species of life. Dolphins will touch other dolphins for friendly companionship, for reasons that appear to show affection, and for aggressive purposes they will even tooth rake each other or strike with their flukes. But dolphins are master touchers and don’t need to be in physical contact to “touch” each other. You see, dolphin pressure sensitivity seems to be much higher than that of a human, allowing two or more dolphins in close proximity to synchronize their movements with a precision few humans could imagine being able to do.38 As discussed earlier, touch is not only desirable, but also necessary for healthy cognitive and physical development in all animals studied. In what has to be among the cutest experiments I discovered when researching this book, scientists found that adolescent rats not only enjoyed being tickled by their human handlers, but when tickled by humans in one test location they would thereafter show a “robust” preference for that location if given free rein to roam their enclosures.39 Moreover, rats were so “tickled” by being tickled by these humans that tickling could even serve as a motivational tool comparable to a food reward when training rats to perform lever-operated tasks. Just like the proverbial rat to the feeder bar, these actual adolescent rats were more than happy to perform tasks in order to receive the affection of their keepers. Physical growth was not measured in this study, like it was in the study of human babies discussed above, but one is left wondering if there could be a universal animal (or at least vertebrate or mammalian) need to be touched in order to develop into healthy adults.

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Work on touch among much smaller forms of life has uncovered some interesting results as well. Many species of ants have been wellstudied for their ability to emit chemical signals to communicate various desires (or in the strict parlance of twentieth-century biology, to release or unlock certain behaviors), but rarely were the accompanying touches of closely-communicating ants taken into consideration. According to one researcher who took up the study of ant communication multi-modally, “In addition to the multicomponent chemical signals, there exist the knocking, stridulation, stroking, jerking, waggling, grasping, and antennations” that occur during a variety of rhetorical situations involving more than one ant.40 While multimodal communication is difficult to decipher—or at least to isolate touch when accompanied by other sensory input to convey a single message—we do know that certain physical behaviors can modify or replicate messages often sent through other media. To provide one example, substrate-borne vibrations have been found to modify behavior in a busy ant nest, and they can also be used as an alarm call that would travel much faster than chemical signals alone.41 In cases where both vibration and chemical emission can be sensed, physical forms of communication can be used to amplify the urgency or importance of chemical signals. One species studied used vibrations to cause foragers to stay in an area for twice the duration they normally would when stridulation was added to the usual chemical recruitment signal. Some very small creatures are well-versed in what in humans would be called interpersonal communication, but unlike humans they often have such conversations across species lines. The aphid parasitoid Paralipsis enervis (a tiny wasp that lays eggs in living aphids) lives among several ant species that defend their aphid herds aggressively, and has thus adapted several defenses against ant aggression. The first is a chemical signal that, because most ants have very poor sight, and some are practically blind, is used to make these parasitoid wasps smell like the aphid nestmates of several ant species. The second is a physical code specific to (at least one, but definitely not all) species of ants. Researchers have found that females of P. enervis have acquired the ability to communicate through mutual antennation as if they were ants of the species Lasius niger (black garden ants).42 Because the various ant species that share a habitat with these parasitoid wasps have developed different codes in response to mutual antennae tapping, some other species of ants will ignore the fake antennations, while others will attack aggressively and with deadly force. It would

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almost seem not worth the trouble, but ants in P. enervis’s range are often the rulers of the roost and are much stronger than anything else their size. Thus, the ant species in control of a certain territory acts in a way like the dons in a mafia movie: those species that work with the ants (or at least mimic species that do) fall under the protection of the ants while those that don’t soon find themselves metaphorically “sleeping with the fishes.” Moreover, when parasitoid wasps antennate with L. niger, they receive a reward of regurgitated liquid food. The largesse of the ants in charge can be impressive, and their wrath formidable; to paraphrase a line from The Godfather, it is definitely best for these parasitoid wasps to keep their friends close and their ant enemies closer.

Human Animals in Rhetorical Theory and in Nature As a human animal, it is difficult to think of ourselves as animals, in large part because of our religio-philosophical traditions in the West. That is why it is both fascinating and alarming to take up animal studies as someone who is professionally interested in a field concerned with persuasion and identification. Frankly, I find myself feeling like an alien at a zoo full of humans who don’t realize how odd they are, yet how similar their behavior is to other primates. While it would be unethical to experiment on unsuspecting humans, it is inevitable that after doing this research for a number of years, one starts making accidental observations that would be fairly embarrassing to the subjects under scrutiny. (And I want to stress that my own behavior is as embarrassingly animalistic as any other person I have observed, I’m sure—it’s simply more difficult to recognize one’s own moments of humorous animal behavior.) One of the things that begin to happen is you learn to identify bonds that have not been publicly acknowledged yet, whether it be for customary reasons (such as people not wanting to be presumptuous by announcing someone as their “boyfriend” too early in a relationship) or in one unfortunate circumstance, because people were trying to cover it up as it would hurt feelings if it came to light, as their mutual friend was also the ex-lover of one of the people involved in the new relationship. Put simply, human relationships seem complicated. However, our tiny behaviors betray our true feelings in a very predictable way if we are not always making a conscious effort to control them. I speak of these things in the abstract for several obvious reasons: I don’t want to embarrass

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anyone, it sometimes feels uncomfortable to observe these things, and sometimes people would be mad if they knew how obvious their actions were. Nonetheless, one of the most obvious ticks among humans who have bonded, whether their relationships are public or not, is the act of mutual grooming. Mutual grooming—what ethologists call allogrooming when commenting on the behavior of other animals—is common among bonded humans, who are more likely to perform the duties of a mate for people of any gender, even if they are only friends. This can be a fairly simple act, like one man brushing the snow off his goalie after a save in a hockey game, or a mother licking her thumb and then using it to wipe a food smudge off of her daughter’s face (much to the daughter’s consternation when this behavior continues into adulthood). Mutual grooming is often more intimate with romantic couples, though it need not be. Some friends will be kind enough to move an out-of-place hair off another friend’s face, replacing it behind their ear, while other pairs reserve this type of intimate touch for lovers only. Allogrooming is simply a function of being smart (although it’s also smart for humans to be certain of a relationship’s status before grooming another human—especially in a professional setting). While self-grooming happens among most animals, primates and monogamous species are far more likely to groom others. In fact, some primate species spend up to 20% of their wakeful hours grooming or being groomed by other individuals.43 This doesn’t make a lot of sense, considering evolution is such a great eliminator of wasteful things—whether those things are needless body parts or evolved behaviors. Instead of foraging for food, increasing one’s individual fitness, for a large chunk of their time, these animals sit down and groom one another. They do not do this simply to remove parasites, as these are largely not a problem for primates unless they are completely sedentary. The main reason to allogroom is to build social bonds. Much like having sex with another human releases chemicals in the human brain that help form tight bonds with that person (or hard feelings if that person is perceived to betray the other), social grooming facilitates stronger feelings or closer relationships by “providing a psychopharmacological environment” that helps to enhance individual commitment to the relationship being built or strengthened.44 Grooming creates social bonds, and human and nonhuman animals that mutually groom one another are performing one of the generalized rituals that apply pair bonding behavior to other group members in order to maintain social

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or political bonds. This creates social bonds in non-sexual relationships, which some biologists humorously go out of their way to label, as if it were a technical term, “friendships.”45 Reasons for mutual grooming being beneficial include the reduction of heart rates and the lowering of behavioral indices of stress. Some animals being groomed will fall asleep, as it is comforting to be rhythmically touched, groomed, or massaged. Being groomed also releases endorphins, which provide an opiate-like high coupled with a mild analgesic effect, making the touching of friends and loved ones potentially addictive. If we recall the massaging babies or tickling rats examples from earlier in this chapter, it becomes easier to envision the potency of gentle touch for physical and mental well-being. Even the very mundane behaviors of humans are influenced by tactile information. Tasting food, for example, is something most people try to do at least three times per diem, and one wouldn’t think the physical qualities of something one does not put in one’s mouth would have any effect on the taste of the food one does put in one’s mouth. One would be very wrong. Much research time and money are dumped into the field of marketing (which a less professional writer might be tempted to call the Mos Eisley of academic fields in that the purpose of all of their research is to better sell people things whether they need them or not), and one thing several such studies have found is that certain people are heavily influenced by factors that are not related specifically to the food being tasted. In one study, taste testers commonly rated the same food as tasting better when it was served on china rather than flimsy paper plates.46 Same food, same ingredients, just a different container. These results likely would not surprise anyone too much, though; what is surprising is what the researchers found when they figured out who was being most influenced by the tactile information—it wasn’t people who identified as haptically-oriented, but the people who did not consider themselves interested in touching things. As it turns out, the people who actively sought out tactile information on a regular basis tended to have a heightened awareness of touch cues, and thus, they were better able to recognize the potential for packaging bias and correct for the difference in tactile stimuli.47 Observations about touch and taste influencing one another raise many more interesting questions, not least of which is about the continued entanglement we see when studying the human sensorium.

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When thinking about the long history of human persuasion, as something separate from our fellow primates for at least 3 million years (and diverging up to 13MYA if no hybridization occurred, which is unlikely), it is difficult to imagine much difference in the ways a human and a chimpanzee, for instance, interact with the world from a purely sensory perspective. Nonetheless, the way most people envision nonhuman animal communication, even among species that share ~99.5% of our genetic makeup, is far more embodied, more physical, than we perceive human communication. This is a trap of language and culture, and needs to be rectified if we want to understand human communication itself, let alone delving into the communication styles of other species. Embodiment was a term first used to describe studies of cognition that sought to break down the mind/body bifurcation that unrealistically represented a sharp division of labor between the thinking brain and the unthinking rest of the body (that by this reckoning existed primarily for locomotive and support purposes only). Communication has a more porous dichotomy between speech and bodily gesture, but linguistic forms of signaling (oral or written) are traditionally treated with little reference to the body, which is ridiculous given any amount of thought about how either oral or written speech acts are produced, disseminated, and consumed. Embodied communication has caught on over the last decade or so, and has become one of the more interesting new subfields of rhetoric and communication studies because of the reclamation project it represents by bringing the person back into interpersonal communication. One example of embodied persuasion studies comes from Raymie McKerrow, who has argued for a corporeal rhetoric. He describes this body-oriented vision of persuasion as inclusive, “operating as an organic whole within which one finds not one rhetoric but many.”48 In this theory of embodied rhetoric, the body acts as the site of mediation between the internal and the external—it is not purely social or biological, natural or cultural. It is, in my terms, a biocultural rhetoric that privileges neither side of such a binary. In McKerrow’s conception of corporeal rhetoric, then, the process of touching becomes an act of translation between two or more bodies, opening the way toward a sharing of internal states. Much as the sense of sight engraves images upon our minds, according to Gorgias of Leontini, the external world is always touching us and being touched by us, both literally and metaphorically shaping the ways we perceive and think.49

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McKerrow’s sharing of internal states might remind the reader of Shannon Walters’s position (discussed earlier in this chapter) that two people or objects touching creates a third space of the touched. While the connection is not acknowledged by either writer, I would suspect this convergence of ideas owes much to the earlier work of Maurice MerleauPonty. While rhetoricians have long suspected a connection between gesture and speech, Merleau-Ponty defined human speech as primarily gestural, not a disembodied action of the will.50 This accords not only with common sense, but also with the origin stories of several civilizations. According to one such story, when Odin created the first humans— Aske out of an ash tree and his wife Embla out of an elder—“Odin gave them life and soul, Vili reason and motion, and Ve bestowed upon them the senses, expressive features, and speech.”51 That believers in the Norse gods knew the intimate connection between sensory input, physical expression, and communication is not something that should be surprising—that these connections were ever doubted by linguists is the truly shocking revelation. Kenneth Burke is well-known among rhetoricians for his elaborations of prior research on gesture-speech, and I have discussed this in a previous book.52 What is important to take for this conversation is the idea that gesture and speech are not only connected, the former is developmentally prerequisite to the latter. Without our ability to point and name, or to mutually attend to objects through gesture and eye direction detection mechanisms, we would be hard pressed to learn language as efficiently as we do, and people who do not attend well to others (such as some people on the autism spectrum) end up suffering from extra challenges in communication and socialization. Mutual attention is not merely a social mechanism—humans are hardwired to give others our undivided attention when we want to learn from or connect with another individual. While it is sometimes visual, sometimes tactile, Charles Darwin’s observation of sympathetic movements may also shed light on the ways gesture and motion are communicated to others within human cultures. An example of this phenomenon is when one sees someone else operating a pair of scissors and notices one’s mouth moving up and down. Debra Hawhee thinks “these sympathetic, mimetic movements operate on a logic of contagion, that physical actions have the capacity to affect other parts of the body.”53 Scientists attribute these unselfconscious mimicking motions to mechanisms called mirror neurons, but there is much research that needs to be done before they can explain

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the method of operation, much less the entire purpose, of these features of the human brain. If it is true that these physical actions and even mimetic movements are able to act on bodies, even other bodies, then Shanon Walters’s connections to Empedocles’s theory of pores and effluences are all the more suggestive.54 To think of pores and effluences in modern terms, we could characterize the perceptive abilities of most senses as a form of touch: rather than effluences, we might consider sound waves that were shaped by forcing air over vibrating body parts; these sound waves are thrust into the air and eventually cause several tiny pieces of our inner ear to move in predictable manners that we can decode as a signal containing information. Vision is the touch of light waves and particles. Taste relies on our tongues touching the food and drink we are about to consume. It is all (if, again, poetically) very easy to see the connection to early theories like Empedocles’s effluences, or Epicurean atomism as expounded by Lucretius.55 All the little particles have to be touched, and through touch, we gain almost all of our information about the external world. Even taste, according to Aristotle, was a form of touch. It is how we register the nutritive matter in our mouths as we consume food; without the ability to perceive, gather, and taste potential food sources, we could have neither locomotion nor a soul, according to Aristotle.56 We would be destroyed by a world of things about which we cannot discriminate. Of course, it is useful to discriminate between senses that are touched by atoms and particles and waves in order to perceive the external world and what people generally refer to as the sense of touch. It is easy to muddle the senses and their methods if we look too closely, so I will not refer to the sense of touch as anything “touching” our photoreceptors from now on. Touch is interesting enough without making it everything. Watching any organized human activity, or any activity where status or celebrity is achieved, one cannot help but notice the overwhelming compulsion for humans to touch that which they perceive as good, popular, important, or beautiful (which, if not governed, can lead to serious trouble in the modern world, where people are less likely to suffer being touched by strangers). Whether one is at a popular music concert where people in the front few rows reach out for the lead singer to touch their hands, or traveling to a site that contains a holy relic of a religion that is worn smooth from the act of touching, human hands are ever-questing tools groping for connection. We touch in order to admire, to show our approval, and to seek some measure of the power of the person or object

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we are touching. Politicians in the West have long understood the power of a handshake, and it is a commonplace that important people go around kissing strangers’ babies. It makes sense in a primal way: I wouldn’t let someone untrustworthy kiss my baby, and if my baby is the dearest thing to my heart, anyone who kisses it must care about me, care for my people, must care about what I care most deeply about. Despite our best attempts to touch the rock stars and Hollywood actors we see, most forms of human touch aren’t as blatantly asymmetrical in terms of desire or power relations. They also aren’t necessarily so direct. Preliminary contact among humans is often mediated through a layer of clothing, whether it is a hug upon arrival at the airport, the initiation of foreplay while kissing, or patting a co-worker on the back for a job well done. Clothing, however, is not the only artifact that mediates our haptic experience; if you think of the many situations in which a stranger might touch parts of our body, there are often items such as latex gloves for a doctor giving you an examination, scissors for the barber cutting your hair, or even fragrant oils for the massage you are lucky enough to receive at the spa.57 Beyond mediated experience between two humans, people interact in meaningful ways, even communicate, with artifacts themselves. One need only consider the difference between reading this book on a computer screen versus reading the printed page. Often reading on a computer means sitting at a stationary work unit—a desk or lab station, etc. The screen moves in a limited number of directions and with limited range. Your chair may or may not be comfortable. Likely it is not. A book, on the other hand (or a Kindle, even), is portable. You can take it to the beach and “work” on vacation. It can accompany you to the gym and be read on the treadmill, which is far healthier than sitting at one’s desk all day. Books (but not Kindles) have a certain pleasant smell made by the mildew, ink, and decomposing paper that awakens warm memories in many a bookworm. And books require a constant turning of the page—an input that allows for the reception of more words. Much like the grooming of another creature with sleep-inducing regularity, the rhythmic pattern of turning pages can either sharpen one’s focus or send one to sleep (often followed by the book dropping unceremoniously onto one’s face). Just as touching artifacts can be stimulating, a lack of touch can be an important sensation. Sometimes human and nonhuman animals can damage or lose touch receptors they’ve carried their entire lives. We know from some amputees, like many war veterans today, that a sudden lack

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of sensation can confuse the brain into feeling pain or tingling of what we commonly refer to as a phantom limb. After amputation, the brain receives “faulty signals” and patients continue to feel pain despite there no longer being receptors to indicate pain or pressure.58 Because touch is so important in our lives, people will over-attribute benefits, especially when marketing traditional remedies or cures. While there is good reason to believe the empirical evidence about massaging babies, as discussed above, other forms of therapeutic touch tend to be neutral or even potentially harmful. Impersonal forms of massage, pressure point activation, acupuncture, even the widespread practice of chiropraxy have limited, and often conflicting, evidence of effectiveness for health benefits that would exceed those gained by stretching and appropriate exercise. The only useful touch in terms of consistent health benefits is “loving touching.”59 That is, the gentle touches of a friend, relative, or lover meant to establish closeness or impart comfort. What marketers and quacks have learned about humans through years of successful health scams, however, is that humans, like primates in general, are easily manipulated through touch. What India Morrison calls “simple touch”—the brief touching of hand to hand, elbow, or shoulder of another person—has been shown to increase the amount people are favorably disposed toward a place or person.60 Being touched in this manner also increases perceptions of trust and increases generous feelings in the person being touched. The phenomenon is easily abused, and its applications are nearly endless—from politicians to restaurant servers, people knowingly or unknowingly take advantage of the powers of touch to help them achieve certain goals with regard to money or power. This is consistent with all forms of primate politics, as behaviors such as mutual grooming and hand-holding transcend species boundaries. When social or political bonds need forming, brief friendly touching is often a conduit to power. Touch across species lines is a popular topic in animal studies, but it is worth noting that human cultures treat human-nonhuman interactions in a variety of ways. Constance Classen relates one oddity of Burgundian law that demonstrates not only the respect for well-trained hunting dogs in that place, but also the disregard shown to humans who would abscond with another person’s prize hound. If a dog was stolen and the thief caught, one of the resulting punishments would be to force the thief to plant a kiss directly on the dog’s derriere.61 This sounds like a pretty good deterrent, and it also demonstrates how much humans and their

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companion animals bond—and no wonder, when they are often physically or emotionally closer than other family members. Before central heating was a common feature in Western life, cats and small dogs were not only desirable for their affectionate natures, but also for their warmth. On a cold night, having another animal on one’s lap provided comfort as well as warmth to the body and to the hands used to stroke one’s pet. Petting is almost certainly a universal human desire, and every known culture interacts with at least some animals in mutually beneficial—and in many cultures, loving—ways. Touch is familiar, and human-animal interactions through gentle touch are likely well-understood as beneficial, or at least as desirable as a form of comfort, by all readers. Likewise, the touches we share with friends and loved ones should be familiar to all, but this chapter was not written to reinforce what we think we know about touch, but rather to consider what some of the newest research in a wide variety of fields—some closely related to rhetoric or communication, and others located on the other side of our mental campuses—is finding out about a sense we privilege just behind the audio and visual, and thus often take for granted. From here, we take another step outward as we walk the plank of familiarity which inexorably leads us to the necessary plunge into alien sensations. In the final chapter of Part II, I will discuss some important findings about olfactory and gustatory sensation, and how they relate to communication among human and nonhuman animals. While these senses are still familiar, they are almost completely neglected by scholarship in the humanist vein. Sometimes this is for good reason, as humans (unlike ants, for instance) do not often knowingly communicate with their scent. Or do they? I will argue that scent and taste persuasion takes up a lot of our mental energy as humans, more than we would acknowledge, but that we often like to ignore the importance of such signals as they are often indelicate or make us seem bestial. But we are animals, and animals spend a significant portion of their lives looking for food and sex. If that is difficult to admit, so be it—people are allowed their little self-delusions, as long as they do not become harmful to others.

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Notes 1. Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses (Vntage Books, 1995). 73. 2. Ibid., 76. 3. Ibid., 77. 4. Ibid., 79. 5. Ibid., 70. 6. Ibid., xvii. 7. Joddy Murray, Non-Discursive Rhetoric: Image and Affect in Multimodal Composition (Albany: SUNY Press, 2009). 1. 8. Ibid., 2. 9. Ibid., 4. 10. Lawrence K. Frank, “Tactile Communication,” ETC: A Review of General Semantics 16, no. 1 (1958): 35. 11. Shannon Walters, Rhetorical Touch: Disability, Identification, Haptics (University of South Carolina Press, 2014). 28. 12. Jessica Slentz, “Habits of Interaction: Touchscreen Technology and the Rhetorical Experience of Co-Curation at the Cleveland Museum of Art,” Enculturation, http://enculturation.net/habits-of-interaction. 13. Gerard Goggin, “Disability and Haptic Mobile Media,” New Media & Society (2017): 3. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., 8. 16. Ibid., 13. 17. Walters, Rhetorical Touch: Disability, Identification, Haptics: 1–3. 18. Ibid., 4. 19. Amy Vidali, “Rhetorical Touch: Disability, Identification, Haptics by Shannon Walters (Review)” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 19, no. 2 (2016): 352. 20. Walters, Rhetorical Touch: Disability, Identification, Haptics. 21. Ibid., 22. 22. Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969). 21. 23. Walters, Rhetorical Touch: Disability, Identification, Haptics: 22. 24. Katrina Hinson, “Rhetorical Touch: Disability, Identification and Haptics, by Shannon Walters,” Technical Communication Quarterly 26, no. 1 (2017): 93. 25. Walters, Rhetorical Touch: Disability, Identification, Haptics: 25. Quoting from Helen Keller, The Story of My Life (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1954). 35. 26. Walters, Rhetorical Touch: Disability, Identification, Haptics: 26. 27. Ibid., 27.

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28. Ibid., 34. 29. Ibid., 35. 30. Hinson, “Rhetorical Touch: Disability, Identification and Haptics, by Shannon Walters,” 93. 31. Jennifer Lin LeMesurier, “Somatic Metaphors: Embodied Recognition of Rhetorical Opportunities,” Rhetoric Review 33, no. 4 (2014): 375. 32. Walters, Rhetorical Touch: Disability, Identification, Haptics: 66. 33. Ibid., 123. 34. Mariska Leunissen, Explanation and Teleology in Aristotle’s Science of Nature (Cambridge University Press, 2010). 66. 35. Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses: 98. 36. Karen W. Pryor, “Non-Acoustic Communication in Small Cetaceans: Glance, Touch, Position, Gesture, and Bubbles,” in Sensory Abilities of Cetaceans: Laboratory and Field Evidence, ed. Jeanette A. Thomas and Ronald A. Kastelein (Boston, MA: Springer US, 1990), 297. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid., 299. 39. Jeffrey Burgdorf and Jaak Panksepp, “Tickling Induces Reward in Adolescent Rats,” Physiology & Behavior 72, no. 1 (2001): 172. 40. B. Hölldobler, “Multimodal Signals in Ant Communication,” Journal of Comparative Physiology A 184, no. 2 (1999): 130. 41. Ibid., 130–1. 42. W. Völkl et al., “Chemical and Tactile Communication Between the Root Aphid Parasitoid Paralipsis Enervis and Trophobiotic Ants: Consequences for Parasitoid Survival,” Experientia 52, no. 7 (1996): 731–3. 43. Robin Dunbar, The Social Role of Touch in Humans and Primates: Behavioral Function and Neurobiological Mechanisms, vol. 34 (2008). 264. 44. Ibid., 261. 45. Ibid., 264. 46. Aradhna Krishna et al., “Does Touch Affect Taste? The Perceptual Transfer of Product Container Haptic Cues,” Journal of Consumer Research 34, no. 6 (2008): 807. 47. Ibid., 816. 48. Raymie E. McKerrow, “Corporeality and Cultural Rhetoric: A Site for Rhetoric’s Future,” Southern Communication Journal 63, no. 4 (1998): 320. 49. Gorgias and Douglas M. MacDowell, Encomium of Helen (Bristol [Avon]: Bristol Classical Press, 1982). 50. Louise Hutchings Westling, The Logos of the Living World: Merleau-Ponty, Animals, and Language (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014). 113.

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51. Thomas Bullfinch, Bullfinch’s Mythology (New York: Gramercy, 2003). 329–30. 52. Alex C. Parrish, Adaptive Rhetoric: Evolution, Culture, and the Art of Persuasion, Routledge Studies in Rhetoric and Communication (New York: Routledge, 2013). 110. 53. Debra Hawhee, “Language as Sensuous Action: Sir Richard Paget, Kenneth Burke, and Gesture-Speech Theory,” The Quarterly Journal of Speech 92, no. 4 (2006): 335. 54. Walters, Rhetorical Touch: Disability, Identification, Haptics: 94. 55. Titus Lucretius Carus and W. H. D. Rouse, De rerum natura (London: W. Heinemann, 1924). 56. Leunissen, Explanation and Teleology in Aristotle’s Science of Nature: 66. 57. Michael B. Schiffer and Andrea R. Miller, The Material Life of Human Beings: Artifacts, Behavior, and Communication (London; New York: Routledge, 1999). 46–7. 58. Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses: 104. 59. Ibid., 121. 60. India Morrison, Line S. Löken, and Håkan Olausson, “The Skin as a Social Organ,” Experimental Brain Research 204, no. 3 (2010): 306–7. 61. Constance Classen, “Animal Skins,” in The Deepest Sense, ed. Constance Classen, A Cultural History of Touch (University of Illinois Press, 2012), 98.

References Ackerman, Diane. A Natural History of the Senses. Vintage Books, 1995. Bullfinch, Thomas. Bullfinch’s Mythology. New York: Gramercy, 2003. Burgdorf, Jeffrey, and Jaak Panksepp. “Tickling Induces Reward in Adolescent Rats.” Physiology & Behavior 72, no. 1 (2001/01/01/ 2001): 167–73. Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. Classen, Constance. “Animal Skins.” In The Deepest Sense, edited by Constance Classen. A Cultural History of Touch, 93–122: University of Illinois Press, 2012. Dunbar, Robin. The Social Role of Touch in Humans and Primates: Behavioral Function and Neurobiological Mechanisms. Vol. 34, 2008. doi:https://doi. org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2008.07.001. Frank, Lawrence K. “Tactile Communication.” ETC: A Review of General Semantics 16, no. 1 (1958): 31–79. Goggin, Gerard. “Disability and Haptic Mobile Media.” New Media & Society (2017): 1461444817717512.

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Gorgias, and Douglas M. MacDowell. Encomium of Helen. Bristol [Avon]: Bristol Classical Press, 1982. Hawhee, Debra. “Language as Sensuous Action: Sir Richard Paget, Kenneth Burke, and Gesture-Speech Theory.” The Quarterly Journal of Speech 92, no. 4 (2006): 331–54. Hinson, Katrina. “Rhetorical Touch: Disability, Identification and Haptics, by Shannon Walters.” Technical Communication Quarterly 26, no. 1 (2017/01/02 2017): 92–94. Hölldobler, B. “Multimodal Signals in Ant Communication.” Journal of Comparative Physiology A 184, no. 2 (1999/03/01 1999): 129–41. Keller, Helen. The Story of My Life. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1954. Krishna, Aradhna, Maureen Morrin, editor John Deighton served as, and article Laura Peracchio served as associate editor for this. “Does Touch Affect Taste? The Perceptual Transfer of Product Container Haptic Cues.” Journal of Consumer Research 34, no. 6 (2008): 807–18. LeMesurier, Jennifer Lin. “Somatic Metaphors: Embodied Recognition of Rhetorical Opportunities.” Rhetoric Review 33, no. 4 (2014): 362–80. Leunissen, Mariska. Explanation and Teleology in Aristotle’s Science of Nature. Cambridge University Press, 2010. Lucretius Carus, Titus, and W. H. D. Rouse. De Rerum Natura. London: W. Heinemann, 1924. McKerrow, Raymie E. “Corporeality and Cultural Rhetoric: A Site for Rhetoric’s Future.” Southern Communication Journal 63, no. 4 (Summer 98 1998): 315. Morrison, India, Line S. Löken, and Håkan Olausson. “The Skin as a Social Organ.” Experimental Brain Research 204, no. 3 (2010/07/01 2010): 305– 14. Murray, Joddy. Non-Discursive Rhetoric: Image and Affect in Multimodal Composition. Albany: SUNY Press, 2009. Parrish, Alex C. Adaptive Rhetoric: Evolution, Culture, and the Art of Persuasion. Routledge Studies in Rhetoric and Communication. New York: Routledge, 2013. Pryor, Karen W. “Non-Acoustic Communication in Small Cetaceans: Glance, Touch, Position, Gesture, and Bubbles.” In Sensory Abilities of Cetaceans: Laboratory and Field Evidence, edited by Jeanette A. Thomas and Ronald A. Kastelein. 537–44. Boston, MA: Springer US, 1990. Schiffer, Michael B., and Andrea R. Miller. The Material Life of Human Beings: Artifacts, Behavior, and Communication. London; New York: Routledge, 1999. Slentz, Jessica. “Habits of Interaction: Touchscreen Technology and the Rhetorical Experience of Co-Curation at the Cleveland Museum of Art.” Enculturation, http://enculturation.net/habits-of-interaction.

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Vidali, Amy. “Rhetorical Touch: Disability, Identification, Haptics by Shannon Walters (Review).” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 19, no. 2 (2016): 350–3 Völkl, W., C. Liepert, R. Birnbach, G. Hübner, and K. Dettner. “Chemical and Tactile Communication Between the Root Aphid Parasitoid Paralipsis Enervis and Trophobiotic Ants: Consequences for Parasitoid Survival.” Experientia 52, no. 7 (1996/07/01 1996): 731–38. Walters, Shannon. Rhetorical Touch: Disability, Identification, Haptics. University of South Carolina Press, 2014. Westling, Louise Hutchings. The Logos of the Living World: Merleau-Ponty, Animals, and Language. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014.

CHAPTER 7

Gustatory and Olfactory Rhetorics

It is difficult for humans to grok the concept of rhetorics existing outside the audio-visual range—even the audio and visual forms that exist beyond oral and written language are often neglected because of our strong linguistic bias. Moreover, while the verb “to grok” has successfully made its way into common English usage, most people have not, shall we say, acquired a taste for it. The origin of the word grok, for those unfamiliar, is Robert Heinlein’s literary masterpiece, Stranger in a Strange Land (1961). In this novel, the protagonist, one Valentine Michael Smith, is a human who was stranded on the planet Mars as a baby and was thus raised by Martians. As a young man, Smith returns to Earth, eventually becoming something of a savior figure, by creating a growing network of what a cynical person might call naked hippie love communes. The novel was a product of its time, and, according to science fiction lore, also the product of a wager between Heinlein and L. Ron Hubbard to see who could create a religion from scratch. (Hubbard’s entry, if the bet was real, became the religion now known as modern Scientology, earning him the dubious distinction of “winner” in this wager.) One of the basic tenets of the new religion of V. Michael Smith is the idea of joining together with other people, of sharing not only material possessions, but body and spirit as well. To grok is to merge with something outside the self, taking it in, absorbing it by literally drinking it in. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. C. Parrish, The Sensory Modes of Animal Rhetorics, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76712-9_7

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If you have grokked someone or something, you have observed it with your entire being, have analyzed it, have incorporated it into yourself. To quote one originally skeptical observer who is converted in the story, The Martians seem to know instinctively what we learned painfully from modern physics, that observer interacts with observed through the process of observation. ‘Grok’ means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed – to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience. It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science – and it means as little to us [Earthlings] as color means to a blind man.1

Good word, right? Every day of our lives, we taste things, we drink them in, but rarely do we grok them. Humans are literally made up of the stuff we have consumed in the past. As the saying goes, you are what you eat, but who wants to think about that when you are at the movie theater, munching on popcorn slathered in environment-destroying palm kernel oil, popping sugary Raisinets (which we kid ourselves are healthier because there’s fruit in them) into our mouths, and washing it all down with 64 ounces of cola that no longer contains any cocaine, but has found a similarly addictive chemical additive in the form of high fructose corn syrup? It is a good thing that so many movies these days are unwatchable reboots of classic films, or all Americans would be overweight, instead of just most of us. While there are criticisms of “pop” nutrition books like Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food, his advice to “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants”2 is generally sound. More importantly, journalists like Pollan, who do not buy into nutritionism and what amounts to the engineered astronaut meals most food scientists have processed and packaged for the masses in our soups, our cereals, and especially our frozen “lite” cuisines, are supporting the grassroots efforts in North America to get people out of the middle aisles of grocery stores and hopefully into farmers markets, co-ops, and community gardens. Only by planting, growing, and killing our own food can we hope to understand its place in our diets, to say nothing of grokking it. Merely to taste something is not grokking. One must thoughtfully incorporate its essence. While all of this talk of community gardening and sharing of essences might seem a bit “hippie dippy” to some readers, it is important for several reasons. First, because the difference between grokking and tasting

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represents a distinct language barrier between those who are poor, or poorly-educated, and those who are rich and well-educated. “Language” in this barrier is to be considered loosely but suggestively in this context, much as David Attenborough uses the term when describing the mating rituals of Galapagos lava lizards, who demonstrate different persuasive behaviors, separated by sub-species, that make otherwise viable unions impossible. Their modes of persuasion, while not strictly linguistic by a purist definition, do still represent separation: these creatures, says Attenborough, are incompatible as mates completely due to “a language barrier.”3 Genetically and physically they are able to mate. It is their culture (yes, culture) that prevents them from interbreeding. A second reason the idea of shared essence is important is because of the ubiquity and importance of food to humans. Think what you want about the attainments of human culture, most of us are wandering around thinking about food (or sex) most of the time. Moreover, there have been convincing arguments made elsewhere that most of the attainments of human culture were achieved in order to directly or indirectly secure access to more, or better, food (or sex). When we consider the importance of finding, cooking, determining the healthfulness of, and finally consuming food, it is no wonder Owen Williamson claims that our treatment of food represents one of humanity’s most important material rhetorics.4 It is possible that cooking, because it allowed for the increased caloric consumption needed to support the growth of the modern human brain, predated both reason and language use. Thus its importance to humans brings up a curious paradox: why do we pay so little attention to taste and scent as rhetoricians? There are very few examples in major publications. Jane Sutton made passing attempts at gustatory rhetorics in publications concerned with other matters, and Justine Wells completed a dissertation on the topic, but these are efforts one would have to go out of one’s way to find.5 The average rhetorician has not concerned themselves with taste or smell to any significant degree. Our capacity to smell, and be smelled, goes far beyond what Plato might call “mere cookery.”6 As with all mammals, humans produce many separable substances—liquids, gases, solids—that can be evaluated by others who chemically detect them through taste or smell.7 While perhaps an unpleasant topic to delve into too deeply, we can round away some of the rough edges of understanding by thinking about some of the less intimidating of human waste products, like sweat. Differing tolerances or

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customs regarding sweat or body odors can lead to cultural difference, which can help turn olfaction into a fraught sense. Lisa Phillips demonstrates the potential for cultural olfactory bias with her case study of a situation in Swansea, South Wales, wherein a pre-school teacher regularly sprayed her 3-to-6-year-old students with air freshener and made them scrub with industrial cleaner because she claimed they smelled of curry. This, Phillips asserts, created “a complicated imbroglio of politics, prejudicial bias, inner-city immigration, overt racism, child abuse, and more.”8 By taking over the smellscape of her classroom, the teacher acted to disinfect the cultural olfactory rhetorics of her students. This activity could easily be considered offensive in cultural contexts where a mosaic approach is preferred to a melting pot, and could even be construed as child abuse. Because the children were cleansed of their cultural odors, the smells of home and their parents’ cooking, they were in some ways stripped of their cultural identity, which can be a frightening experience for tiny humans who have no opportunity to fight back. Smelling is the inhalation of more than just oxygen. In fact, oxygen is about 21% of the air you breathe—nitrogen being the most abundant gas in Earth’s atmosphere. Smell receptors pick up odor molecules in the air that originate from a variety of sources. Most of these odors humans are unable to isolate with our weak noses. Nonetheless, we absorb tiny bits of the things in our atmosphere, whether we want to or not, through our respiratory system which is the function that is most responsible for supplying passive olfaction with data about the external world. Eating, we could say, is the consumption of DNA—a material text that is widely considered rhetorical.9 We literally digest information when we eat. This information in turn shapes our own. The consumption of one material can activate epigenes for cancer prevention or weight loss, just as consumption of another can trigger sleepiness or insulin production. That “we are what we eat” isn’t just a common adage; it is true in many ways. Thus it is necessary for a true understanding of human rhetoric to acknowledge the importance of smell and taste for our survival. While the sections of this chapter are somewhat divided for the reader’s benefit into those dealing with smell and those dealing with taste, it is important to acknowledge the strong synesthesia in humans. While appearance can definitely affect the perceived flavor of a meal, the aroma is an even stronger indicator of food quality; we pre-taste with our eyes and nose before our tongues are ever put to work. All this is not to diminish

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the role of taste, or the importance of gustatory rhetorics, but to acknowledge once again that strict divisions among senses are, well, senseless. Those of us who are able to use several senses to interact with an object— a pie, for example—will have a more complete grasp of pie ontology than those who are able only to see the pie, but not smell, touch, or taste it. If a pie is covered, it could be apple, or cherry, or even pork, and we might never know the difference by appearance alone. Likewise, we humans, who are so limited in our sensorium compared to other animals, would never be able to tell there was a foreign object baked into the center of our pie, unless we were cetaceans who would initially “view” the item with ultrasound (or, perhaps, cartoon prisoners who would be expecting any baked good they receive to contain a file to aid in their escape). Put more simply, our senses are bound together by our brains, which make use of as many different inputs as our bodies provide. Some humans have more, or better, senses than others, and their brains will often compensate to some degree. Some animals have inputs we can hardly fathom—modes of experiencing the world that are completely alien to us. Other animals, like the humble olm (an amphibian that looks like an elongated white salamander), can sense electric fields, like sharks or certain other types of fish. However, olms are completely blind, so they “see” through other senses, creating a map of the world that could exist to them like our sense of sight presents the world to us. Or it could be completely different. To the olm, all humans are considered disabled, but we can’t say the same in return, despite our superior vision, because olms live in shallow pools in lightless caves—places where vision is almost useless. For the above reasons, it will be useful to keep in mind that, while I have divided taste and smell, in many ways when I am discussing one I am indirectly discussing the other (and perhaps additional senses). The thematic sections within this chapter are for ease of reading, not for maintaining strict accuracy.

Categorizing Olfactory and Gustatory Signals Human olfactory and gustatory signals are often unintentionally deployed, and in many cases are difficult for us to detect. In the case of pheromones, it was only very recently that scientists were even certain that we could sense them the way all other mammals seem to do. It’s long been suspected that the activity of our sweat glands betrays internal states,

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thus allowing lie detectors and animals with better senses, like canids, to sense our state of mind, or even, in the latter case, potentially diagnose diseases accompanied by characteristic scent formations. However, nature provides so many more potent examples of scent signaling, that it is worth thinking about the variety of forms before discussing specifics. One of the more interesting uses for olfactory rhetorics in nature is concentrated odors deployed as defense mechanisms. Stink glands represent an extreme case of olfactory rhetoric in skunks, stoats, and polecats. Humans are especially susceptible to such chemical warfare, despite our poor sense of smell. As we disconnect from the natural world, and from the production processes of our food systems, our natural (and adaptively useful) capacity for feeling disgust seems to be growing. While skunk spray is meant to act as a weapon, the cleaning and dressing of dead animals is a natural activity for an omnivorous species such as ours, that is nonetheless something that many readers have never done, and may never in their lifetimes. That the smell of a body’s internal contents are strong and unpleasant to the untrained hunter or fisherman is odd considering the necessity for humans to rely on these protein sources up until a very short time ago when alternative protein sources became widespread in many ecosystems. One thing humans do have going for them is the ability to condition ourselves to negative stimuli better than some other animals. By a process called extinction, we begin to ignore bad smells we are used to, which can help us deal with noxious odors, but it is also potentially dangerous because “how we direct our sensory focus and attention suggests how we may fail to notice what is right under our noses, or treat our sense of smell as a joke, which prohibits measured response and ethical responsibility in some instances.”10 We can test the former point by opening a fresh bag of roasted coffee beans and smelling it three times in quick succession. The scent, which starts off exceptionally strong and nuanced, almost completely fades by the third attempt, as your sense receptors seem overwhelmed by the powerful smell. What remains after the third inhalation is a shadow of the glorious odor of roasted beans. Scent extinction may be a good thing for various reasons, as more than just a few mammals employ the disgusting as a defense mechanism. A bird named the hoopoe (Upupa epops ) is able to shoot its excrement from out of the nest fairly accurately, in order to ward off predators. Other birds are known to employ defensive vomiting to shoot streams of noisome digestive fluids at intruders or those perceived as a threat. Birds that

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are especially disturbed by curious humans can cover the approaching predators in digestive fluids and stomach contents, making for a very uncomfortable trip home. Smell, taste, and digestion do not rely merely on external reception to be effective, either. As an example of the importance of internal signals to some species, Heini Hediger notes the sensitivity of many species’ digestive systems.11 Reptiles and snakes shortly after feeding must be left alone or handled with great care, so they do not eject their meal. Humans have the tendency to have their salivary glands slow way down in stressful situations, causing their tongues to stick to the roofs of their mouths. Many, many species empty their bladders when excited, either to shed extra weight while fleeing, or to surprise a captor, such as when toads urinate in order to facilitate escape from grasping hands. Herons will intentionally vomit on zookeepers who approach them too soon after feeding time. And, less dramatically, a wide range of animals will stop eating if upset. It may seem to the outside observer that only in religious rhetoric that gustatory and olfactory abilities become unnaturally inviting. In Christian mythology, the concept of transubstantiation allows believers to imagine they are literally consuming the flesh of a person who died over 2,000 years ago. In Norse myth, “the flesh of the boar Schrimnir is served up to [the heroes in Valhalla], and is abundant for all. For although he is cooked every morning, he becomes whole again every night.”12 These things are, of course, impossible. Yet, because of strong early inculcation, such beliefs persist even when entire pantheons are replaced—new religions consume the old, like Valentine Michael Smith grokking the substance of American Protestantism in Stranger in a Strange Land. There is a wide range of gustatory and olfactory signals deployed in nature, and an ever broader scale of unintentional communication taking place. One could argue that most human scent communication is naive, and could be quite dangerous in the wild, where predators still roam who can detect what is likely a very strong series of smells from our bodies, clothing, and hair-care products—scents we have either grown accustomed to or were never able to detect with our comparatively weak senses. Animals from all parts of the kingdom detect smells and tastes, and the very vast majority do so better than we do. While it will be impossible to discuss all of the examples from nature, it will be instructive to take some of the most interesting ones under consideration, which will provide some context before we explore human abilities and limitations.

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Examples from Nonhumans Throughout the animal kingdom, olfactory communication holds a strong influence over the behaviors of others, both inter- and intraspecifically. This is especially true among gregarious species. Many hymenopterans—like ants, wasps, and bees—use scent to communicate, to regulate behavior, to sound warnings, to control the influx or production of resources into their home, and even to govern the sex lives of others. In communal societies “almost every part of colony behavior is mediated by pheromones,” including whether or not workers can reproduce, which is controlled by the queen.13 This, of course, seems quite alien to the human mind—imagine needing permission from your president or prime minister to have sex!—but olfactory signaling can be faster, more convenient, and more accurate within a highly communal society. Olfactory communication can be achieved through most media one would expect, including wind, water, or direct application of chemicals to noses or antennae. It is highly effective in situations where vision or hearing can be limited, and requires very small traces of matter in order to be detected in the air. One can smell the tiniest particles from a warm apple pie, for instance, and know almost exactly how it will taste. Examples of scent production and consumption in nature are varied and diffuse. Detection is capable by most known species of animals and possibly more plant species than one would expect (although these obviously use different organs to detect air- or water-borne signals). Honeybees are one of the more interesting examples from hymenoptera, and most animal studies enthusiasts will be familiar with von Frisch’s study, which famously brought to light the waggle dance of Apis mellifera. What is less likely to be generally known, however, is that there is an olfactory aspect to this rhetorical performance, as well, which has received little attention to this point. In the bee waggle dance, which is often used by foraging bees to inform hivemates of particularly rich caches of resources, a returning bee will perform an elaborate dance that includes round or figure-eight patterns of movement, accompanied by buzzing and rhythmic shaking of their rear ends. What most people do not know is that twofold odor signaling occurs in this process: one bee carries the scent of the flower species she has recently visited, and upon returning to the hive she activates scent glands when she finds a good source of food, luring her sister workers in to watch the performance of her dance.14

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The flowers with the best nectar transmit a specific fragrance which ensures that they are the most sought after. Thus, in this simple fashion, traffic is regulated according to the law of supply and demand not only to benefit the bees but also to promote pollination and seed yield of plant varieties rich in nectar. A new and hitherto unknown side of the biological significance of flower fragrance is thus revealed. Its great diversity and strict species specificity communicate a truly charming scent language.15

Thus is an interesting sequence of multi-species, even multi-kingdom, communication played out. A flower communicates through scent the type of riches it holds; a bee is lured in and explores the flower’s contours, hoping it was not the siren call of a pitcher, or other carnivorous plant; the experienced bee returns home to tell tales of the argosy on distant shores, perhaps like the ghost of Sychaeus telling Dido of the horde that would allow her to flee her home in Tyre and build the great city of Carthage. While probably less romantic than the image of poetic bees and their flower muses, we also know that bees demonstrate a form of gustatory rhetoric, according to Donald R. Griffin. He claims “there is a great deal of communication among members of a hive of bees, largely through exchange of stomach contents and transmission of chemical signals.”16 This intentional vomiting and redistribution of foodstuffs allows the bees to regulate worker activity. By taking a survey of the various stomach contents of their hive mates, workers are able to tell what materials are in short supply in the hive, and thus recalibrate their foraging efforts. While humans might consider this method unappealing, it is the honeybee equivalent of polling the entire family about what needs to go on the grocery list before heading to the store. Because bees are such complex gustatory and olfactory communicators, they provide many examples of additional forms of olfactory rhetoric. One important aspect of scent production is that of pheromone secretion. Bees, like most animals, secrete a variety of pheromones; one of these is called the queen substance. It is excreted from the mandibular glands of a queen bee, and consumed by her workers. Much like linguistic communication, one olfactory “word” or “phrase” can hold several meanings, depending on the situation in which it is used. Researchers have discovered at least three meanings for the queen substance, based on the context of the excretion.17

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1. In one case, it prevents the worker bees from rearing any of the larvae as queens. This is useful for the queen to prevent challengers to her throne. 2. Another use of the queen substance is that it prevents workers’ ovaries from developing, which allows the queen to maintain sole breeding rights in the hive. All of the worker bees being female, colonies would not survive long if its workers were allowed to breed. 3. Finally, during the queen’s nuptial flight, the substance acts as a sexual attractant to the male drones who are otherwise rarely seen by the human eye. This communication via the queen substance ensures fertilization and the ability to pass down her, and only her, genes. This last example indicates the types of effect possible through a class of substance called releasing pheromones. These are a sort of rapid effect communication system, not unlike vocalizing or providing visual cues. Another type is the priming pheromone (or primer) which provides a delayed effect that is primarily physiological, such as the prevention of ovary development above. In mammals, priming pheromones can elicit sexual behavior, for instance. Mammals also provide informational pheromones to one another, often originating in the anogenital area. By smelling another individual, most mammals can divine information about an individual’s identity, their diet, whether they are ready to breed, their dominance level, and their general health. Insects have additional pheromone types. Most viewers of nature documentaries are well familiar with the trail pheromones used by many species, including all varieties of ant. What they might not be familiar with, however, is the existence of propaganda pheromones, which provide false information to confuse their enemies. Ants can and do use their pheromones to lie, which is quite necessary in a world full of noses and antennae that can coopt the signals of one species in order to better hunt them down. Alarm pheromones and sexual attractants round out the main types of pheromones we have discovered among insects. It is also very possible that mammals display some form of these, whether humans are able to detect them or not. Scientists have been able to isolate some of these powerful chemical signals, including one specific attractant named bombykol, which was the first pheromone concentrated and tested on another species. The sexual attractant of female Bombyx mori silk moths, bombykol released

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into the air allows males of that species to find females with their antennae, following an airborne trail based on the strength and direction of the odor.18 This allows moths with poor eyesight to detect potential mates from much farther away, and is therefore a very efficient form of communication that steps outside the human audio-visual norm. Both predator and prey species use their noses to intercept olfactory messages of other animal and even plant species. Humans, of course, exploit this ability in some species that frequently share space with us, like truffle pigs and dogs. While Margo DeMello reminds us that there is only evidence for a few hundred years of truffling activity by humans using service animals, it is very likely that pigs especially have been used to find the buried delicacies for as long as they have been domesticated, if informally, since the pig needs little prompting to find them, while dogs need training and encouragement.19 There is of course a long history of truffle consumption, dating back to the ancient world, and including what might be called a truffle dark age because their heady aroma was thought by medieval Christians to be an obvious tool of their devils and demons. Nonetheless, pigs and dogs are far better suited to finding the buried culinary treasures than are we humans. The power of animal noses is more than merely profitable to chefs and connoisseurs, though. We use various species of animals, including those we would normally classify as vermin, to carry out a number of chores our inferior noses cannot: detecting mold, finding destructive insects, seeking out chemical residues associated with bomb manufacturing, inspecting vehicles for drugs or other contraband, and searching for buried victims of avalanches or earthquakes. The most common assistance animals in the modern United States are those used by military and police forces, and their tasks are overwhelmingly based on making up for humans’ poor senses of smell.20 It is obvious that bees, wasps, insects, and various notoriously wellendowed mammals can use their superb senses of smell to communicate and influence behavior, but we know relatively little about the sense of smell in our fellow primates, since it has long been assumed that (like humans) their noses are not that sensitive, and are thus relegated to the secondary senses bin that we only use when sight and hearing fail us. One researcher laments that chemical signaling is so “underappreciated” in the Old World primates, and she suggests that there is much diversity of structure and use, which would allow for a variety of behaviors resulting from chemical cues.21 Work on primates is ongoing, and connections between

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human and nonhuman primate abilities are sure to crop up, but it is still too preliminary to make confident conclusions or generalizations across species lines. It would be better to consider what we know about humans in isolation before discussing possible cross-species similarities. Smell and taste abilities will be treated separately, with the usual caveat that separating sense functions that are so intertwined is somewhat artificial and sterile.

Odor and Human Animals The sense of smell has not gained much traction as a communicative medium in most disciplines. There are a few exceptions, and it will be worthwhile to briefly explore their treatment in rhetorical theory and biosemiotics. Dominique Lestel reminds us that biosemioticians treat communication by odor as a form of writing, not speaking.22 This suggests a mode of literacy often requiring sensory abilities with which humans are not equipped. Whether we think of scent marking by urinating, rubbing, or excreting chemicals to create trails, there is a certain similarity with the visual process of rubbing ink or graphite on a surface in visuallyidentifiable patterns to communicate. Orality is evanescent and perhaps special because it takes advanced technology to encode the spoken word and replay it at a later date. In my own lifetime, I recall my (much) older brothers owning 8-tracks of all the best music, from Foghat to Lynyrd Skynyrd. I owned cassette tapes and CDs of my favorite grunge bands, while my parents had their vinyl albums of John Denver and the Muppets, as well as several other Christmas albums (which was about the only time the records were played) until I was into my teens. These transcriptions of sound resemble (however metaphorically) the way we treat smells, as well. Tema Milstein describes how the scent of animals has been used as an excuse to selectively separate their bodies from our minds in the development of zoological garden enclosures. As early as 1961, “early glass fronts added to interior cages were championed as serving to restrict ‘offensive odors’ to the zoo’d animal space.”23 Rather than force human patrons to suffer momentarily through the same stench and squalor the animals were made to occupy for their entire lives, it seemed better to zookeepers to separate animals both bodily and sensually from humans—at least those senses that were more prone to register the wrongness of caging wild animals. Olfactory rhetorics thus denied still

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speak forcefully for their importance in human moral decision-making. That we do not as easily identify the horrible living conditions of animals in zoos by merely looking at them or hearing them speaks volumes about the banality of the seen object, the susceptibility of our audio-visual biases to mental editing. Much like the violence we casually witness on American television, it is so much easier to look past the crime scene peopled with rotting corpses on a program like “CSI” than it could ever be to smell past it. Moreover, if the smell of the abattoir or the feedlot ever accompanied our meat in the supermarket, it would never make it into our homes. Natural and experimental observation suggests that while humans don’t favor smell as a primary source of information, it can nonetheless be a potent resource for detecting certain types of signals. If you can believe it, up until the 1990s, human olfactory signaling had largely been discounted among researchers, mainly because they thought the human olfactory system was vestigial. Interest in the sense of smell did exist among a small portion of the community, but has not been vigorously interrogated until the twenty-first century.24 Tristram Wyatt recalls that prior to the advent of professional science, we knew that nonhuman animals communicated messages via smell long before we could hope to comprehend the underlying processes. “The [ancient] Greeks knew that secretions from a female dog in heat were attractive to male dogs” and much later, in 1623, Charles Butler published The Feminine Monarchi, which makes a less direct behavior-to-biology connection: “an injured bee’s ‘ranke smell’ would attract other angry bees to sting.”25 Through the imputation of anger in these understandably provoked bees, Butler connects the smell stimulus to a debatably rhetorical call to action by means of emotional arousal—bees become angry at the death of a comrade, which they detect through scent, so they are convinced to attack invaders. In a rare case of attributing a useful skill to nonhumans while excluding human animals, most people did not believe that we could perform such smell-based persuasion. It was not until 1959 that the Nobel laureate Adolf Butenandt identified the first pheromone—a chemical signal that has evolved for the purpose of communicating between members of one or more species—and it would be 31 years after that before scientists finally came around to the idea that humans had the capacity to emit and detect pheromones (although work toward proving just that began around the same time as Butenandt’s discovery for nonhumans).26

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Nonetheless, it was not until 1991 that the mystery of how a human’s sense of smell works unraveled.27 If this fact is not at least mildly alarming, place it next to other developments of that year, such as the Internet becoming widely available in the United States, or Bryan Adams’s “(Everything I Do) I Do It for You” being Billboard’s yearend top song. While this might be a sign of my own age, these things seem much more recent than one would expect in relation to scientists understanding a concept as seemingly simple as “humans can communicate via smell.” It is difficult to not find such a timeline shocking, and it is indicative of the general neglect our sense of smell suffers. Part of the reason for this was fed by the strong human audio-visual bias that restricted interest in our sense of smell. Also at fault is our assumption that because our noses are so limited compared to supersmellers like wolves and great cats, there wasn’t much to be found in studies of human olfaction. But it turns out the nose and all it holds is quite important to human communication, especially when it becomes more personal and intimate (which is a statement that is meant to clearly urge caution reading what follows in the rest of this section, if one is of a more Victorian sensibility toward human sexuality). When we are close enough to smell one another, our noses become vastly more important—sending signals to both our neocortex, for conscious processing (as of odor identification), and our limbic system for emotional processing (memory and affect).28 A development that was vastly important in the early 1990s was that scientists were able to locate the human vomeronasal organ (or VNO), which is an aperture about 1–2 mm in diameter on each side of the nose. These are tiny tubes that run under the nasal respiratory mucosa.29 Thought vestigial, it was discovered that the human VNO is functional and grows during fetal development. It is also affected by hormonal differences during growth, which helps account for gender-specific responses to chemical stimuli.30 Pheromones are able to alter behavior, even in humans, and they work their electrophysiological effects with a quick response that suggests a strong potential for medicinal use.31 Whether humans can intentionally deploy pheromones to alter the behaviors of others, or whether this is purely autonomic, is up for debate, but some research into male pheromones of the androstene group suggest some male odors may act to comfort scared or angry females, or to pacify them before initiating a sexual encounter.

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Androstene is most prominent on male axillary hair and skin surfaces (contributing to armpit smell); it stimulates the female VNO, resulting in changes to autonomic activity.32 Various studies have attempted to reproduce the results of smelling androstenol or androstadienone, and have had mixed results. Grosser reports a reduction in nervousness, tension, and other negative self-appraisals reported by the women in one study.33 Benton ran a different study that applied androstenol to the lips of female subjects who were in the middle of their menstrual cycles, which led to them reporting more submissive, and less aggressive, moods (but the pheromones did not affect other bipolar mood responses, like happiness/sadness, sexiness/unsexiness, or lethargic/lively feelings).34 The study tracked response over full menstrual cycles, and suggests that if androstenol is a human male pheromone (the study was performed in the 1980s, before this question was considered settled), its greatest influence is on women who are approaching optimal fertility.35 Probably not coincidentally, this effect is enhanced by females’ fluctuating ability to smell—mid-cycle (or shortly thereafter) is also when a woman’s sense of smell is the keenest.36 It is entirely possible that the armpit smell of men, likely transmitted during hugging or shielding/protecting actions, is a sort of doping mechanism to make women more receptive to sexual overtures; we know that in several other animal species androstenol elicits an “immobilization reflex” in females that were already sexually receptive.37 In another study of the effects on human women, the subjects reported enhanced feelings of submissiveness, especially by those women who were in the middle of their menstrual cycles, but not direct arousal when no other stimuli were presented. (i.e., without an actual man around, smelling one chemical alone in a sterile laboratory setting is likely inadequate to arouse women whose sexual preferences are generally unknown—pheromones almost assuredly act in conjunction with other olfactory stimuli, and certainly are enhanced with sight, sound, touch, etc.) Sexual status, and perhaps the smoothing of social inhibitions surrounding sex, are not the only functions of human olfactory communication. Each of us has a personal scent that early in our lives attracted our parents to us, and that later in life attract our children if we choose to breed. Odor cues from lactating women, for instance, affect the behavior of newborns in multiple ways, including arousal modulation, the fine-tuning of interactions, head orientation, oral activity, and possibly

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even eliciting directional crawling from a distance.38 These smells originate from various sources, including the nipple, the areola, milk, and colostrum. If collected, they are effective in attracting infants for about 60 minutes; however, breast feeding is not always strictly necessary to develop this response, as collected cow’s milk proves equally attractive for some babies tested.39 As we develop, our sense of smell might be less immediately necessary for our survival, but it is still important in later-life goals, like securing mates and growing families. Adult humans find it very easy to pick out the scents of their loved ones—especially their children and their mates. Several researchers have performed variations on the t-shirt test, which asks test subjects to forgo perfumes and deodorants while wearing a t-shirt for several days. The t-shirts are collected and coded, and participants are asked to smell the various shirts without knowing who they belonged to. Participants then rate the shirts’ odors in several categories, including: likelihood that this is one’s own shirt, that this is a mate’s shirt, pleasantness or unpleasantness of smell, etc. Several tests found that smells are assumed male if they are stronger, muskier, or unpleasant, and that odors are assumed female if they are sweeter or more pleasant.40 While it is fairly simple to identify individuals through personal odor, it is also possible to detect emotional states. In one experiment, researchers collected underarm pads that subjects wore while watching scary or funny movies. People were often able to distinguish by smell alone which type of movie the person who had been wearing the pad had watched.41 Once again there was a gendered response to these tests, however. Women were better able to tell when male subjects were scared, while men were better able to tell when women were happy. There are multiple ways to read these responses. Perhaps we can conclude that happiness in women and fear in men are better disguised from other sensory systems, or— and I find this more likely—it could be that male feelings of safety and female feelings of pleasure are more adaptively significant (i.e., if a man is scared or a woman is displeased, survival or the likelihood of breeding are, respectively, reduced). Without more data, however, these or any number of other conclusions are little more than informed speculation about gendered behaviors, which are often best left “open” until more evidence is accumulated. Smelling serves other purposes than breeding and identifying family members and their emotional states. One area where traditional medicine

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had surpassed science-based practice for a time was in the use of olfaction to diagnose and treat diseases that present in urine smell. Urine has long been a diagnostic tool for the identification of gout, rubella, diphtheria, and a long list of other diseases.42 Well before we understood the causes of these diseases, they had often been discovered based on the practice of smelling the urine of a patient and acting accordingly. (However, actions deemed appropriate in some pre-scientific medical traditions could do more harm than good, and in most cases were limited to treating symptoms alone.) With the rise of laboratory tests, it is now uncommon for medical professionals to use their noses in this capacity, though there are still some situations (e.g., detecting gangrene in a field hospital) when the sniff test is a quick and ready time saving tool. General olfactory sensitivity in humans is, as mentioned above, different not just among individuals, but also between genders. While the assumption had been that any such differences must be cultural, related to traditional divisions of labor (women spending more time preparing meals, for instance, might make them more sensitive to food odors), several studies have found that these differences bridge several distinctly different cultures. One study in particular tested four different ethnic groups and concluded that there could be fundamental biological differences in the ways human males and females have evolved the sense of smell.43 Women of all four cultures outperformed men in their ability to identify a wide range of odors. The gap between male and female ability was slight in all groups, but it was consistently there, suggesting that sex differences in chemosensory function could be a human universal (although more research is required). Much like gender gaps in verbal and spatial ability, the effects of this difference are subtle and generalized. A single man could outperform some women, but on average women were more likely to perform better on this series of tests. Results typically only differed by 3–5% more odors identified, so that finding has almost no bearing on function, especially when relying on verbal accounts of sensory input (i.e., better performing individuals could just be more adept at discriminating between smells, regardless of the raw power of their instrument). What is more interesting is that the results of these tests are consistent across age groups, meaning hormone differences within the same gender do not seem to influence scores.44 One reason for engrained biological difference or developmental difference is in mate identification and recognition of cross-gender bodily states

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(several scent recognition studies use axillary or vaginal odors to test sensory ability and discrimination, since scent in the armpit and anogenital areas are most pronounced in humans). Humans respond to the odors of other people, and we each have individual scent markers that are distinguishable from others. By smell alone, people can surprisingly accurately pick out the odors of their mate from among several options, and can distinguish between male and female odors quite consistently.45 Odor serves as a display among humans, and propinquity enhances ability; this is why people living in crowded urban settings are far more likely to mask, or even enhance, their personal body odor with the use of perfumes and deodorants. Among modern westerners, one particularly interesting cultural assumption showed up in several tests of odor identification. When men and women were asked to identify shirts that were worn by people of both genders and rank them as pleasant or unpleasant, the shirts that were presumed to be those previously worn by men were deemed unpleasant smelling, while shirts thought to be from women were thought pleasant smelling. Actual use by the guessed gender did not always match presumptions, which betrays cultural assumptions held by both genders that men smell bad and women smell good. Only the shirts identified as those worn by male mates of the female testers escaped this assumption, being identified as pleasant (even the shirts men identified as self-worn were reported to be unpleasant smelling).46 If these results are general, we may be doing a disservice to young people by deluding them about their body odor (i.e., telling boys they always stink is psychologically damaging, while telling girls they always smell pleasant could be misleading and cause embarrassment later in life). Stronger male smell and perceptions of “bad” odor are in part due to men’s larger apocrine glands, where size of the gland corresponds to more concentrated odor. We can use this information to estimate gender, much like we would if we only knew someone’s height or weight; it’s not always accurate, but serves as a good shorthand.47 Apocrine glands, found concentrated in armpits and genital areas, are definitely used for communication, and we know this based on at least six reasons. They produce body odor that we often judge unpleasant in crowded areas, which affects behavior. They are functional only after puberty, and before menopause. They are larger in males. They also differ by size and number according to one’s race. They excrete the most when we’re excited or stressed. And they produce steroids known to influence behavior in other mammals.

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While male axillary odors may cause calming or aroused feelings in women, female axillary odor is thought to drive menstrual synchrony with other women.48 That is, if groups of women are regularly exposed to the smells of other women in their group (most often by living or working together), their menstrual cycles will actually gravitate toward a lead female’s schedule. Some women are far more likely than others to drive this trend, and it is not yet known why. One is tempted to speculate about dominance or hierarchy, but there is as yet no basis for this assumption. What is known is that some women are able to influence other women’s cycles, and it is often the same women who dictate these shifts as their living and working groups change.

Taste and Human Animals Those who are queasy about human sexuality may now resume reading, and they should be delighted to find out that taste is the next matter of discussion—a topic near and dear to the Victorian’s heart. It is not merely limited to Victorian tastes however; throughout the history of rhetoric, and across cultures, taste is a traditional concern. We see the topic crop up in almost every historical period, and by writers of all races and genders. Ibn al-Muqaffa’ (d. ca. 756) claims that the art of rhetoric is simply presenting one’s view with succinctness.49 This is a view that values style very highly, sometimes to the detriment of content, not unlike Confucian court rhetoric, or twelfth-century European courtly dialogue. Henry Johnstone, Jr. tells us that “rhetoric is an art of getting attention.”50 Sometimes this includes uttering that which is distasteful in order to shock or cause a scene. As an expression of the third classical canon of rhetoric, taste exemplifies that nexus of style and audience that exists between any sender and receiver(s) of signals. Taste in written and oral persuasion is, we generally assume, a metaphor—that thing which Phil Dolph refers to as “the nature of man’s responses to nature and to art.”51 It is interesting, of course, that nature (and the nature of nature) is so prominent in Dolph’s definition of artistic discrimination, and there is good reason for that. Because Dolph is a scholar who studies the work of George Campbell, he understands the traditional recursiveness of concrete reference to taste and tasting and the metaphorical use of appreciation, savoring, and consumption (!) when describing fine art. Campbell’s Philosophy of Rhetoric espouses the view that eloquence must be both a fine and a useful art, and Campbell

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believed in several layers of taste existing simultaneously.52 We find these layers in the imagination, gratified by wonder, goodness, and novelty. However, all of these fine things must be paired with some degree of felt pleasure, according to Campbell, even though there is no particular requirement that these must be resting on the tongue itself. Oddly, this idea of layering has long persisted in considerations of (artistic) taste and (culinary) tasting. One researcher working on sixteenth-century aesthetics noted a similar idea in British artistic circles that very well could have later influenced Campbell, who was working toward the end of the eighteenth century. She comments that it was very common in Britain to layer taste on taste in exploring the connection between aesthetic and gustatory taste, appetite, and consumption in literary circles.53 While this only connects 200 or so years in one geographic area, it is worth noting that the connections across this metaphorical relationship are often intricate and inextricable. One reason for this is because cooking is “deeply rhetorical” as both an art and a craft itself, and likely predates the evolution of Homo sapiens entirely. Consuming and appreciating art—whether it is culinary, literary, filmic, or related to any number of genres—is in our DNA more deeply than those things that make us peculiarly human! And because DNA is rhetorical itself (it is literally a set of instructions transcribed countless times and sent over a highly persistent medium throughout the body), eating can be considered the consumption not just of material, but of information as well.54 Diners at a fancy restaurant are both the audience of a chef and the readers of her texts. If meals, or words, are good enough, an audience will devour them with a voracious appetite. Despite the interesting connections between rhetorical taste and tasting rhetorically (the exploration of which would make a wonderful dissertation project in the history of rhetoric, no doubt), literal taste is where the focus of this discussion should remain. There are obvious challenges to measuring the effects of literal taste among other species. We know animals have preferences, and those preferences can change based on abundance or scarcity of food types, like in the example of bees presented earlier in this chapter. Catfish, we know, are likely very attuned to the sense of taste—much more than humans could be with our limited abilities with this sense. Called “swimming tongues” by some who study them, catfish have taste buds that are part of their external bodies, and the oropharyngeal cavity.55 If that weren’t enough (and just imagine having to taste everything you

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touch, everything that floats by on the breeze, even everything you sit on) the catfish outdoes us again because their taste buds are more sensitive than ours, despite being so much more numerous as well. We know that animals whose tasting power is likely quite similar to our own also have strong preferences for certain foods. Laboratory monkeys have shown that they are partial to certain foods over others, for instance, and if one test subject is given a better reward for a similar task, they will become excited and even violent because they feel their rewards are being doled out in an unfair manner (which they are). Nonetheless, taste is often personal, or communal, or influenced by tradition or need; thus it is difficult to make generalizations about taste. Instead, it may be more valuable to the reader to think about one’s own personal taste preferences while considering some basic information related to what we know about human taste, and how this could be related to that of other animals. Human taste is measured through clinical gustometry tests.56 These help doctors diagnose taste disorders and to find processing opportunities for food scientists. The tests function by applying four concentrations to test strips (sweet, sour, salty, and bitter), and measuring the patient response. In addition to detecting ability, which is highly variable among humans, these tests can indicate disease risk from bad diet, tobacco smoking, or alcohol abuse. Tests results can vary prodigiously by country, though many cultures that share dietary traditions can adopt similar tests because they are conditioned to taste in similar manners. One example of adapting a new test based on results from another country resulted in some interesting observations. In adapting a German protocol, Portuguese researchers found that Portuguese taste buds were less adept at identifying tastes in all categories.57 They theorize that what we call the Mediterranean Diet, which uses heavy salt and spices, but fewer unnatural flavorings, could dull the sense of taste among Portuguese subjects. While the use of a greater variety of vegetables and herbs with fewer artificial flavors is probably a healthy result of this diet, increased salt intake could be harmful in some cases. Understanding these things can help physicians prescribe changes in patient nutrition to militate against several risk factors. Diane Ackerman calls taste that most social of all the senses. It is intimate, she almost purrs, as “we can’t taste things at a distance.”58 We need to be up close and personal to taste a thing, as it must be inserted into our mouths and carried over the tongue to do it justice. The mere act of describing a tasting of things has a sensual element to

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it that conjures suggestive sexual imagery in situations that are otherwise innocent. Indeed, food, drink, and sex are commonly linked because of their intimate nature and the rush most people get from episodes of extreme sensory stimulation that might encourage the release of euphoric chemicals in the body, such as dopamine or adrenaline. Adult humans have around 10,000 taste buds in their mouths (and numbers among species vary wildly—rabbits have 17,000, while parrots only have about 400).59 Most people are able to detect saltiness at 1 part per 400 and bitterness—because it is so much more important for survival—at as little as 1 part per 2 million.60 About every week or so, a taste bud is replaced by a fresh reinforcement, and taste buds are sloughed or damaged fairly easily, as anyone who regularly drinks hot coffee or tea is sure to understand. What is striking about human taste is that it is so much weaker than our ability to smell (which is notoriously weak); it takes about 25,000 times as many molecules to taste food as it does to smell it.61 Nonetheless, taste seems so much more central to family and culture, and the rituals appertaining thereto, that it is far easier to think about pleasant childhood memories like holiday meals without reference to their scents but not their flavors. Indeed, eating and drinking are not just vital for human survival, but also provide entertainment and opportunities for social bonding. Changes in our other senses will often reflect changes in our ability to smell and taste.62 Humans have learned to manipulate these phenomena by multiple means, including the addition of non-nutritious food additives to manipulate the way food or drink appears, its odor, its texture. Spices give a warm feeling to the mouth, or numbness, or even a form of pain that many people feel as concurrently pleasurable. Carbonation makes a drink bubbly and fun, and adds a sharp sting at the back of the throat and tongue. It is in our nature to manipulate food, but sometimes in the name of convenience or profit we take something that should be sustaining and turn it into something harmful and false. For many of us who grew up in the second half of the twentieth century, modernist notions of business and time value steamrolled our appreciation of taste for taste’s sake. Erin Branch identifies a peculiar moment in American culinary history that is both enlightening and troubling with regard to the health and nutritional crises stemming from modern food science. The argument Branch makes is that Julia Child’s groundbreaking Mastering the Art of French Cooking was something of an antidote to the instant, the frozen, and the canned that had overtaken

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most pantries and iceboxes after World War II.63 These prepared “food” items (which any sane being would call the cruel atrocities of the food science industry, and food studies scholars and journalists like Michael Pollan have condemned wholeheartedly) are generally little more than vehicles for excessive levels of salt and sugar in an attempt to addict the unwitting consumer. Taste, and the act of sitting and tasting socially, was sacrificed on the altar of expediency, and dinner with the family turned into a tray of stuff vaguely resembling food plopped on the coffee table in front of the television. Branch acknowledges that Child’s book may have excluded those individuals who were more concerned about their schedules than their health, or whose budgets would not allow for experiments with specialty items like foie gras or venison. And it is a shame that economic and social forces conspired against home cooking (even if those same forces allowed women to get out of the home and into the workforce, granting them far greater personal agency than before). Nonetheless, Child’s book was a remedy to the damage modernist gustatory rhetoric did to at least one nation of people who are confused why they or their children are obese, despite replacing all of the natural fats in their diets with “lite” versions of everything that substitute massive loads of heart-damaging refined sugars for a nutrient the body needs (especially in the development and maintenance of the brain—an organ made mostly of fat). Unlike the TV dinner and the boxes of cereal that start your day “right” (including thinly veiled attempts to disguise the fact that you are literally consuming cookies, or marshmallows, or chocolate chunks instead of a healthy breakfast), anti-modernist trends focus on the pleasurable sensations derived from eating and cooking well. In the case of Child’s book, this appealed to upper-middle-class audiences with fewer time constraints and economic concerns than the less privileged (especially housewives) of the 1950s and beyond.64 Appreciation of food and of the sensory pleasures it brings becomes more difficult when dealing with canned or frozen ingredients that are soggy, wilted, and often loaded with so much salt as to make one canned vegetable barely distinguishable from another. Because the French in the 1950s had a reputation as more sensual or hedonistic than Americans of the time, Child was able to capitalize on the forbidden desires of people who remembered eating actual food, and titillated her audience of proto-connoisseurs who had been denied sensory satisfaction for too long.

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But modernist practices have not only expanded, they’ve become weaponized. Almost anyone who owns a Netflix account has seen the cottage industry of anti-fast food documentaries cropping up in the last two decades, revealing sickening food manipulation and construction practices. Pink slime, parts of thousands of cows in one hamburger, added flavors and scents, what should be criminal levels of salt and sugar additives… the list of ways corporations are abusing food science (not to mention food consumers) is long and growing, and regulation is often lackadaisical at best. Further, our own senses are being targeted in a most mercenary fashion. Fast food companies vent their fryers into the open air on the street so that people are bombarded with the overwhelming stench of french fries and other greasy treats that should be rarely consumed. Chemical additives that are at best unnecessary, and at worst life-threatening, are injected into foods to make them smell more like the food they no longer resemble. Like any struggle in nature, there is a battle for sensory information going on, but in the case of gustatory and olfactory rhetorics, we are allowing corporations to wage war on us in order to increase profits for stockholders. In essence, humanity has hijacked its own sense organs in order to make money off its own destruction. What is the remedy? Unfortunately, that is a topic for other books— countless have been written on the subject, and the trend is growing. The important message we might take away from this chapter, perhaps this entire section of A Hoot in the Light, is that although we might ignore some senses in part or in whole, others do not. We can rest assured that denying the information our noses or skin communicates to us can literally kill us, and in some cases others (many of whom are from our own species) will actively work to do just that because it brings them profit. I would urge the reader to keep this view in mind as we transition from a discussion of the senses we think we know to a discussion of senses we are almost completely unaware of. Here’s why: just like with the senses we’ve deprioritized, the information we ignore is still out there. Even if we can’t tell we’re radiating heat, the lurking pit viper can. Even if we don’t know we’re able to be located electromagnetically, the shark can find us. We communicate on several media we can’t even reliably detect, let alone grok, blindly broadcasting our information into space for anyone—or anything—to detect and use against us. Our sensory experiences shape our understanding of rhetorical practice, which in turn has shaped the history of rhetorical theory from its inception. Sadly, with regard to our understanding of communication, that means we are often flying blind.

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Notes 1. R. A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land (Penguin Publishing Group, 1987). 213–14. 2. Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto (Penguin Press, 2008). 1. 3. Galapagos with David Attenborough, vol. 3 (Sky One, 2013), 18:30–50. 4. Owen M. Williamson, “Culinary Rhetoric and Rhetorical Cookery: Plato was Right After All” (2013). 5. Justine Beatrice Wells, “A Taste For Things: Sensory Rhetoric Beyond The Human” (2015); J. Sutton, “Barbarians at the Plate: Taming and Feeding the Modern American Family” (Bowker, 2005). 6. For those who are unfamiliar with this reference, Plato, in his Gorgias, compared philosophy with the nutritional advice a doctor could provide, while rhetoric was disparaged as mere cookery that seeks to dress up unwholesome food as something healthy. 7. Michael B. Schiffer and Andrea R. Miller, The Material Life of Human Beings: Artifacts, Behavior, and Communication (London and New York: Routledge, 1999). 47. 8. Lisa L. Phillips, “Smellscapes, Social Justice, and Olfactory Perception,” in Rhetoric Across Borders, ed. Anne Teresa Demo (Anderson, SC: Parlor Press, 2015), 36. 9. Williamson, “Culinary Rhetoric and Rhetorical Cookery: Plato Was Right After All,” 20. 10. Phillips, “Smellscapes, Social Justice, and Olfactory Perception,” 38. 11. Heini Hediger, “The Animal’s Expression,” in Readings in Zoosemiotics, ed. Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli, and Aleksei Turovski, Semiotics, Communication and Cognition (Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011), 130–31. 12. Thomas Bullfinch, Bullfinch’s Mythology (New York: Gramercy, 2003). 331. 13. Tristram D. Wyatt, “How Animals Communicate Via Pheromones (cover story),” American Scientist 103, no. 2 (2015): 114. 14. Karl von Frisch, “Decoding the Language of the Bee,” in Readings in Zoosemiotics, ed. Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli, and Aleksei Turovski (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011), 143. 15. Ibid. 16. Donald R. Griffin, “Is Man Language?,” in Readings in Zoosemiotics, ed. Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli, and Aleksei Turovski (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011), 347. 17. D. Brian Lewis and D. Michael Gower, Biology of Communication (New York: Wiley, 1980). 2–3.

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18. Karl Grammer, Bernhard Fink, and Nick Neave, “Human Pheromones and Sexual Attraction,” European Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Reproductive Biology 118, no. 2 (2005): 135. 19. Margo DeMello, Animals and Society: An Introduction to Human-Animal Studies (Columbia University Press, 2012). 198. 20. Ibid. 21. Marie J. E. Charpentier et al., “Nasopalatine Ducts and Flehmen Behavior in the Mandrill: Reevaluating Olfactory Communication in Old World Primates,” American Journal of Primatology 75, no. 7 (2013): 703, 10. 22. Dominique Lestel, “The Biosemiotics and Phylogenesis of Culture,” in Readings in Zoosemiotics, ed. Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli, and Aleksei Turovski (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011), 387. 23. Tema Milstein, “Banging on the Divide: Cultural Reflection and Refraction at the Zoo,” in Perspectives on Human-Animal Communication: Internatural Communication, ed. Emily Plec (New York: Routledge, 2013), 177. 24. Grammer, Fink, and Neave, “Human Pheromones and Sexual Attraction,” 135. 25. Wyatt, “How Animals Communicate Via Pheromones (cover story),” 114. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. 28. Grammer, Fink, and Neave, “Human Pheromones and Sexual Attraction,” 136. 29. Bernard I. Grosser et al., “Behavioral and Electrophysiological Effects of Androstadienone, a Human Pheromone,” Psychoneuroendocrinology 25, no. 3 (2000): 290. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid., 295–97. 32. Ibid., 289. 33. Ibid. 34. David Benton, “The Influence of Androstenol—A Putative Human Pheromone—On Mood Throughout the Menstrual Cycle,” Biological Psychology 15, no. 3–4 (1982): 249. 35. Ibid., 254. 36. Because individuals’ cycles can vary in length (it is common for 28–36 day cycles to occur depending on age and other factors), these findings are only roughly accurate—some variation is apt to occur. 37. David Benton and Vivien Wastell, “Effects of Androstenol on Human Sexual Arousal,” Biological Psychology 22, no. 2 (1986): 141. 38. Sébastien Doucet et al., “The “Smellscape” of Mother’s Breast: Effects of Odor Masking and Selective Unmasking on Neonatal Arousal, Oral, and Visual Responses,” Developmental Psychobiology 49, no. 2 (2007): 129. 39. Ibid., 130.

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40. Michael J. Russell, “Human Olfactory Communication,” Nature 260 (1976): 521. 41. Denise Chen and Jeannette Haviland-Jones, “Human Olfactory Communication of Emotion,” Perceptual and Motor Skills 91, no. 3 (2000): 1. 42. Richard L. Doty, “Olfactory Communication in Humans,” Chemical Senses 6, no. 4 (1981): 351. 43. Richard L. Doty et al., “Sex Differences in Odor Identification Ability: A Cross-Cultural Analysis,” Neuropsychologia 23, no. 5 (1985): 667. 44. Ibid., 669. 45. Margret Schleidt, “Personal Odor and Nonverbal Communication,” Ethology and Sociobiology 1, no. 3 (1980): 225–26. 46. Ibid., 230. 47. Doty, “Olfactory Communication in Humans,” 355–56. And the following “6 reasons”. 48. Ibid., 360. 49. Hussein Abdul-Raof, Arabic Rhetoric: A Pragmatic Analysis (Routledge, 2006). 50. Henry W. Johnstone Jr, “Rhetoric as a Wedge: A Reformulation,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 20, no. 4 (1990). 51. Phil Dolph, “Taste and ‘The Philosophy of Rhetoric’,” Western Speech 32, no. 2 (1968): 104. 52. Ibid., 106. 53. Jody Greene, “Accounting for Taste,” The Eighteenth Century 47, no. 1 (2006): 86. 54. Williamson, “Culinary Rhetoric and Rhetorical Cookery: Plato Was Right After All,” 19–20. 55. Hiromi Nakamura and Homei Miyashita, “Communication by Change in Taste,” in CHI ‘11 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Vancouver, BC, Canada: ACM, 2011), 2003. 56. João Carlos Ribeiro et al., “Cross-Cultural Validation of a Taste Test with Paper Strips,” European Archives of Oto-Rhino-Laryngology 273, no. 10 (2016): 3407. 57. Ibid., 3409. 58. Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses (Vntage Books, 1995). 127–28. 59. Ibid., 138. 60. Ibid., 139. 61. Ibid., 142. 62. Nakamura and Miyashita, “Communication by Change in Taste,” 2000. 63. Erin L. Branch, “‘Taste Analytically’: Julia Child’s Rhetoric of Cultivation,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 45, no. 2 (2015): 177. 64. Ibid., 178.

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References Abdul-Raof, Hussein. Arabic Rhetoric: A Pragmatic Analysis. Routledge, 2006. Ackerman, Diane. A Natural History of the Senses. Vntage Books, 1995. Benton, David. 1982. “The Influence of Androstenol—A Putative Human Pheromone—On Mood Throughout the Menstrual Cycle.” Biological Psychology 15, nos. 3–4: 249–56. Benton, David, and Vivien Wastell. 1986. “Effects of Androstenol on Human Sexual Arousal.” Biological Psychology 22, no. 2: 141–47. Branch, Erin L. 2015. “‘Taste Analytically’: Julia Child’s Rhetoric of Cultivation.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 45, no. 2: 164–84. Bullfinch, Thomas. 2003. Bullfinch’s Mythology. New York: Gramercy. Charpentier, Marie J. E., SylvÈRe Mboumba, Claude Ditsoga, and Christine M. Drea. “Nasopalatine Ducts and Flehmen Behavior in the Mandrill: Reevaluating Olfactory Communication in Old World Primates.” American Journal of Primatology 75, no. 7 (2013): 703–14. Chen, Denise, and Jeannette Haviland-Jones. “Human Olfactory Communication of Emotion.” Perceptual and Motor Skills 91, no. 3 (December 1, 2000): 771–81. DeMello, Margo. Animals and Society: An Introduction to Human-Animal Studies. Columbia University Press, 2012. Dolph, Phil. “Taste and ‘the Philosophy of Rhetoric’.” Western Speech 32, no. 2 (Spring1968): 104. Doty, Richard L. 1981. “Olfactory Communication in Humans.” Chemical Senses 6, no. 4: 351–76. Doty, Richard L., Steven Applebaum, Hiroyuki Zusho, and R. Gregg Settle. “Sex Differences in Odor Identification Ability: A Cross-Cultural Analysis.” Neuropsychologia 23, no. 5 (January 1, 1985): 667–72. Doucet, Sébastien, Robert Soussignan, Paul Sagot, and Benoist Schaal. 2007. “The ‘Smellscape’ of Mother’s Breast: Effects of Odor Masking and Selective Unmasking on Neonatal Arousal, Oral, and Visual Responses.” Developmental Psychobiology 49, no. 2: 129–38. Frisch, Karl von. “Decoding the Language of the Bee.” In Readings in Zoosemiotics, edited by Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli, and Aleksei Turovski. 141–55. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011. Galapagos with David Attenborough. vol. 3. Sky One, 2013. 18:30–50. Grammer, Karl, Bernhard Fink, and Nick Neave. 2005. “Human Pheromones and Sexual Attraction.” European journal of obstetrics and gynecology and reproductive biology 118, no. 2: 135–42. Greene, Jody. 2006. “Accounting for Taste.” The Eighteenth Century 47, no. 1: 85–89.

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Griffin, Donald R. “Is Man Language?” In Readings in Zoosemiotics, edited by Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli, and Aleksei Turovski. 343–56. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011. Grosser, Bernard I, Louis Monti-Bloch, Clive Jennings-White, and David L Berliner. “Behavioral and Electrophysiological Effects of Androstadienone, a Human Pheromone.” Psychoneuroendocrinology 25, no. 3 (2000): 289–99. Hediger, Heini. “The Animal’s Expression.” In Readings in Zoosemiotics, edited by Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli, and Aleksei Turovski. Semiotics, Communication and Cognition, 123–40. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011. Heinlein, R. A. Stranger in a Strange Land. Penguin Publishing Group, 1987. Johnstone Jr, Henry W. “Rhetoric as a Wedge: A Reformulation.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 20, no. 4 (1990): 333–38. Lestel, Dominique. “The Biosemiotics and Phylogenesis of Culture.” In Readings in Zoosemiotics, edited by Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli, and Aleksei Turovski. 377–410. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011. Lewis, D. Brian, and D. Michael Gower. Biology of Communication. New York: Wiley, 1980. Milstein, Tema. 2013. “Banging on the Divide: Cultural Reflection and Refraction at the Zoo.” In Perspectives on Human-Animal Communication: Internatural Communication, edited by Emily Plec, 162–181. New York: Routledge. Nakamura, Hiromi, and Homei Miyashita. “Communication by Change in Taste.” In CHI ‘11 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1999–2004. Vancouver, BC, Canada: ACM, 2011. Phillips, Lisa L. “Smellscapes, Social Justice, and Olfactory Perception.” In Rhetoric Across Borders, edited by Anne Teresa Demo. Anderson, SC: Parlor Press, 2015. Pollan, Michael. In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. Penguin Press, 2008. Ribeiro, João Carlos, Mariana Chaves, Carolina Chaves, Lisete Lemos, Eduardo D. Silva, António Paiva, and Thomas Hummel. “Cross-Cultural Validation of a Taste Test with Paper Strips.” European Archives of Oto-Rhino-Laryngology 273, no. 10 (October 1, 2016): 3407–11. Russell, Michael J. “Human Olfactory Communication.” Nature 260 (1976): 520. Schiffer, Michael B., and Andrea R. Miller. 1999. The Material Life of Human Beings: Artifacts, Behavior, and Communication. London and New York: Routledge. Schleidt, Margret. “Personal Odor and Nonverbal Communication.” Ethology and Sociobiology 1, no. 3 (September 1, 1980): 225–31. Sutton, J. “Barbarians at the Plate: Taming and Feeding the Modern American Family.” Bowker, 2005.

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Wells, Justine Beatrice. “A Taste for Things: Sensory Rhetoric Beyond the Human.” (2015). Williamson, Owen M. “Culinary Rhetoric and Rhetorical Cookery: Plato Was Right After All.” (2013). Wyatt, Tristram D. “How Animals Communicate Via Pheromones (Cover Story).” American Scientist 103, no. 2 (2015): 114–21.

PART III

Extra-Sensory Rhetorics: Beyond the Human Sensorium

CHAPTER 8

Thermoception

Is the body an obstacle when one associates with it in the search for knowledge? I mean, for example, do men find any truth in sight or hearing, or are not even the poets forever telling us that we do not see or hear anything accurately, and surely if those two physical senses are not clear or precise, our other senses can hardly be accurate, as they are all inferior to these.1

The senses are inaccurate, complains Socrates (via Plato). We cannot locate truth by perceiving it with our senses, our bodies, things that exist and can be verified. Truth is only found through the invisible entity of the soul, and the pure thought it provides, detached from all access to external reality (which Socrates would famously say is mere shadow puppetry on the primitive cave walls of human ignorance). Bodily urges are mere distractions from the important work of rational thought. Nonsense like love, safety from war, hunger, and taking care of our children undermine our ability to properly align our values. It is only through the purification of death that we may obtain knowledge—for, who needs brains to think things? Plato is an important thinker with whom I disagree on almost everything. His philosophy, to modern eyes, seems to be most often employed in service of maintaining an order where landed elites, mostly men, and definitely not foreigners, are in complete control of economic, political, and even moral structures. His rhetoric is sophistic and his politics are © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. C. Parrish, The Sensory Modes of Animal Rhetorics, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76712-9_8

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religious. He makes modern far-right Greek politicians, who now openly demonstrate neo-Nazi tendencies, look like compassionate progressives. Nonetheless, he is valuable, and important to the rhetorical tradition, and must not be ignored. At the very least, the quote above demonstrates the long and troubled history philosophy has shared with the inadequacy of human sensory abilities compared to those of other species. We have decent eyesight and passable hearing, and those are by far our most powerful (or at least immediate) sense organs when dealing with the external world. That Plato rejects them should definitely be read in keeping with his general assault on materialism, which anyone with an undergraduate science elective under their belt can classify as pure poppycock, but it can also be read as an appeal for more information than our senses alone can provide. This latter point, at least, is worth further investigation, but it does not mean we throw out the baby with the bath water—our available sense organs may be imperfect, but we have not yet reached the technological sophistication to easily and effectively replace them if they were lost. Later philosophers will make more successful appeals to pure reason, and yet this manner of idealist ostrich-holing is useful for very few people outside of philosophy departments and fundamentalist religious groups. Even ostriches don’t literally stick their heads in the sand to avoid the problems an external reality presents—that is merely an old commonplace of visual rhetoric that has persisted so long because of its comedic imagery. Socrates worries that the act of studying the natural world by observing it with his eyes would blind his soul altogether, a claim so foreign to post-Enlightenment thinkers that it is nearly incomprehensible, not only for reference to a soul (or if you believe in souls, the ability to blind them merely by studying things), but also to making an equivalence between observational science (or natural history, if you will) and the physical act of burning one’s retinas by watching a solar eclipse (a.k.a. solar retinopathy—there is no such thing as “soular” retinopathy, mind you). If you’ve made it this far into my argument, then I am likely preaching to the choir; you’ve accepted and incorporated some form of materialism (or at least a wishy washy dualism) into your worldview. Granting that humans must observe the world in order to understand it, in order to act in response to an ever-changeful environment, we are once again faced with a conundrum. Our senses are weak and flawed, but they are our best tools for survival. The way we respond to such unwelcome realities defines

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us; while it is simpler to reject an external world, to appeal to lives-after, knowledge or ideals, souls, and other invisible things that are of no help in the here and now, we are better off acknowledging our shortcomings as a species and trying to address them. The first step might be something as simple as an awareness raising effort like the one I am making in this book: we are communicating untold information via countless media, of which we can detect very few sources, let alone control them. We are solid, and therefore easy to echolocate. We produce thermal and chemical reactions, so infrared and ultraviolet detection reveals our presence. We leave our DNA on bandages, hair brushes, drinking glasses, and even inside other people where it may merge and retransmit or be rejected and die, as nature sees fit. Our footsteps leave vibrations on the earth, and our fear sticks in the noses of more able species. We are communicating always, and communication is the stuff of life. The last gasps of dying stars transmitted the gift of heavier elements that formed our lonely planet and enabled the evolution of DNA, and our DNA writes its instructions and copies, and copies, and copies, and “Oops!” there was a mistake and now something new exists. The new will die an inglorious death if the error that created it isn’t useful, or it will live and breed and replace us all if the error provides an advantage in producing more of itself than we can reproduce. Biosemioticians treat life as a great act of communication in order to survive in a natural world full of laws, and I would argue that rhetoricians should follow suit. Selection favors those species that are best able to communicate; the only species that think humans are the best at it is humans (and we’re probably biased on this matter, wouldn’t you agree?). Our greatest skill is not communication, but what communication enables, which is cooperation. Communication also represents our worst enemy as a species, enabling our overwhelming drive to deceive. If cooperation might save us, it is deceit that will be our undoing, and the language-use that we find so sophisticated powers both forces. Language, like any technology, can be misused, and if it is a powerful enough tool, then it will be mighty enough to destroy more completely. But communication happens with or without us, and in sophisticated ways that we are too ignorant to grasp. Even plants have been found to communicate and persuade. While this is not necessarily the point of this chapter, it is interesting to note that this happens in several ways. One of which occurs when mycorrhizal fungi colonize land plants. They

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do this to many varied species, exchanging mineral nutrients for carbon in a sort of symbiotic partnership. They can act as a signaling conduit between plants, providing an “early warning system” against herbivore attack, which will allow plants to deploy appropriate defenses or delay budding activity.2 Theirs is a rhetoric completely alien to our own at first blush, but observations about such disparate forms as exist on Earth are fundamental to expanding our view of what is rhetorical. Common mycelial networks connect plants of the same or different species by transmitting signal compounds that are undetectable in normal quantities by the human sensorium. Communication occurs through these networks when healthy plants are connected to blighted plants, such as tomato plants with early leaf blight. One study showed that aphid-free plants that were connected to aphid-infested plants via the network acted in the same defensive manner, releasing volatile organic compounds that repel aphids and attract a species of parasitoid wasps that eat their aphid attackers. This sympathetic reaction did not occur in plants that only shared root contact, but was deployed along the wider fungal network— thus researchers hypothesize a sort of communicating on behalf of the plant symbiotes.3 This might strike the rhetorically minded reader as reminiscent of the forms of mediated rhetoric often theorized in disability rhetorics and animal studies, and I have discussed this in previous chapters at length. The idea behind this theory is that mediation is often very useful and should often be sought in order to give voice to the voiceless, but may at times be complicated when conflicts of interest between the mediatee and mediator arise. Research has not yet shown what happens when only the symbiotic fungi are threatened and the host plant is not, but this represents an opportunity for further study. What it does tell us, however, is that there are certainly more methods of persuading out there than we can even imagine. We find new ones so frequently that people at conferences are no longer surprised when you tell them that redwoods or blue jays, Dell computers or talking trains, underground mushroom networks or flying squirrels, or even the rare politician, provide useful information if one is able to decipher it. And there’s the rub: we can only understand what we can detect, and humans are woefully inept when it comes to detecting many forms of communication. That is the topic of the third part of this book—pointing out some of the interesting and useful modes of signaling and detecting that humans

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simply are unable to sense without the use of tools (whose sophistication is generally nowhere near that of species that have evolved to sense these signals naturally). I have chosen as examples three senses that we either lack completely or are functionally incompetent in using for communication, though there were countless possibilities available for further examination. These three should make a strong case, however, because they are striking examples of superhuman abilities that provide information that directly influences behaviors, and in some cases (like echolocation) may be shared directly to another individual like humans would share a picture from their cell phone to a friend’s device. That these rhetorical channels exist represents the fact that there are significant gaps in a theoretical netting that has been allowing information about other rhetorical species two slip and wriggle through its holes for far too long. If animals can deploy rhetoric in these surprising sensory media, and in ways we cannot, it suggests several troubling conclusions about animals and rhetorical theory. First, we are easier to deceive than we might like to admit. Considering the argument in Chapter 4, how we deceive and manipulate one another through obvious, though complex, means of communication, the potential for further deception in media we aren’t even able to monitor is unfathomably high. A second thing we learn by studying animal rhetorics and our sensory weaknesses is that our view of rhetoric is woefully lacking in context. Some of that necessary context can be suggested in the latter half of this book, but it will take many more rhetoricians to attempt to form a fuller picture of the behaviors in the natural world that might be deemed rhetorical. I urge the reader to think about the ways we contextualize human rhetoric, or the ways we do not, as I present the examples of animal rhetorics (in Parts III and IV), and our history of ignoring or even suppressing that context (Part IV, especially Chapter 11), because there is a third important lesson these extrasensory animal rhetorics can demonstrate, and that’s the humans have a very large blind spot (no pun intended) when it comes to our perceived superiority, which seems to prevent us from acknowledging the sophistication of nonlinguistic forms of communication—especially those we cannot perform, or even detect, ourselves. If you find yourself thinking all this animal stuff is interesting, but where’s the rhetoric?, then you’ve fallen into the trap of anthropocentrism once again, and need to open your mind to the idea that the intentional acts of various species to persuade are rhetoric. It is worthy of study alongside that of human rhetoric, and is not worth dismissing simply because few, or no, previous scholars have theorized it.

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This is where scholarship becomes a trap, or even cult-like, in its devotion to the footnote: it doesn’t allow for new ideas if a big name can’t be cited in support, having thought of something similar already. If we are going to realign our thinking about human superiority, we need to be aware of the inadequacy of our own supposedly superior skills, like linguistic or other forms of communication that have become so abstracted that they can in many cases seem utterly broken. We do not detect but a tiny portion of the available information other individuals of any species provide (wittingly or un-), so if we read on in the spirit of McLuhan’s now almost aphoristic statement that the medium is the message, we will start to get a sense of how many messages we are missing over media we didn’t even think to observe. In 1987 action stars Carl Weathers and Arnold Schwarzenegger led a team of b-movie actors, ex-wrestlers, and future governors of the state of Minnesota into the jungles of Central America in order to film a fictitious battle with an alien being known only to the audience of the film as the eponymous Predator. The predatory alien in this film employed a visual spectrum cloaking device in order to avoid detection by its prey (the unwitting human commandos), and a visor that allowed him to shift from visible to his natural infrared range of vision. Predators tracked people by their body heat, and they killed them for sport. They were efficient killers, but they were fair, refusing to attack unarmed individuals of any species, as there was no sport in it. Those who have seen the film—and I would hope that includes all of my readers, as this movie is a 1980s science fiction classic with all of the self-deprecating campiness and clever one-liners that description would imply—understand that most of the humans in the story meet a tragic ending, followed by the removal of their skulls and spinal columns as trophies for the Predator to take home. Much like human tourists might do with souvenir snow globes, shot glasses, or Paddington bears. As the movie is now over 30 years old, I am confident that any spoilers will be tolerated when I mention that one of the ways Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character, Dutch, is able to survive is by masking his body heat by covering himself in mud from a murky body of water he falls into during one of his conflicts with the beast. As I will discuss below, infrared radiation is nearly impossible to detect through any amount of water, so the wet mud masks Dutch’s heat signature from the predator, once his high-tech mask becomes damaged in one of their early struggles.

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What makes Dutch’s fight with the predator interesting, beyond the clever barbs they sling at one another—both in heavily accented English— is that Dutch is able to think outside his own lived experience and quickly adapt to an alien way of sensing the world. This is something most people are unable to do, even in relation to the pets with whom they share a decade or more of their lives. Unlike Dutch, most people do not realize they are communicating via IR because it is impossible for humans to directly detect IR without the aid of specially created devices. There are, of course, indirect gauges of radiation absorption and reflection that are visible to the naked eye—some of these may even shape coloration in birds and other animals because of the variable amounts of melanin in their exposed surfaces (skin, feathers, etc.).4 While we cannot witness heat absorption directly, we are nonetheless able to infer it based on coloration patterns among species that range across warmer and colder climes. The colder weather in some places will inspire darker coloration to trap more heat from the sun, while warmer species need not spend resources on such pigmentation. This is very different from pit vipers and a select few other animals, who are able to “transduce electromagnetic radiation in the infrared frequencies.”5 In some cases, some animals (mainly insects) are able to see normally in near UV frequencies, making them more appropriate for discussion in the previous section of this book. Humans are simply ill-equipped in terms of organs able to detect what is traditionally called thermal or chemical radiation. To the person of scholarly bent who is reading the introduction to this chapter thinking to herself, “what does all of this science fictiony stuff have to do with rhetoric?” I would answer that persuasion and identification are both highly improbable without understanding. Understanding not only one’s audience, but also how one relates to the world and the other individuals who are living on it. In the case of cloaking devices and infrared vision, these things aren’t merely science fiction—they exist in some form or other already, and they need to be reckoned with if we want to understand the available means of persuasion across the natural and the technological worlds. Humans attempt to make up for their sensory shortcomings, and when they do, it is often in ways that seem straight out of fantasy or science fiction literature. One wildly interesting example of this practice is that of the infrared invisibility cloak. Literary and filmic treatments of invisibility devices and cloaking technology are far older than the Predator movie series. In fact, they are found in stories at least as old as the classical era of

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Western history, starting perhaps with the Helm of Hades, and continuing through Arthurian legend in the English tradition as a literal cloak, which likely inspired the device’s most memorable modern expression: the elven cloaks given to the Fellowship of the Ring in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings series. (It is also worth noting for casual Tolkien fans that The One Ring was often used by Bilbo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings and the prequel The Hobbit as an invisibility device, but that was a mere fraction of its power, expressed as the disappearing act of a hobbit whose greatest hope when he discovered the power of his magical ring was to remain unseen.) While visual light can be altered to some degree, there are as yet no devices that can compare to elven cloaks in terms of sheer magical hiding power. However, in other wavelengths, electromagnetic radiation can be very effectively disguised, in order to trick those species (or human devices) that are usually able to detect that output. Outside the very small portion of the near-infrared that humans call part of our visible spectrum, some animals are able to generate thermal images of prey or other predator species, in order to better hunt or avoid conflicts. Any object with a surface temperature over absolute zero emits thermal radiation— “objects” including you and me. Our surface temperatures determine the wavelength we emit, and so IR is very handy at figuring out the external shapes of living beings, but not necessarily the interiors, like x-rays or ultrasound can.6 The experimental cloaking devices scientists are developing are able to hide living creatures from IR detection quite effectively. In the case of one experiment, test mice were hidden behind the cloak and were completely undetectable to thermal imaging cameras.7 No snakes, thankfully, were employed to further test the efficacy of the mice’s cloaks to fool predators, although this feature is certainly inferred. It is best to be certain of the results ahead of time before subjecting another living creature to potentially very cruel experiments they have no hope of escaping if the technology fails. Use of IR cameras is widespread in various areas of human life that affect other animals in different ways. Anyone who has bought a house in North America in the last decade or two has probably hired a house inspector who uses an IR camera to provide a wealth of information, including aspects of: air flow, heating and cooling efficiency, plumbing leaks in walls or ceilings, and insulation sufficiency. It is not uncommon for inspectors to find whole colonies of bees or other animals in the walls

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or attics of older homes either, and IR camera use is a much safer alternative to breaking through the wall (and possible the hive of understandably defensive bees) to investigate. The possibilities for infrared technology to help reduce human impact on other species are growing. Another example of an experiment meant to mitigate human pressure on other species was directed toward large sea mammals. Because visual and acoustic spotting techniques prove insufficient in some cases, many marine mammals are put at risk during unintentionally harmful recreational or military boating exercises. In the summer of 2003, one group of researchers tested an IR device on board the NATO Research Vessel Alliance.8 Using infrared binoculars designed for military application, they were able to detect differences in temperature from radiated thermal energy—in this case from the living bodies of whales and dolphins. While infrared presents another medium for monitoring large-bodied mammalian activity, it also comes with certain challenges in oceanic deployment. Most notably, as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character Dutch found out, water is opaque to IR radiation, so under normal circumstances it was only possible in this experiment to detect the fins, bodies, or blow of surfacing cetaceans. Other mammals that do not surface as clearly, like seacows (or sirenia), are nearly impossible to observe. Another challenge is that marine mammals have thick insulating layers of blubber that mask their thermal radiation—only flukes, dorsal fins, and pectoral fins are poorly insulated, making them easier to spot.9 In addition to oceanic temperature issues, IR also requires fairly favorable weather conditions to be at its best. Rain, fog, or haze can get in the way of clear readings, as water or water vapor will attenuate the thermal radiation one is trying to detect.10 Despite all of these potential problems, IR is still a promising technology—especially in daylight with favorable weather conditions— but in other conditions the technology simply isn’t advanced enough to be anything but one piece in a panoply of imperfect monitoring devices seeking to piece together full coverage like links in chain mail armor. In order to protect sea life, we still need to detect them using several imperfect devices. There are more mundane ways humans detect thermal signals, the way an audience would listen to a speech or watch a sporting event. Nociception (the general feeling of pain) and thermoception in primates happens across the surface of the body. Pain and heat detection by the skin requires direct attention to be at its most sensitive, however. When

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we do not pay attention to signals coming from the skin, if our thoughts or concentration are focused on other things, we drastically reduce our ability to feel pain.11 People who grew up with older siblings like mine learned quickly not to complain about minor injuries, as their solution was to cause an injury elsewhere to “help you” forget about the pain of the original booboo. While this was mostly good-natured fun, at least for the older children, it demonstrates the striking ability of humans to self-medicate by withdrawing attention from pain by re-orienting the appropriate sense receptors to other stimuli, which seem to influence perception. While few things work better than modern opioid drugs, a less risky solution to moderate pain may be a course of distractions, followed up with some out-patient diversions. That this claim may sound somewhat fanciful (and it is meant to both inform and entertain as Cicero would advise) does not make it any less true. As audiences of unwanted heat or pain, we are able to withdraw our attention to some degree, thus limiting mild-to-moderate thermal rhetorics’ effects on our psyche, if not our person. There are other ways to understand the persuasiveness of heat, beyond an audience-centered model, and it will be worth thinking about an environmental or ambient model of persuasion, as well as a rhetor/speaker-centered mode.

Environmental or Passive Detection Often, when there is no single organ dedicated to sensing thermal signals, other parts of the body, such as the skin of mammals, can be saddled with additional duties, like weak heat sensing. As this is not skin’s primary duty, it is understandably only “good enough,” which biologists sometimes cite as a rough and ready classification for abilities that were not evolved specifically to tackle the challenge being discussed, but have worked well enough to make it unnecessary to evolve a stronger response. Much like a broken old flashlight held together with so much duct tape—it still helps illuminate, but there are better options available if one could pick and choose. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately if some science fiction stories are to be believed) humans are not yet technologically advanced enough to start from scratch when addressing environmental problems, like sensing light, heat, or sound. If we were, we could do much better than human eyes, skin, or ears, respectively. What we know about weak mammalian heat detection systems is that they are relative to a significant degree. Most animals will acclimatize to

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their local conditions, and for mammals this seems to especially be the case. In one study of rats, who have no dedicated heat sensing organs (so they add another duty to their skin’s workload, as we do), scientists found that temperatures were considered more or less extreme based on what climate the rats were used to. Thermal responses are regulated around different temperatures for rats used to colder or warmer average temperatures, meaning that thermal stress varies for rats raised in different conditions.12 While completely unscientific, similar effects to the ones found in this study can be observed when humans grow up in one environment and move to another. As a northerner, moving to Virginia as a 30-something assistant professor some years ago was quite a shock; in winter I would generally wear shorts and a t-shirt, while summers were almost unbearable for the heat and humidity. Meanwhile, I would observe students from warm climates wearing what appeared to be arctic expedition gear when temperatures dipped below 50F, and local professionals would wear sport coats and slacks or dresses with sweaters over the top in the middle of summer, and I would wonder what was wrong with these people. While my human abilities to detect heat were confined to being one of the many tasks my skin takes on, being acclimatized to the cold early in life, I often complained most pathetically that I could sense the UV radiation bombarding me and that the entire South was not just figuratively (politically) red, but represented in my ersatz IR detection system as such. While I tend to the dramatic about too much heat, it does illustrate the effects of what our sensory systems are used to on our current perceptions. Beyond merely acclimatizing, heat and hormone cycles may combine to suggest appropriate mating strategies for animals of various species. In a phenomenon called temperature coupling, two members of a species will be attracted to one another based on their internal temperatures synchronizing at a given moment. This could theoretically be something some species detect directly, but more often animals will figure this out through changes in vocal or acoustic communication. That heat can be determined very accurately by some species based on their calls is another wonderful example of sensory synesthesia, as animals employ a full spectrum of sensory strategies that merge their information in order to help the animals survive and pass on their genes. The gray tree frog (Hyla versicolor) is a wonderful example of temperature coupling behavior in that it has several mating call properties that are all temperature dependent.13 Among vertebrates temperature coupling

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through vocal detection is very rare, being more common among crickets and other, smaller species. It only occurs in what biologists call poikilothermic species, which refers to animals whose body temperatures can vary by a great degree. Humans are homeotherms, a group of animals whose body temps stay comparatively stable. We produce our own heat (i.e., we’re endothermic), and our body uses several strategies to dissipate the excess when we are running hot. Beyond the basic preferences of each member of the species, we can mate in a wide range of temperatures, and some individuals find it stimulating to test the limits of their ability to couple in extreme cold or hot environments. Our vocal communication has no innate information regarding our relative body temperatures, although tourists traveling in the American south are often regaled with stories about the southern drawl originating from a desire to do things more slowly in response to the heat down there. This is fanciful, of course, but it is nonetheless one of those pleasant fictions that bear the ring of truth—at least enough to encourage repetition. While human voices do not display much heat information, if any, many smaller species do. When invertebrates like crickets are seeking mates, the males use an acoustic form of communication called stridulation. Stridulation is heavily affected by external temperatures, and in one study it was found that “syllable” and chirp repetition rates increased linearly with rising temperatures ranging from 15–24 °C.14 Changes in temperature cause parallel shifts in both the generation and recognition of signals by cricket rhetors and their eventual audiences. Thus, a warmer female would be more likely to respond to a male of similar disposition rather than one with a cooler internal temperature. In addition to the acoustical displays of crickets and the (specifically) vocal displays of some tree frogs, there is another form of temperature coupling signal—this one traveling through a visual medium. The bioluminescence of various firefly species carries with it temperature information for potential mates. While this type of communication might seem easier for humans to “envision” because of our strong sight preference, it is also potentially easier to fake. While I could find no studies directly addressing predatory deceit in relation to temperature coupling specifically, there are several predatory species of fireflies that doctor their signals to appear like those of prey species. They do this in order to lure in their next unwitting victims and secure a cheap meal. Much like the flashing neon of a bar sign, it is difficult to miss the displays of fireflies in the night.

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That predatory species are successful at luring in their prey suggests that they have tuned their biochemical reactions to signal appropriate temperature, as well as species, information in order to deceive. In theory. Either way, the lure of the predatory firefly species is like Scylla’s siren call: beautiful and laden with the promise of sex, only to cause a swift and sudden wreck as the male fireflies pilot their vessels into the charybdic doom of the predator species. Beyond mating practices (real or mythological), other thermosensitive creatures need to constantly take readings on their environmental conditions in order to maintain optimal temperatures for activities like growth, feeding, and movement. The American lobster (Homarus americanus ) is one such creature. Lobsters migrate seasonally, and their locomotory activity is heavily dependent on water temperature.15 Despite not having skin, lobsters are able to sense and respond to local differences in temperature; this is important because, without skin they are unable to sweat, and their insulation is not expandable in preparation for colder weather, so they are forced to thermoregulate behaviorally. That is, they move to the warm water when possible. While scientists have had a difficult time locating the sensory organs lobsters use for thermoreception, they know from cardiac assays that they do in fact sense and respond to quite small changes in water temperature.16 Thus, the undirected forces of nature act as rhetors persuading the lobster, like many species of weak thermal detectors cum audiences, to pay heed to what cues they are able to pick up on in order to interact with their environments in more productive ways. Some species, however, are deadly merciless in their exploitation of thermal information pulsing uncontrolled from the bodies of almost all living things. These animals perform a more active type of rhetoric—one that hijacks the unwitting communications of prey species in order to make of them a fine meal. Most notable among these predatory animals are several species of snakes that develop heat-sensing pits. Because snakes are deaf, we may think of them as having a little leftover computational space in their nervous system that allows them to monitor additional information that we cannot. For some this means vibrations in the undergrowth, while for others any warm-bodied creature stumbling upon their territory will quickly learn that to do so is “the pits.” As the pun above alludes, pit vipers are one of two types of snakes that develop heat-sensing pits that allow them to detect infrared radiation given off by other animals. And pit vipers are the most adept—so much

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so that scientists speculate that they are able to create infrared “pictures” in their minds, just as one would by watching life forms through an IR camera at night (and just like the eponymous Predator was able to do in the Schwarzenegger film). These vipers have pits located between the eye and nostril on either side of their face, which are called facial or loreal pits. Pythons develop smaller, but more numerous, pits on their upper and lower labial scales, which are aptly called labial pits.17 Originally the pit structures were figured to detect air vibrations caused by roaming prey in the underbrush, but warm air is not what these structures detect; they actually serve as accurate heat monitoring systems capable of detecting a rise in temperature of the pit membrane of only 0.003C. Unlike skin surfaces, nerves in most pits only register heat—not pain, pressure, or other haptic information; these are dedicated organs in their own right.18 There is one exception to this general rule, which shows up in the species Python reticulatus, whose pits are bimodal in that they respond to both temperature and touch. Presumably both sensations are weaker than what is provided by pits dedicated to only one sensation. What is even more interesting about the way this sensory organ interacts with the nervous system of snakes is that several studies have shown parallel structures in the brains of heat sensing snakes between their visual and thermal processing units—that is, when the brain processes prey information, the visual and thermal information is supplementary and may present a single, multi-layered image to the snake, much like the many layers of an image one creates in Photoshop or PaintShop Pro. If one layer provides no information, the image is still present. It merely adds depth to what one senses as layers of information are added. Heat sensing snakes do not seem to have larger brains or more efficient nervous systems than comparable species that do not detect heat, but they do seem to make a trade-off of their resources. Generally speaking, snakes that detect heat have lost their ability to use mechanoreception to detect ground vibrations, whereas snakes that don’t detect heat are often quite efficient using vibrations to assist in hunting prey. The species Boa constrictor is one exception to the idea that there is a strict divide between the heat sensing and vibration species. However, it should be noted that boas have the weakest thermoreception threshold, so this animal seems to get by with a cobbled together system of “a little of this, a little of that.”19 Once again, the boa demonstrates that species often need to get by not on the best, but on the “good enough” abilities that are somewhat less costly to maintain.

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In an interesting bit of crossover from the active seeking-out of thermal information heat detecting snakes demonstrate and the passive reception of ambient information discussed above, pits are also used (as in the examples of several pit-less poikilothermic animals) as a method of thermoregulation for snakes. While it was long thought that thermal pits in pit vipers were used only for prey detection, it seems there are multiple applications for such handy tools. We now know that pits direct thermoregulatory behavior by remotely sensing the surface temps of terrain from a distance.20 Because natural surfaces emit thermal radiation, and they do so in direct proportion to their current surface temperatures, it is important for a snake to locate the best spots to absorb heat without endangering themselves. While this suggests an interesting relationship with the American lobster discussed above, it is uncertain if lobsters can detect infrared radiation, or if they use more primitive organs, like humans do.

Sender-Focused Thermal Rhetorics? Having already discussed a reception-based, or audience-focused, theory of thermal rhetorics, as in the cases of pit vipers or the technology behind infrared and ultraviolet cameras; various responses to environmental cues, like rat acclimatization, heat detection in primates, or thermoregulation in lobsters and snakes; it is clear that there are audiences actively and passively seeking out information from Nature and her denizens. There is also what one might term a dialectic or even dialogic focus for some species: acoustic expressions of heat status, like temperature coupling in crickets and tree frogs; visual expression of heat, like in firefly temperature coupling. These present arguments of an epideictic sort, i.e., “We are of similar body temperatures and are thus best aligned for mating.” They persuade not just to action, but to identity, saying we are like. This still leaves a certain gap in the theorization of thermal rhetorics, neglecting what was the ultimate focus of classical thinkers like Isocrates, Seneca, or Cicero. That is, concern for what Quintilian called the good man speaking well. So, what about signaler/sender-focused thermal rhetoric? Pliny suggests one instance, although it is a bit fantastical, when he asserts that “the breath of elephants attracts snakes out of their holes, that of stags scorches them.”21 This image of a stag roasting or devouring a snake made its way into medieval bestiaries, and at first glance might register

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as more than a bit absurd, as ruminants don’t seem a likely predator of snakes. That said, examples exist of deer that are malnourished or in need of protein supplementation (e.g., after does drop their fawns) eating fingerling fish, the heads of quail chicks, and other animals that common sense would suggest they should not eat. While there is no way to know for certain if Pliny himself witnessed a deer consuming a snake in his own lifetime, or if this was merely a rumor reported secondhand, it is perhaps best that we continue to treat Pliny’s claim with skepticism while realizing nature is quirky and many animals will act out of character when hungry or weak. There is no available evidence confirming elephant breath attraction either, but Pliny is known for his creative license when conjuring the examples he used to delight his audience, the better to fulfill the other offices of rhetoric: to inform and persuade. Thermal rhetorics for humans may be more subtle and intimate, much like we found regarding olfactory communication, in which people shared their familiar odors and had clear preferences for the odors of the ones they love. This may be where our weaker senses become more important—because we are more vulnerable in our communications across media we have difficulty detecting, we only expose our closest friends and family to that level which requires the most trust. Thus human senderfocused thermal rhetorics often seem to include loving and comforting acts, like opening one’s jacket so a cold friend can share your warmth, or the unfurling of the covers to lure a sleepless spouse back into your warm bed at night. When we share our warmth, we share something from inside ourselves, and we must move very close to do so. To invite someone into our personal warmth is a very basic physical form of love, and it is impossible to imagine a world in which you could not feel the joy of holding a fragile newborn to your breast, or comfort an older child who has scraped a knee while riding a bicycle. What is sent in this form of persuasion is the warmth of self, and an invitation to share that warmth. Some might argue that the ability to detect and better quantify that sort of radiation via organs that were receptive to infrared signals might ruin the mystery, or pull back the curtain behind loving warmth, but this does not have to be the case. The more we learn about the chemical processes in our bodies that cause feelings of love, the more integral and important to our existence it seems. Finding out more about the warmth of another living being could serve to strengthen existing bonds rather than weaken them.

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We might all require more hugs to test this theory, though, but that is a pretty great form of research (and it requires little in the way of funding). Beyond such intimate displays of warmth, it is difficult to find examples of humans actively using warmth as a persuasive tool. There are certainly examples out there, but they are rare. This problem becomes even more difficult as we consider the topic of the next chapter—electroreception. While examples exist there, too, they are often found at the very extremes of sensation, and in violent episodes that arose as a result of shameful periods in human history. It is perhaps comforting that humans are unable to sense normal levels of the information presented in this part of the book, as the ways we employ them veer quickly toward malevolence. Nonetheless, we are not alone in our ability to do harm using sensory information, and many species—especially those that live underwater—have employed electroreception much like the pit viper uses thermoreception on land: as an additional means of finding someone to kill.

Notes 1. George Maximilian Anthony Grube and John M Cooper, Five Dialogues: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Phaedo (Hackett Publishing, 1938). 13. 2. Zdenka Babikova et al., “Underground Signals Carried Through Common Mycelial Networks Warn Neighbouring Plants of Aphid Attack,” Ecology Letters 16, no. 7 (2013): 835. 3. Ibid., 836–39. 4. Jack P Hailman, Optical Signals: Animal Communication and Light (Indiana U Press, 1977). 110–11. 5. Ibid., 118–19. 6. Lian Shen et al., “Large-Scale Far-Infrared Invisibility Cloak Hiding Object from Thermal Detection,” Advanced Optical Materials 3, no. 12 (2015): 1738. 7. Ibid., 1739. 8. Alberto Baldacci, Michael Carron, and Nicola Portunato, Infrared detection of marine mammals (2017). iii. 9. Ibid., 6. 10. Ibid., 25–7. 11. M. C. Bushnell et al., “Attentional Influences on Noxious and Innocuous Cutaneous Heat Detection in Humans and Monkeys,” The Journal of Neuroscience 5, no. 5 (1985): 1. 12. A. R. Gwosdow and E. L. Besch, “Effect of Thermal History on the Rat’s Response to Varying Environmental Temperature,” Journal of Applied Physiology 59, no. 2 (1985): 1.

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13. H. Carl Gerhardt, “Temperature Coupling in the Vocal Communication System of the Gray Tree Frog, Hyla Versicolor,” Science 199, no. 4332 (1978): 992. 14. John A. Doherty, “Temperature Coupling and ‘Trade-Off’ Phenomena in the Acoustic Communication System of the Cricket, Gryllus Bimaculatus De Geer (Gryllidae),” Journal of Experimental Biology 114, no. 1 (1985): 17. 15. Steven H. Jury and Winsor H. Watson, “Thermosensitivity of the Lobster, Homarus Americanus, as Determined by Cardiac Assay,” Biological Bulletin 199, no. 3 (2000): 257. 16. Ibid., 258. 17. Buning Tjard de Cock, “Thermal Sensitivity as a Specialization for Prey Capture and Feeding in Snakes,” American Zoologist 23, no. 2 (1983): 363. 18. Ibid., 366. 19. Ibid., 372. 20. Aaron R. Krochmal and George S. Bakken, “Thermoregulation Is the Pits: Use of Thermal Radiation for Retreat Site Selection by Rattlesnakes,” Journal of Experimental Biology 206, no. 15 (2003): 2539. 21. Pliny, H. Rackham, and W. H. S. Jones, Natural history, The Loeb classical library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961). XI.cxv.279.

References Babikova, Zdenka, Lucy Gilbert, Toby J. A. Bruce, Michael Birkett, John C. Caulfield, Christine Woodcock, John A. Pickett, David Johnson, and Nicole van Dam. “Underground Signals Carried through Common Mycelial Networks Warn Neighbouring Plants of Aphid Attack.” Ecology Letters 16, no. 7 (2013): 835–43. Baldacci, Alberto, Michael Carron, and Nicola Portunato. Infrared Detection of Marine Mammals. 2017. Bushnell, M. C., G. H. Duncan, R. Dubner, R. L. Jones, and W. Maixner. “Attentional Influences on Noxious and Innocuous Cutaneous Heat Detection in Humans and Monkeys.” The Journal of Neuroscience 5, no. 5 (1985): 1103. Doherty, John A. “Temperature Coupling and ‘Trade-Off’ Phenomena in the Acoustic Communication System of the Cricket, Gryllus Bimaculatus De Geer (Gryllidae).” Journal of Experimental Biology 114, no. 1 (1985): 17. Gerhardt, H. Carl. “Temperature Coupling in the Vocal Communication System of the Gray Tree Frog, Hyla Versicolor.” Science 199, no. 4332 (1978): 992. Grube, George Maximilian Anthony, and John M Cooper. Five Dialogues: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Phaedo. Hackett Publishing, 1938.

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Gwosdow, A. R., and E. L. Besch. “Effect of Thermal History on the Rat’s Response to Varying Environmental Temperature.” Journal of Applied Physiology 59, no. 2 (1985/08/01): 413–19. Hailman, Jack P. Optical Signals: Animal Communication and Light. Indiana U Press, 1977. Jury, Steven H., and Winsor H. Watson. “Thermosensitivity of the Lobster, Homarus Americanus, as Determined by Cardiac Assay.” Biological Bulletin 199, no. 3 (2000): 257–64. Krochmal, Aaron R., and George S. Bakken. “Thermoregulation Is the Pits: Use of Thermal Radiation for Retreat Site Selection by Rattlesnakes.” Journal of Experimental Biology 206, no. 15 (2003): 2539–45. Pliny, H. Rackham, and W. H. S. Jones. Natural History. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961. Shen, Lian, Bin Zheng, Zuozhu Liu, Zuojia Wang, Shisheng Lin, Shahram Dehdashti, Erping Li, and Hongsheng Chen. “Large-Scale Far-Infrared Invisibility Cloak Hiding Object from Thermal Detection.” Advanced Optical Materials 3, no. 12 (2015): 1738–42. Tjard de Cock, Buning. “Thermal Sensitivity as a Specialization for Prey Capture and Feeding in Snakes.” American Zoologist 23, no. 2 (1983): 363–75.

CHAPTER 9

Electroreception

Ba-dum! You’ve packed up the car and taken the family to the ocean for a day of relaxation and fun. Ba-dum! Unloaded is the car, which was jammed full of coolers, floaty toys, and bags of essentials, like sunscreen and snacks for the kids. Ba-dum! Little Suzy is ready for you to take her in your arms and wade into the ocean for the first time ever, so you plop down your blankets and race the kids to the waves. Da-da-dum… Daughter in your arms, you feel an odd current around your legs. You’re probably deeper into the ocean than you need to be, but Suzy’s delighted giggles as the waves splash you both is music to a parent’s ears. Dum dum, dum dum… It can feel your nervous twitch as you realize something is amiss. Something is in the water with you. It senses the beating of your heart, the contraction of your muscles, the very fluid flowing through your veins, which creates tiny electrical discharges no human could ever see. DUM DUM, DUM DUM. DUM DUM, DUM DUM. BOOM! DUM DUM. BOOM! © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. C. Parrish, The Sensory Modes of Animal Rhetorics, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76712-9_9

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Then it happens! Shark attack!!! Okay, likely nothing bad actually happens. Suzy is a fictional character, and sharks don’t like to eat people. A modern human being is more likely to die from a vending machine falling on her head than a shark attack, no matter how paranoid movies like Jaws have made us about going into the ocean. You can let your heart beat more slowly; take a deep breath. Forget the scary theme song. I didn’t write this to startle you. Or at least, not only to startle you. It is creepy, though, right? Knowing that sharks can locate us from very long distances away because of the electric fields we generate. That we transmit but do not detect. That we communicate but do not understand. We endanger ourselves daily by simply living in ignorance of our own signal systems. Our world is not cruel, but it is indifferent, and the drive for other creatures to fulfill their own needs often makes life seem fraught with danger—and it can be if we lack information that other predators are aware of. So we should be informed. The ocean, which is popularly called “monster soup,” is chock full of creatures that can kill us for fun. On land there are fewer, but they still exist (and the most dangerous are generally other humans). The problem, once again, is that we don’t realize that we are broadcasting signals carelessly. Almost all animals emit easily detectable direct current (DC) electric fields under water.1 To the more powerful electroreceptors, it’s as if we display little neon signs powered by friction, muscle contraction, and fluid movement, that say “Come and take a bite of me and see how I taste!” The thing is, we’re blind to neon in this metaphor, and the night is very dark. Something as simple as swimming with a small wound, like a scratch or a skinned knee, can make us 100 × easier to detect via electroreception. Our skin insulates us to some degree, normally. If the wound bleeds, as most of us know, that is even greater encouragement for a hungry shark to take a test bite, one of the leading reasons for the approximately 80 shark attacks on record each year. A curious shark has no hands to manipulate objects, and so, dog-like, it simply takes a nibble out of anything that looks interesting. For a great white shark, a mere nibble can take a significant chunk out of most humans. But, once again, there is little reason for most people to fear, as the vast majority of shark bites happen in Western Australia, where we already know the monsters of our nightmares take many forms (from nearly human-sized flying bats, to venomous snakes,

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to deadly jellyfish, to name but a few of the many critters that threaten to haunt your dreams if you make the mistake of googling them). Whatever danger we face, we are better able to handle it if we are forearmed with knowledge of its nature. That’s why this third part of the book is hopefully a wake-up call for human supremacists, in that each chapter is meant to demonstrate the various ways we’re “blind” to the world, while other predators are not. As biologists like to note (and I like to repeat), we humans are not fast or very strong. We do not have sharp teeth or powerful claws. We cannot fly; we don’t see very well. Our species would be what my students in 2019 call “a hot mess” if we didn’t have the ability to cooperate and learn from nature’s difficult lessons. One of the more difficult lessons for an apex predator—especially one that has developed cultures that claim humans are nearly divine, or created in the image of an omnipotent deity—is that we’re still just dumb animals broadcasting our existence in hundreds of ways, most of which we can’t even sense ourselves. Electroreception is one more example, and a jarring one, in that so much information is provided to the eavesdroppers of the world, and we simply had no clue how ignorant we were until very recently.

What Is Electroreception? Electroreception is a powerful tool in a medium that is not always penetrable with visual or acoustic senses. According to one observer, [it] couldn’t be a more efficient prey-detection system, because every living animal that swims in the sea broadcasts its presence by projecting electrical fields into the water. If you’re alive and in the water, your body is generating electrical fields. There is no camouflage, no way to hide.2

The information is ubiquitous, and some very dangerous animals are able to use it to their competitive advantage. Thus, it seems important to understand precisely what it is. One of the foremost experts in electroreception defines it as follows: “electroreceptive animals have at least one set of organs specialized for the detection and measurement of feeble, naturally occurring electric fields in the ambient medium, plus specialized brain structures that process the information and influence responses appropriate to the stimulus.”3 Most often that ambient medium is a body of water, and the specialized organs are sense receptors located near the

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face or head of an animal. But there are other specialized organs that will be discussed below—powerful ones that can reach out like “The Force” in the Star Wars movies to actively probe for other creatures, and in extreme cases could even kill a human being with a potent electric discharge. Electric fields are generated by contracting muscles, beating hearts, and pumping gills underwater, which are all “tell-tale signs of potential prey.”4 The ability to sense these signals is primordial, has been employed since vertebrates first evolved.5 Reception comes in forms both active and passive, as alluded to above. Some very special creatures even create their own electric fields to navigate, to locate prey, and even to communicate socially. And, like I just mentioned, very rarely a species will develop a weaponized form of electric organ that can jolt other species to stun or kill them when foraging or defending themselves. All of these types of electroreceptive activity will be described below. Electroreceptivity is determined in a newly studied species by using average evoked potentials (AEPs), which are in layman’s terms the brain’s response to an electrical stimulus; using these can potentially avoid the need for dissection or complex searches in the anatomy of the subjects, which usually ends up in a lot of dead fish.6 Sadly, if AEPs are indeed detected in a new species, the fish being studied are doomed anyway, as scientists will then move forward, searching their brains for specific structures for processing the information, or for afferent fibers in the lateral line nerves or sense organs in the skin.7 These organs are what can sense or create electric fields. Underwater electroreception relies on either ampullary or tuberous organs. The elasmobranchs (sharks, rays, skates) and a small number of electric fish species have ampullary organs that are sensitive to low frequencies, while a great many electric fish species have tuberous receptors that are sensitive to high frequencies.8 Ampullae of Lorenzini (named for their discoverer, in the late seventeenth century, Stefano Lorenzini) consist of “tiny bladders, richly innervated and connected to a surface pore by a long canal.”9 As modern scientists tried to come to grips with what these canals could do, a century-long debate, riddled with false conclusions and frequent overturnings caused these body parts to be a true biological mystery. It was not until the middle of the twentieth century that a Dutch biophysicist, A. J. Kalmijn, figured out that sharks use their ampullae of Lorenzini to detect prey buried in the sand. Using agar plates to cut off all other sensory data, the sharks were still able to sense the presence of flatfish underneath, which are a common prey group that hide under surface sand at the ocean’s bottom.10

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What Electroreception Is Not Magnetoreception is the weaker cousin of electroreception, which shows up in terrestrial and aquatic species alike. It is the sense that allows homing pigeons and other animals to navigate based on the Earth’s magnetic field. One of the many problems with the research into this sense is that in over 50 years of trying, no single sensory organ has been located, nor brain center for processing electromagnetic information. What we do know is that magnetoreception (or sometimes magnetoception) is thought to be far more widespread than electroreception, and almost never as powerful in terms of how the sense is used for basic survival needs. Many electroreceptive animals use this sense in a primary role or in alliance with other modes that constitute a primary sensory suite. This simply isn’t true of most land or marine animals humans pay much attention to. Magnetoreception operates differently from electroreception, from what scientist can see so far. Magnetoreception is brought on by geomagnetic field interactions with localized deposits of magnetic crystals. Electroreception, on the other hand, is the induction of electrical signals in specialized sensory receptors.11 The latter signals can, of course, be generated by living bodies, as well as the movement of large water currents. However, magnetoception is entirely reliant on navigation by the location of magnetic materials found naturally in the earth, lacking entirely in sentience. Extremely tiny magnetic deposits in many types of animal (such as deposits in the teeth of mollusks) make them sensitive to the geomagnetic field, and in the case of mollusks, this significantly influences their kinetic movements.12 Migratory birds are well-known for their homing ability, but while low frequency electric fields do influence the orientation of their flight, it does not affect their ultimate ability to home.13 It seems solar and olfactory cues play a larger role in homing (which is not surprising, since those senses are better suited for above-water detection).

Underwater Electrolocation---Passive Because water is so much less resistant than air, the very best (and until recently, it was thought all) electroreceptors are marine and freshwater species. Six groups of marine and freshwater fishes independently evolved electrical perception, and they can be very effective at locating prey.14 The

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lowest threshold values for detection come from the elasmobranchs; electric fish with the largest electric organs (discussed below) are much less sensitive.15 Most commonly this sense is passive, waiting for information to be broadcast by prey species or other predators as a fish or other animal swims along, searching. Passive reception exists among various groups of electric fish, lamprey, catfish, possibly some amphibians, and in proterian mammals, like the platypus.16 The powerful shark and ray ampullae previously mentioned are concentrated mainly on their ventral surfaces, especially around the mouth, which makes sense, considering their primary purposes are foraging and feeding.17 They have passive electroreception only, which, in addition to prey detection, may also provide them with a compass direction sense.18 These animals tend to swim long distances, constantly searching with various senses to find enough prey animals to eat to sustain their large bodies. Their receptors are strictly ampullae of Lorenzini, not tuberous organs. Almost all fish have at least some ampullae of Lorenzini, but they are generally not useful to the degree that sharks’ and rays’ high concentrations are.19 Sharks’ faces are covered in them, and rays’ extend along either “wing” to form something of an array. As elasmobranchs swim through “lines of flux of the geomagnetic field, small voltage gradients are induced in its ampullary canals.”20 This allows the sharks or rays to interact with the very weak fields broadcast by prey species. Fields in the range of 0-8 Hz are optimal for detection, but the most powerful electroreceptive species detect on a relatively broad spectrum, and at extremely low voltage. In order to navigate using the fields they’ve induced while swimming through the Earth’s magnetic field, sharks and rays need to compute electric voltages, swim speed, and the local geomagnetic field vector, which presents some pretty sophisticated challenges.21 With their ampullae, sharks can detect as little as 5 nanovolts/cm, which, in more humanfriendly terms, is like being able to sense 1.5 V—think of the output of a single AA battery—over 3,000 km. (Another researcher provides the description of 1 µV/m, which is like “one flashlight cell per 1,500 km.”22 This disparity could stem from differing standards over time and by country of origin—e.g., mercury batteries that shamefully were not discontinued in the United States until 1990 had a steady discharge of 1.35 V.)

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These senses are so acute in elasmobranchs that they should be able to detect their own fields, as well as the bulk water movements through the geomagnetic field.23 One can imagine this as humans in Rome being able to sense a candle being lit in Beijing (if the Earth were perfectly flat), while admiring the currents of air that we are steeped in, surrounded by, and filled with through our life-sustaining respiration. Even this thought experiment does the power of electroreception a disservice, but it is so alien to the human mind that it is very difficult to imagine. As it is a primary sense for some species, describing electroreception to a human would be like a human describing vision to someone who was born blind. Electroreception is a powerful sense that can be adapted to many uses. In addition to prey detection, navigation is a useful application. The method of compass direction detection in sharks and rays is still being worked out by biologists. We know they are able. The method likely has to do with swimming undulations quickly exposing the shark to field variances as their heads briefly dip right and left of their general trajectory.24 This theory is supported by a great deal of electromagnetic theory that would require far more undergraduate physics than the average lay reader enjoys, so it should be acceptable to note that the method of detection is under debate, but the ability’s existence largely is not. The electrical sense is obviously very important to shark survival. Neonatal sharks studied in a lab responded to electric stimuli within 24– 32 h of birth, biting at electric dipoles as if they were prey.25 Because many sharks, including the bonnetheads being used in this study, lack any parental care after birth, they must very quickly learn to respond to scent and electric cues very soon in order to survive.26 By way of comparison, the average human child does not develop 20/20 vision until it is about 6 months old. It also does not see a full color palette until around the same time. Much energy has been devoted to the study of marine and freshwater fish, but very little attention has been given to discovering electroreception in mammals. Nonetheless, it is surprising to discover that an interesting cooptation of older sense organs exists among at least one species of dolphin, which allows them to potentially sense electric fields, as well. Some aquatic mammals use what are called mystacial vibrissae to detect and track the hydrodynamic trails of their prey. These are like little sensitive hairs (think whiskers, but more of them and relatively smaller) that various species of toothed whales lose after birth. Most researchers had assumed they were vestigial. However, students of the Guiana dolphin

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(Sotalia guianensis ) found that these vibrissae were being used as electroreceptors—not sensing the underwater currents left by swimming prey, as their ancestor senses would have, but their electrical fields.27 This represents an interesting case of a mechanoreceptor system evolving into a different type of sense entirely, reminiscent of the boa constrictors discussed in the previous chapter, whose thermoception is a weak example of the sense because they also use their sense organs to process motion detection, as they were originally used.28 The organs on dolphins’ beaks look like the cavities where long lost whiskers once dwelt in their terrestrial precursors.29 Development of even a relatively weak electroreceptive sense, compared to rays and sharks, would be of great benefit to dolphins, who are benthic feeders, eating fish that lurk on or under the seafloor, causing plumes of sediment to kick up that could interfere with vision or echolocation at times. When dolphin ancestors returned to the sea, bats were just starting to appear on land, and their sensory development presents an interesting (if very rough) parallel for land and sea mammals. That echolocation may be supplemented by electroreception in at least one known species speaks to its usefulness under water.

Active Electrolocation and Electric Organs Electric fish have evolved independently in Africa and South America.30 Both types of fish operate by emitting electric organ discharges (EODs) that are altered in some way by interposing prey or objects. These EODs can take the form of pulses or waves. While phylogenetically quite distinct, African and South American fish both have wave species and pulse species in their groups—there is no correlation to geography for either type.31 Active electrolocation requires the production of electric fields in order to aid and enhance information gained through electroreception, analogous to echolocation’s relationship to hearing. There are, in fact, “many parallels to audition” in various forms of electroreception.32 Not least of which is the importance of object distortions on the returns of intentionally broadcast signals. In active reception, an animal generates an electric field in order to locate distortions created by objects of varying conductivity and capacity.33 A solid object being far less conductive than a living creature, they influence the fields differently. This active form of the sense is found in the weakly electric fishes, which are among the most common types,

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and it requires both ampullae and tuberous organs, which also lie at the bases of canals.34 Each organ responds to certain aspects of electric fields and is “tuned” to different features. Wave species have their own private frequencies, while pulse species have private intervals between pulses.35 Either can be shifted to avoid jamming. Among passive electroreceptors, we see their ampullae of Lorenzini tuned to lower frequencies—DC to 10 Hz. Tuberous receptors are tuned to higher frequencies—up to several hundred cycles per second (Hz).36 The lower frequencies are those created by the respiration and nearby movements of fish, while the higher are caused by electric organ discharge in active locating species. There is thus a functional difference in what is being detected in passive and active electrolocation: passive location when foraging finds the prey animal’s own electric fields, while active electroreception detects the effects of a prey animal on the predator’s own fields. Once again, parallels to echolocation and active versus passive sonar suggest themselves. Those species that actively electrolocate generally have tuberous electroreceptor fibers that are tuned to their own electric organ discharges.37 In some gymnotoid species of electric fish, their fundamental frequencies can span 3.6 octaves (50–600 Hz), and some apteronotid species up to 5.1 octaves.38 Such large ranges allow for each fish to have its own private channel for communicating and locating prey. Uses for this ability aren’t restricted to finding prey, either. Others include finding mates, locating hiding places, avoiding obstacles, and detecting rivals, as well as some social communication properties.39 For weakly electric fish, electric organ discharges represent their primary sense for orientation and prey capture, just as the sense of sight is primary for humans.40 While a human face is arranged to provide us with a narrow field of binocular vision, fish bodies are also arranged to maximize their primary senses. Self-generated currents in electric fish are “funneled” by the fish’s body shape toward the peri-oral zone where most of their electroreceptors are located.41 This allows for more powerful discharges, which is especially useful for smaller fish that are trying to detect tiny prey. Larger fish lose much of their receptor density because it’s simply easier to locate larger prey.42 Objects that pass within a fish’s electric field will be more or less resistant than water, producing a reduction or increase in localized field strength (respectively).43 For a visual learner, one might imagine the field shifts like seeing water flow over a rock in a stream—because water cannot

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flow through the rock, the water’s “field” is shifted around the object in the way, causing little currents around the impediment. For the electric fish, small prey fish with lower resistance would concentrate the lines of electrical force, while solid obstacles with higher resistance will create dead zones or shadows in the field.44 The rhetorical canon of memory is naturally relevant to this sense, as electric fish stockpile templates of resistance like a human speaker would stockpile topoi or illustrative examples of concepts. Memory serves to remind the fish what the distribution of voltages normally looks like across, and extending out from, its own body, as well as how various prey objects or obstacles cause those fields to pinch inward or curve around them, depending on their resistance. One researcher notes that, as “in all perceptual systems, some form of memory is an essential feature.”45 Because identification is such an important concern, electroreception relies heavily on an animal’s ability to differentiate between types of bodies that have entered their “electric halo.”46 Over time, fish will accumulate examples of resistance patterns, much as Erasmus collected examples of how to embellish, amplify, and cleverly restate common phrases in his “Copia.”47 As mentioned above, active electroreception is very much like biosonar in that it sends out information into the environment in order to coax better data out of the world.48 There are two ways of doing this with electroreception, and those are to send waves or pulses. Each species only does one of these things usually. What are referred to as wave species produce a steady signal and monitor disruptions, as described above. Pulse species, however, emit brief strong pulses and analyze the returning distortions, more akin to echolocating bats on the hunt. Each species has its own particular waveform, so that electric organ discharges are not confused, especially because many electric fish are social, and live among other electric species, as well as their own. Filtering out noise is a real problem in areas densely packed with several species of electric fish, as well as other ambient “noise” that could interfere with electrolocation. Thus EODs are very consistent in their frequencies, so that species can concentrate on their own range.49 Each species’s tuberous organs are specially tuned to receive their own signal returns, and each individual’s sense receptors will be tuned even more tightly to discriminate between its own signal and a conspecific’s—evolution, in the case of electric fish, seems to have done the same job as the Americans’ FCC does for its airwaves: to assign each species (or radio station, in

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the case of the FCC) a single broadcast frequency, thereby preventing unwanted interference between neighbors.50 To further aid in this process of discrimination, fish will voluntarily raise or lower their frequencies in the presence of other species in order to avoid jamming one another. These “jamming avoidance response” actions aid both communication and social identification.51 Because each fish has a slightly different electric organ discharge (EOD), and electric discharges are definitely used for purposes of social communication, one can think of each EOD as the “voice” of the fish, recognizable to other individuals of its species. Some species even have two different types of tuberous organs—one set to sense their own EODs, and another to detect those of other individuals of the same species.52 (This brings the total, then, to three distinct processing systems, as all of the tuberous organ fish also have ampullary organs.) Actively electrolocating fish can’t use their EODs to stun prey like the stronger species, and they are often very small, so their ranges are rarely more than about 10 cm for purposes of finding prey.53 When they get close enough to one another, one fish’s EODs will stimulate that of another, allowing the fish to communicate at an effective range of a few meters, under ideal conditions.54 A “rich variety” of messages can be sent this way, including threat, submission, readiness to mate, as well as such automatic information suggested by the discharge frequency, like species, age, size, sex, and individual identity.55 Weakly electroreceptive fish communicate socially by means of varying the EOD repetition rate and its modulations.56 While these fish are not like the mighty sharks, skates, and rays with their powers of detection, nor are they dangerous like the electric eel or Nile catfish that we will consider briefly below, their ability to communicate in an electrical language is utterly fascinating. While weakly electric fish were only discovered to perceive electric fields in the 1950s, strongly electric fish have been apparent to humans since antiquity.57 This is mainly due to the fact that encounters with the latter can be quite painful—even deadly. These rare species of fish are able to produce electric organ discharges that can stun or kill their prey. The discharges can also be used for predator avoidance and are quite effective at discouraging all but the toughest and most determined animals. The most powerful electric discharges are made by electric eels of South America. These relatives of knifefish and catfish (not eels at all, really) can create strong enough shocks to kill a horse—about five times as powerful as what you would get from sticking a metal knife into a

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standard American wall outlet. The eels’ electric organs extend through most of their length; a 2 m long specimen would have an electric organ 1.8 m long.58 Because of evolution’s general stinginess, we can tell this electric organ is a very important tool for electric eel survival, or so many resources, and so much body mass, would never be wasted on such a large organ if it were not essential to survival. The electric eel is possibly the only animal that has both a strong and a weak electric organ, so it can not only deliver the powerful jolts to stun prey, but it can also produce a weak electric field to detect them, like other electric fish.59 Like the electric eel in South America, African Nile catfish are very strong, as well, producing more than 350 V shocks which, if done repeatedly, could potentially kill a human being.60 There are no recorded cases of this happening, but that amount of voltage placed directly over the heart could stop it entirely. Modern paddle-type defibrillators vary from 200 to 1,000 V, so it would take a very nasty (and unfortunately wellplaced) shock or series of shocks from a Nile catfish to kill someone. It would nonetheless be painful and dangerous—especially for a human out swimming alone. Once they’ve been shocked by such a powerful fish, most people learn their lesson and stay away.

Terrestrial Electroreception? Because air is an electrically resistive medium, it was long thought impossible for terrestrial animals to use a true form of electroreception (i.e., excluding the much weaker magnetoreception). Honeybees and bumblebees have been shown, however, to detect the electric fields of flowers. They do this in two different ways. The honeybee detects electric fields through the oscillation of their antennae when they come in contact with a field. They use this in foraging, as well as in communication.61 Despite great attention being paid to the honeybee’s waggle dance in the last half century, it was only recently discovered that the symbolic dance also relays information about the electric fields of target flowers through the transmission of an electric field stimulus to observers. Bumblebees, on the other hand, detect fields by the deflection of tiny hairs on their bodies. Because the visitation of a bee discharges some of the static electricity each flower holds, these fields serve to further signal which flowers to visit or avoid until resources of nectar and pollen are replenished. Bumblebee hairs are far more sensitive than honeybee

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antennae, requiring only 0.77 to 61 V/m, depending on frequency, as opposed to the honeybee’s requirement of 15.3 to 306 V/m.62 Because humans do not operate on the scale of bees, researchers lament the fact that relatively “little is known about the structure and dynamics of electric fields and electric charges at the spatiotemporal scale of flowers and bees.”63 Humans evolved to see, hear, and touch things in “medium” human scales, over moderate lifespans. Moreover, we are nearly useless at detecting weak fields and weren’t even aware they were useful to terrestrial animals until very recently. There is indeed a whole electric ecology to which we are not privy and may never understand. What bees can teach us could be immense and important, though. We know a bit now about how flower and bee electroreception and attraction works as a coevolved process. It relies on a natural force known as the planet’s atmospheric potential gradient (APG). How it works is this: as one travels farther into the air, one experiences an atmosphere that is more positively charged. Those who are grounded will be connected to the Earth’s negative charge on land. So, at a rate of about 100 V/m, the taller an object is, the greater the potential difference it will have between the charge on its upper surface and the surrounding air.64 (And thus, standing at roughly 6 3 , the author of this book could rightly claim that he has a highly electric personality. His students, however, have told him that they heartily disapprove of this pun.) Bees, which are not grounded in flight, gain their electric charge through what is called the triboelectric effect.65 This effect is the key to their ability to detect the electric fields of flowers and also to recreate the field information during a waggle. The triboelectric effect is the phenomenon wherein frictional contact with another material either takes or gives up electrons, thus causing a positive or negative charge. We can imagine this effect quite easily, as it is the same process that causes us to accumulate the necessary static electricity to cause painful discharges after walking in stocking feet during winter or while petting a cat. The high energy flight of bees similarly causes friction with the air, which leads to a positively charged bee who can then interact with the grounded flowers. While humans are generally unaware of triboelectric charge build-up until they receive that painful discharge in the form of a shock, bees are quite aware. Flowers, too, while likely not “aware” themselves in this manner of speaking, benefitted from evolving negatively charged pollen because it is better at sticking to those visiting bees carrying a positive charge.66 When bees land on flowers, some charge is exchanged, leaving

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a flower’s negative charge partially canceled for a minute or two. This informs the aforementioned process of bees knowing which flowers in a densely packed patch need to recoup their resources before they are worth revisiting. Accumulating a charge in flight isn’t always useful and may not be universally encouraged by natural selection. Spider webs, for instance, can be relatively strong in their negative charge, thus pulling in flying animals like science fiction tractor beams.67 Insects that land more often or fly with less energy might maintain a lower positive charge, making them less susceptible to this additional tool in the spider’s toolbox. However, it is significant in that any force that discourages insects from accumulating strong charges could also interfere with the evolution of electroreception—if it is disadvantageous, or even neutral, it is unlikely an animal will be able to afford resources to support the additional body structures needed for sense organs and brain adaptations. For bees and other foraging species, this might be a worthwhile risk, as far as the cold forces of evolution are concerned. Electric fields emanating from environmental landmarks could aid bees and other flying animals in navigation or even help maximize the routes used to fully exploit the continuously replenishing resources of flower patches.68 If honeybees can share electric field patterns during their waggle dance, this can describe the height, shape, and density of flowers. While bumblebees do not waggle, they are evolved to find less densely packed sources of nectar, so any time-saving advantage an electroreceptive sense provides them could be essential for survival in the harsher conditions in which they are able to thrive. Beyond bees, there is very little evidence for many terrestrial animals using electroreception. The platypus is one of the other known terrestrial animals with this sensory faculty, but it seems to only be useful under water. We know that they are able to locate moving prey by the electrical activity generated by muscle contractions, and that their receptors are located in their duck-like bills, but little more is understood about them.69 It is almost unfair to classify this as a terrestrial ability, as, while the platypus does live on land, it deploys the sense on aquatic environments. This is not to say that other terrestrial examples are impossible or even unlikely. Considering it was not until the 1950s that scientists began to understand electroreception as a sensory modality (and even then, it was only understood that animals were aware of electric fields, but not why or

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how), it is no wonder that new species are often being added to the list.70 Just as dolphins and bees are relatively recent surprise additions, there will definitely be more added to the list soon—hopefully before humans drive them to extinction.

Human Electroreception While I’ve mentioned that there is the potential for weak magnetoreception in humans, it is equally possible that this sense is vestigial, as well. The only suggested “organ” for this sense comes in the form of magnetite “compass needles” existing in our eyes or ear structures. Evidence for these tiny, tiny needles being effective is inconclusive, and while many scientists think it possible that they could provide some navigational benefit, few have committed to the idea as yet. In fact, some of the evidence gained from studies in bees, humans, and pigeons is downright contradictory, so magnetoreception is once again a difficult example to justify using, even if it is closely related to electroreception.71 Electroreception proper would not be foreign to humans if we didn’t insist on being born with skin. All animals can in theory detect electricity. The problem is that skin, fur, and feathers are all resistive, so it takes what ends up being closer to dangerous levels of current to stimulate bird and mammal nervous systems.72 Very few animals, and almost all of these aquatic, are able to usefully sense weak electric fields generated by biological creatures. However, scientists believe this sense evolved independently several times.73 Humans, alas, do not have the ability. It is also unlikely that humans have a very weak sense, like some sighted people can very weakly echolocate when concentrating. Even among the animal groups that contain electric fishes, there do not seem to be any (or any extant) borderline or transitional species. Either you sense electrical fields or you don’t.74 Fish that do sense e-fields possibly come from an ancient common ancestor that evolved the ability and later lost it—possibly several times.75 While it is not a human sense, it is likely that we will continue to find other species that do have it. One of the foremost researchers on electroreception speculated that some likely next candidates for study should be wading birds and aquatic reptiles.76 This leaves us humans, crafty tool-users that we are, to develop technological solutions to make up for our sensory ignorance. We have developed significant technology to assist us in magnetoreception (one can get an actual working compass in a box of Cracker Jacks, if that

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product still exists), but the more difficult task of individual humans sensing or altering electric fields for health or safety reasons is a field in its infancy. One of the first interesting products developed to exploit electroreception stems directly from the study of sharks, rays, and electric fish. PODs, or personal oceanic devices, are an effective solution to shark attacks. Or, more likely, the irrational fear thereof. PODs function as shark repellent by creating their own electromagnetic fields that cause sharks to think humans are no longer interesting, and could even be painful to a shark that gets too close.77 That this technology is now in production, and is making (and perhaps preventing) a killing with divers, is an irony not lost on an author who began this chapter with an appeal to humans’ irrational fear of sharks, and our very real ignorance of what could potentially kill us. The Jaws reference may have been overly dramatic, but the knowledge that sharks have a secret weapon against prey, and that their prey in rare cases can include humans, is what led people to investigate underwater electric fields for rhetorical purposes. We persuade sharks not with our words, which they would not understand, but in a sensory mode they do comprehend—that is, electroreception. The remedy for many dangerous human-animal encounters is to learn their dominant languages; in the case of electroreception, this is a language we were not even aware of fifty-or-so years ago. This is a powerful example, one must conclude, of how important it is to realize how little humans generally understand about rhetoric writ large: those ways of communicating and persuading that occur outside our species specific echo chambers. If we want to be the wise apes (Homo sapiens ) we’ve named ourselves, we need to understand how little of our own environments that we see and hear, touch, and taste—let alone what we echolocate, electrolocate, or any number of sensory modalities we’re not even aware of! We are, to update Kenneth Burke’s suggestion, one of the symbol using and symbol misusing creatures on this planet, but the symbols we use and the media through which we transmit them represent a miniscule portion of the communication that goes on here. The future of rhetoric can be greatly enhanced by paying attention once again to materialist concerns before abstracting and daydreaming nonproblems of the ideal. If we wish to be the best communicators, we need to remember the maxim Zeno the Stoic is famous for: there is a reason we have two ears and only one mouth—so that we listen twice as much as we talk. Humans have done enough talking. It’s time for us to listen, and before we can listen, we have to learn how.

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Notes 1. Barbara I. Blonder and William S. Alevizon, “Prey Discrimination and Electroreception in the Stingray Dasyatis sabina,” Copeia 1988, no. 1 (1988): 33. 2. Howard C. Hughes, Sensory Exotica: A World Beyond Human Experience (MIT Press, 1999). 201. 3. T. H. Bullock, D. A. Bodznick, and R. G. Northcutt, “The Phylogenetic Distribution of Electroreception: Evidence for Convergent Evolution of a Primitive Vertebrate Sense Modality,” Brain Research Reviews 6, no. 1 (1983). 4. Nadia Drake, “Life: Dolphin Can Sense Electric Fields: Ability May Help Species Track Prey in Murky Waters,” Science News 180, no. 5 (2011): 12. 5. Hughes, Sensory Exotica: A World Beyond Human Experience: 256. 6. T. H. Bullock, R. G. Northcutt, and D. A. Bodznick, “Evolution of Electroreception,” Trends in Neurosciences 5, no. Supplement C (1982): 50. 7. Ibid., 51. 8. Theodore Holmes Bullock, “Electroreception,” Annual Review of Neuroscience 5, no. 1 (1982): 122. 9. Theodore Holmes Bullock, “Seeing the World through a New Sense: Electroreception in Fish: Sharks, Catfish, and Electric Fish Use Low- or High-Frequency Electroreceptors, Actively and Passively, in Object Detection and Social Communication,” American Scientist 61, no. 3 (1973): 316. 10. Ibid. 11. T. S. Tenforde, “Electroreception and Magnetoreception in Simple and Complex Organisms,” Bioelectromagnetics: Journal of the Bioelectromagnetics Society, The Society for Physical Regulation in Biology and Medicine, The European Bioelectromagnetics Association 10, no. 3 (1989): 215. 12. Ibid., 218. 13. Ibid., 217. 14. Carl Hopkins, Electrical Perception and Communication (2009). 813. 15. Bullock, Northcutt, and Bodznick, “Evolution of Electroreception,” 50. 16. Nicole U. Czech-Damal et al., “Electroreception in the Guiana dolphin (Sotalia guianensis),” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 279, no. 1729 (2011): 663. 17. Blonder and Alevizon, “Prey Discrimination and Electroreception in the Stingray Dasyatis sabina,” 33. 18. Hughes, Sensory Exotica: A World Beyond Human Experience: 201. 19. Ibid., 215–19. 20. Tenforde, “Electroreception and Magnetoreception in Simple and Complex Organisms,” 216.

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21. Michael G. Paulin, “Electroreception and the Compass Sense of Sharks,” Journal of Theoretical Biology 174, no. 3 (1995): 325. 22. Bullock, “Seeing the World through a New Sense: Electroreception in Fish: Sharks, Catfish, and Electric Fish Use Low- or High-Frequency Electroreceptors, Actively and Passively, in Object Detection and Social Communication,” 317. 23. Paulin, “Electroreception and the Compass Sense of Sharks.” 24. Ibid., 332. 25. S. M. Kajiura, “Electroreception in Neonatal Bonnethead Sharks, Sphyrna Tiburo,” Marine Biology 143, no. 3 (2003): 3. 26. Ibid., 6. 27. Czech-Damal et al., “Electroreception in the Guiana Dolphin (Sotalia guianensis),” 664. 28. Ibid., 666. 29. Drake, “Life: Dolphin Can Sense Electric Fields: Ability May Help Species Track Prey in Murky Waters,” 12. 30. Carl D. Hopkins and F. Heiligenberg Walter, “Evolutionary Designs for Electric Signals and Electroreceptors in Gymnotoid Fishes of Surinam,” Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 3, no. 2 (1978): 113. 31. Carl D. Hopkins, “Convergent Designs for Electrogenesis and Electroreception,” Current Opinion in Neurobiology 5, no. 6 (1995): 769. 32. Ibid. 33. Czech-Damal et al., “Electroreception in the Guiana Dolphin (Sotalia guianensis),” 663. 34. Hughes, Sensory Exotica: A World Beyond Human Experience: 225. 35. Hopkins and Walter, “Evolutionary Designs for Electric Signals and Electroreceptors in Gymnotoid Fishes of Surinam,” 114. 36. Hughes, Sensory Exotica: A World Beyond Human Experience: 227. 37. Carl Hopkins, Stimulus Filtering and Electroreception: Tuberous Electroreceptors in Three Species of Gymnotoid Fish, vol. 111 (1976). 171. 38. Hopkins and Walter, “Evolutionary Designs for Electric Signals and Electroreceptors in Gymnotoid Fishes of Surinam,” 126. 39. Hughes, Sensory Exotica: A World Beyond Human Experience: 213. 40. W. Metzner, “Neural Circuitry for Communication and Jamming Avoidance in Gymnotiform Electric Fish,” Journal of Experimental Biology 202, no. 10 (1999): 1365. 41. M. E. Castello et al., “Electroreception in Gymnotus Carapo: PreReceptor Processing and the Distribution of Electroreceptor Types,” Journal of Experimental Biology 203, no. 21 (2000): 3279. 42. Ibid., 3286. 43. Hughes, Sensory Exotica: A World Beyond Human Experience: 228. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid., 229.

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46. Ibid. 47. Formally titled De Utraque Verborum ac Rerum Copia, historians of rhetoric often use shorthand, referring to the text as “Copia” or “the Copia.” 48. Hughes, Sensory Exotica: A World Beyond Human Experience: 231. 49. Hopkins, Stimulus Filtering and Electroreception: Tuberous Electroreceptors in Three Species of Gymnotoid Fish 111: 172. 50. Hughes, Sensory Exotica: A World Beyond Human Experience: 242–5. 51. Metzner, “Neural Circuitry for Communication and Jamming Avoidance in Gymnotiform Electric Fish,” 1365. 52. Hughes, Sensory Exotica: A World Beyond Human Experience: 246–7. 53. G. W. Max Westby, “Electroreception and Communication in Electric Fish,” Science Progress (1933-) 69, no. 274 (1984): 297. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid., 298. 56. Bullock, “Electroreception,” 139. 57. Hopkins, Electrical Perception and Communication: 813. 58. Westby, “Electroreception and Communication in Electric Fish,” 295. 59. Ibid. 60. Hughes, Sensory Exotica: A World Beyond Human Experience: 204. 61. Dominic Clarke, Erica Morley, and Daniel Robert, “The Bee, the Flower, and the Electric Field: Electric Ecology and Aerial Electroreception,” Journal of Comparative Physiology A 203, no. 9 (2017): 738–9. 62. Ibid., 739. 63. Ibid., 740. 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid., 741. 66. Harold H Zakon, “Electric Fields of Flowers Stimulate the Sensory Hairs of Bumble Bees,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113, no. 26 (2016): 1. 67. Ibid., 2. 68. Mathieu Lihoreau and Nigel E Raine, “Bee Positive: The Importance of Electroreception in Pollinator Cognitive Ecology,” Frontiers in Psychology 4 (2013): 2. 69. JE Gregory et al., “Electroreceptors in the Platypus,” Nature 326, no. 6111 (1987): 386. 70. Hughes, Sensory Exotica: A World Beyond Human Experience: 202. 71. Tenforde, “Electroreception and Magnetoreception in Simple and Complex Organisms,” 218. 72. Westby, “Electroreception and Communication in Electric Fish,” 291. 73. Ibid. 74. Bullock, Bodznick, and Northcutt, “The Phylogenetic Distribution of Electroreception: Evidence for Convergent Evolution of a Primitive Vertebrate Sense Modality,” 41.

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75. Ibid., 43. 76. T. H. Bullock, “The Future of Research on Electroreception and Electrocommunication,” Journal of Experimental Biology 202, no. 10 (1999): 1455. 77. Hughes, Sensory Exotica: A World Beyond Human Experience: 257.

References Blonder, Barbara I., and William S. Alevizon. “Prey Discrimination and Electroreception in the Stingray Dasyatis Sabina.” Copeia 1988, no. 1 (1988): 33–36. Bullock, T. H., D. A. Bodznick, and R. G. Northcutt. “The Phylogenetic Distribution of Electroreception: Evidence for Convergent Evolution of a Primitive Vertebrate Sense Modality.” Brain Research Reviews 6, no. 1 (1983/08/01/): 25–46. Bullock, T. H., R. G. Northcutt, and D. A. Bodznick. “Evolution of Electroreception.” Trends in neurosciences 5, no. Supplement C (1982/01/01/): 50–53. Bullock, Theodore Holmes. “Electroreception.” Annual Review of Neuroscience 5, no. 1 (1982): 121–70. ———. “Seeing the World through a New Sense: Electroreception in Fish: Sharks, Catfish, and Electric Fish Use Low- or High-Frequency Electroreceptors, Actively and Passively, in Object Detection and Social Communication.” American Scientist 61, no. 3 (1973): 316–25. Castello, M. E., P. A. Aguilera, O. Trujillo-Cenoz, and A. A. Caputi. 2000. “Electroreception in Gymnotus Carapo: Pre-Receptor Processing and the Distribution of Electroreceptor Types.” Journal of Experimental Biology 203, no. 21: 3279. Czech-Damal, Nicole U., Alexander Liebschner, Lars Miersch, Gertrud Klauer, Frederike D. Hanke, Christopher Marshall, Guido Dehnhardt, and Wolf Hanke. “Electroreception in the Guiana Dolphin (Sotalia Guianensis).” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 279, no. 1729 (2011): 663–68. Drake, Nadia. “Life: Dolphin Can Sense Electric Fields: Ability May Help Species Track Prey in Murky Waters.” Science News 180, no. 5 (2011): 12–12. Hopkins, Carl. Electrical Perception and Communication. 2009. https://doi. org/10.1016/b978-008045046-9.01827-1 ———. Stimulus Filtering and Electroreception: Tuberous Electroreceptors in Three Species of Gymnotoid Fish 111 (1976). https://doi.org/10.1007/bf0060 5531. Hopkins, Carl D. “Convergent Designs for Electrogenesis and Electroreception.” Current Opinion in Neurobiology 5, no. 6 (1995/12/01/): 769–77.

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Hopkins, Carl D., and F. Heiligenberg Walter. “Evolutionary Designs for Electric Signals and Electroreceptors in Gymnotoid Fishes of Surinam.” Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 3, no. 2 (1978): 113–34. Hughes, Howard C. Sensory Exotica: A World Beyond Human Experience. MIT Press, 1999. Kajiura, S. M. “Electroreception in Neonatal Bonnethead Sharks, Sphyrna Tiburo.” Marine Biology 143, no. 3 (2003/09/01): 603–11. Metzner, W. “Neural Circuitry for Communication and Jamming Avoidance in Gymnotiform Electric Fish.” Journal of Experimental Biology 202, no. 10 (1999): 1365. Paulin, Michael G. “Electroreception and the Compass Sense of Sharks.” Journal of Theoretical Biology 174, no. 3 (1995): 325–39. Tenforde, TS. “Electroreception and Magnetoreception in Simple and Complex Organisms.” Bioelectromagnetics: Journal of the Bioelectromagnetics Society, The Society for Physical Regulation in Biology and Medicine, The European Bioelectromagnetics Association 10, no. 3 (1989): 215–21. Westby, G. W. Max. “Electroreception and Communication in Electric Fish.” Science Progress (1933-) 69, no. 274 (1984): 291–313.

CHAPTER 10

Echolocation

The earliest rhetoricians in the Greek-speaking ancient Mediterranean world, whence the discipline originated, would have been intimately familiar with the traditional story of the handsome youth, Narcissus, and the cursed but beautiful nymph by the name of Echo. Because we no longer share a literary context in the modern West—at least not to the degree our pre-modern ancestors would have, at first through the classical tradition, and then the Christian Bible—I will recap the brief version of Echo and Narcissus’s tale, wherein Echo fell madly in love with Narcissus, despite his cruel self-centeredness, and Narcissus’s haughty conceit doomed them both. Echo was a beautiful nymph whose only flaw was her incessant talking. She was always wagging her gums, and insisted on having the last word in every exchange (often the first and most words, as well). One day, Hera, queen of the Olympian gods and wife to Zeus, suspected that her husband was once again making sport with the willing young nymphs whose sexual openness was the inspiration for the name’s more modern usage. Zeus was famously not picky, and would sow his oats in pretty much any soil—often changing into a variety of species to lure in, or even rape, the object of his desire. Echo, seeing Hera approach, detained the goddess with frivolous conversation and, being the strong-willed woman that she was, it was © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. C. Parrish, The Sensory Modes of Animal Rhetorics, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76712-9_10

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difficult for Hera to allow a mere woodland nymph to get the last word over her. Because this conversation turned into a sustained verbal joust, Hera was unable to catch the randy Zeus at his tricks, so she contrived to punish Echo for her impudence and interference. No longer would Echo be allowed to initiate conversation with anyone—least of all the goddess herself—only to respond. Since having the last word was so important to Echo, Hera decreed that it would be the only one she got. Thus when Echo spied Narcissus hunting in the forest, she revealed herself in uncharacteristic silence. Though she was smitten with the young hunter, she could only reply to his questions with further questions of the same nature. This frustrated the man. She is mocking me, he figured, and so he shunned her. This broke Echo’s heart, but it would not be long before Narcissus got his just deserts, for the lad made a habit thereafter of rejecting the beautiful nymphs who were unfortunate enough to fall in love with him. One of Echo’s sister nymphs eventually laid a curse on Narcissus so that he would feel the same sting of unrequited love, which would be his undoing. Echo retired to a cave where she diminished until her very bones melded with the rock of the cliffs and caverns of the world, leaving only her voice to softly repeat whatever future generations would call their questions to her. Narcissus, tired from another hunt, one day reached a pool of exceptional stillness and clarity that reflected perfectly whatever shone on it. These silvery waters showed Narcissus his own beauty, and he fell instantly in love with his own mirror image. He reached out to the beautiful vision, only to have it flee when he touched the water. Yet it always returned and shared the longing look of love that was on Narcissus’s face, and so encouraged him to try and try again to touch the alluring visage. Unable to look away, the reflection consumed Narcissus until he withered down to a tiny beautiful flower, no good for anything but to be admired. The modern analogy of the echo, or response, is apt in several ways. An echo as we know it is the result of active, intentional rhetorical action—in most cases, the transmission of a sonic pulse through clicking or tapping noises formed by the body or its tools, with the express purpose of detecting the slightly altered return signal. This can be done for fun, as children are apt to do in canyons and cathedrals, or any natural or man-made environment with the appropriate acoustic qualities. Or, more interestingly, echoes can be manufactured with the intention of gathering information about the external world based on a comparison of the sent

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and received signal characteristics. To be clear, an echo’s value is not in the transmission of rhetorical energy, but in the characteristics of its transformation by external things (whether they are agents or objects, it does not matter). An echo is among the most fascinating units of persuasion, because it is sent and received most commonly by the same speaker/listener. One must intend to signal; moreover, one must also intend for that intentional signal to be returned with some sort of additional information tacked onto it due to its interaction with an external world independent of our existence. Echoes could thus be construed as metaintentional or metarhetorical in this sense, as users of echoes must be aware of their rhetorical potential before they are able to employ them. Like the nymph, Echo, before her fateful encounter with Hera, several species of animal chatter or yammer (or, more accurately, emit one or more sequential clicks in a pulse transmission) at high frequency. The animals do this for various reasons, such as navigation, obstacle detection, location of prey, and perhaps communication with other individuals. Almost always, echolocation happens in the absence of, or as a supplement to poor, vision or unideal visibility conditions. The signals, more often than not, like Narcissus, serve the signaler’s self-interest, though there may be one or two exceptions which will be discussed later in the chapter. The way echolocation signals are used depends on both species and situation. They can persuade a self or other. Most interestingly of all, as we shall see at the end of this chapter, they can even replace a damaged or missing sense in a species that does not normally develop the ability to echolocate. Of the examples treated in this section exploring three “superhuman” senses, echolocation is possibly the least likely ability for humans to be able to use, but with extraordinary effort, considerable training, and an astonishingly plastic brain, some “superhuman” humans do just that. To witness human echolocation in action is nothing short of amazing. One may be tempted to claim that the power of Echo, when harnessed by humans who have lost their primary link to distal externalities, is nigh on mythological.

Echolocation as a Communication Signal Bats and toothed whales are not only the best-known echolocators in terms of public awareness of the phenomenon. They are also the most well-studied and most capable users of biosonar in the animal world. Signaling among cetaceans and bats is especially rife with rumor and

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urban legend. Bats, for instance, are usually not blind. Their senses of sight, smell, hearing, and touch are often quite good, despite conventional wisdom assuming the contrary.1 Echolocation is not even the primary form of bat communication. In fact, one researcher laments the fact that almost “all aspects of social communication in bats remain largely uninvestigated.”2 Echolocation just happens to seem odd and interesting to humans, or valuable as a biotechnology to copy, so we spend a much higher proportion of our time and research monies studying it. Likewise, echolocation is not (as the general public believes) limited to these two groups of animals. While it is still a very small club, in addition to cetaceans and bats, we know of a few unrelated animals that echolocate, including shrews, swiftlets, and oilbirds. The commonality among these species, despite their wide taxonomic diffusion, should be obvious—they all hunt or live in areas where light does not exist or penetrate well, like in caves, underground, or under water. Underwater communicators like dolphins and whales have a variety of acoustic or vocal signals, including ultrasound clicks and (among some whales) subsonic “song.” Whales can sing continuously for extremely long periods of time—the longest recorded effort thus far is a continuous song lasting 21 hours.3 This was composed of cycles lasting about thirty minutes, which contained about eight different themes. Each theme contained about twenty phrases, with recurring structure and patterns. Some parts of the song were even found to rhyme (with phrases ending in similar notes).4 Whale song, like some dolphin vocalizations, is learned, shared, and evolves. Local groups of whales, for instance, will share a song until a new one emerges or is found. Especially with dolphins and smaller whales, humans interact heavily with echolocators, and have adapted their abilities for use in several media—the most obvious being underwater location of objects, but also fairly mundane activities like using ultrasound scans on a pregnant woman to “see” the fetus inside of her. “Cultural transmission in both parties” explains the closeness of dolphins and humans, as there are many cultures of each animal that work together to ensure a steady supply of fish.5 Nonetheless, almost all of our knowledge about the 34 species of dolphins comes from the convenient study of the bottlenose (Tursiops truncatus ). Despite our close interconnectedness with several types of echolocators, echolocation is actually very rare in nature. Especially as the sense becomes more fine-tuned, the initial investment in bodies that can produce and process strong pulses seems to be prohibitive to many

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species. Researchers have been especially interested in bats because flight is also very expensive in terms of energy, but the costs of flight and echolocation do not seem to be additive, once the structures are in place.6 Echolocation during flight seems to put each breath the bat takes to double duty. It’s almost as if a human was attempting to sing an aria while running at a track meet. Yet echolocating bats in one study did not use significantly more energy than did the non-echolocating bats or birds tested.7 The system echolocating bats have evolved is surprisingly efficient and could teach humans much. Some of the technologies relevant to individuals, as opposed to those used for military or large industrial purposes, will receive some attention later in this chapter. First it is important to understand a bit about echolocation as a signaling phenomenon, and how various groups of animal do or do not use this method of signaling. Echolocation among marine mammals differs in strength, frequency, and use. For instance, in sperm whales, echolocation is extremely powerful, providing sensory data far beyond their range of sight. The primary use of echolocation for sperm whales is finding food. However, they will also use it to learn geographical information for navigation and hunting, and to locate other individuals.8 Some species (including sperm whales and all dolphins studied so far) can even use echolocation to gather internal information about conspecifics. Much like a doctor will use the aforementioned ultrasound (a form of sonar) on pregnant women to monitor the development of their children, cetaceans will use echolocation to monitor the health status of other individuals.9 The idea of universal ultrasound should be shocking to humans, who would almost surely misuse a biomorphic technology that allowed them to peer inside the bodies of other humans. The problems this would cause for reproductive rights, government-based food assistance, and any number of political and social issues carry the potential for widespread social strife. This suggests a certain amount of sensory maturity has to exist in species that are privy to such intimate information about others. Just as primates evolved what Kurt Vonnegut called our big, broken brains in order to monitor and remember social interactions and debts, cetacean brains encountered a sharp rise in brain size at one point in their evolution. Despite entering the sea about 55 million years ago, cetacean brains remained about the same size until around 38 mya when their brains sharply increased in size. The reason for this corresponds with the evolution of echolocation, which was subsequently used for social

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communication.10 Much like primates who form tight social groups, cetaceans became far more social when they developed a new way to share information with (and about) one another, causing increased demand on mental function. Echolocation practices differ sharply between species. While some predator species signal for hunting purposes, navigation seems to be the most common use. Types of pulses emitted vary, as do frequencies and patterns. Oilbirds, one of the weaker echolocators we know of, are the only species that emit multi-click bursts. Toothed whales, tongueclicking bats, and echolocating swiftlets all rely on single or double clicks with regular (if variable) gaps between bursts.11 Of the various types of toothed whales studied, bottlenose dolphins are the best understood, so they will be our most valuable source of information regarding the use of underwater biosonar.

Nonhuman Echolocation---Dolphins Dolphin communication can be vocal and gestural, with vocal signals being narrowly focused or transmitted in broadband emissions. Dolphin gestures are most often performed in close proximity to one another, when their heads are above water, or when they are swimming in very clear water. Dolphin visual abilities vary by species, with some river dolphins being nearly blind and many ocean dolphins having some visual acuity (though their sense of sight does not rival even the mediocre visual acuity of the average human). Dolphins can communicate symbolically through gesture, and captive dolphins often work out a symbolic shorthand when cooperating with human trainers. Like dogs, dolphins attend to human gaze and pointing gestures.12 Thus, they are often considered “intelligent for animals,” or in similarly condescending ways. Often they are treated like clever pets or precocious children. While understanding that dolphins and other animals communicate symbolically militates against long-standing arguments that humans are the only symbolic communicators, it often raises another problem that can be similarly troubling.13 The abilities of animals that we choose to measure, like symbolic communication, are the ones we already assume are particularly human abilities. This leads to the shorthand of calling particularly smart toothed whales “aquatic apes” or corvids “feathered apes,” which encapsulates the issue surrounding treating other species like evolutionary precursors until they show aptitude at a skill

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humans value, in which case cognitive psychologist Louise Barrett argues they are then promoted to being “like children” at performing anthropocentric behaviors.14 We pay little attention to their own mental and behavioral needs in their various Umwelten; moreover, we then assume that human cognitive abilities are all fully developed, and any other species that attempt “human” mental tasks are simply lesser examples of us, rather than animals that are far superior at tasks that are important to them, and yet still able to do some of the things that humans value in themselves. This way of thinking tilts the ice so that all other species are constantly skating uphill. Vocal communication among dolphins is much more complex and useful than visual communication in their natural environment, as sound travels better through water than light. This, of course, is one way that their Umwelt has influenced their rhetoric, as the large, carnivorous horse- or camel-like creatures dolphins descended from (their closest land mammal relative is the hippopotamus, or “water horse,” which eats lots of vegetation and some meat when it becomes available) would have been adapted to be primarily visual, like the vast majority of terrestrial mammals. When speaking to humans, dolphins use a fair number of call types, including a sort of epideictic mimicry-plus-elaboration model they use with other dolphins and that human toddlers use with their parents.15 This can elevate to gesture-speech above water, and thus is quite sophisticated by human standards. Sadly, humans cannot hear roughly half of dolphin vocalizations, because we are not very sophisticated by dolphin standards, but the ones we can hear are fascinating. For instance, much attention has been paid in cetacean studies to the signature whistles of various dolphin species, which consist of whistles that change frequency over time in a recognizable pattern, in order to identify individual dolphins by sound. Each dolphin adolescent spends time developing their personal whistle, and male dyads—groups of two dolphins who form often lifelong bonds as what in human terms would be considered friends or close allies—will converge their whistles to demonstrate their solidarity. Other dolphins will recognize individuals based on their whistles, and react appropriately if a dolphin they know is lost or injured. These whistles demonstrate dolphin individuality in such a significant way that one might call them “audiosyncratic,” if one was so inclined.16 It is even possible that each group of dolphins that spends significant time together may have whistles that share certain characteristics that are

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identifiable to other groups.17 One might think of this like using an area code to identify what large group of humans one wants to call before settling on a specific person. Research on this is ongoing, and because dolphin groups mix and match as they do, with the exception of smallscale male alliances, it is often difficult to define what one “group of dolphins” consists of over time. While signature whistles are very specific and individually developed over time, and in response to culture, all mammals seem to present some sort of vocal correlate to sender identity. Research done on 11 mammalian orders suggests that, since paralinguistic cues were present in all of the orders studied, they are prehuman in origin.18 These similarities exist likely because of homologies in the central nervous system and in the vocal production systems of all mammals. This suggests that recognizing individuality is not merely a human trait, but at least a mammalian one. There seem to be other cases in particularly intelligent non-mammals, such as birds. Famously, there has been much research on corvids, but it would not be surprising to find other birds, like parrots, recognize individual members of their own species.19 Irene Pepperberg’s work with Alex the Parrot (a name that suggests great perspicacity indeed!) shows these birds have potential far beyond mere recognition of individuality.20 While signature whistles are one example of narrowband signals (also see: squawks, brays, mewings, or blats) that dolphins deploy for communication, echolocation is deployed across a wide band of the spectrum. Bottlenose dolphins in captivity (where the vast majority of dolphin communication practices are studied) send short click pulses across a range of 40–150 kHz. The pulse bandwidths can be as wide as 55 kHz.21 For reference, an adult male human speaks in a narrow point varying from 80 to 185 Hz, with women ranging between 165 and 255 Hz, depending on the individual, while the healthy human ear of a young adult can generally detect 20 Hz to 20 kHz. While it is difficult for a human to fathom the nuance available through such a range, a shorthand for dolphin echolocation is that it starts more than twice as high as a soprano straining for high C. Dolphins on the other hand can hear a broader range—from about 70 Hz to 150 kHz, and their communicative whistles can be detected up to 10 km away in quiet waters.22 Dolphin echolocation is primarily used to navigate their environments, but can also be employed for prey detection in situations where visual information is lacking. Underwater biosonar gathers information

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about reflected objects by investigating how they affect transmitted waveforms.23 Returned signals are analyzed and can be compared with results over time to track direction and velocity of moving objects, although bats seem to be better at this than dolphins. Nonetheless, bat and dolphin alike are thought to process echolocation signals roughly similarly.24 One difference during prey tracking is that dolphin signals decrease in intensity as they close in on prey, whereas bats’ do not. As dolphins close in on their target, they reduce their signal by about 6 dB for every halving of the distance to target; this reduction in source level with decreasing range acts as a form of dynamic time-varying gain (or “TVG”) control.25 This is the opposite of human sonar systems, too, which keep the amplitude of emitted signal constant and apply TVG to the receiver instead of the source. Bats act similarly to the human technology they inspired, but their TVG is achieved through the muscular contraction of their middle ear muscles. Dolphins may or may not have evolved the same ability if their ears had been able to flex their massive middle ear structures.26 It is these structural differences that seem to be the most important of several components driving the differences in how echolocation evolved in the various groups of animals that employ it. As I will discuss below, bird and human ears differ in structure from bat and whale ears, which are much more perceptive to frequencies that accommodate strong echolocation practices. Whether probing for prey hiding just below the surface of the ocean floor, or casting nets of bubbles to corral fish to allow for easier hunting, dolphins are often reliant on their echolocating abilities when other senses won’t suffice. Researchers, however, are often amazed at the ability of dolphins to modulate their signals on the fly, in order to peer through disturbances and clutter that would blind human active sonar technologies. In the case of blowing bubble nets to enclose and herd prey to favorable hunting spots, it would seem as if the dolphins were actively jamming their own sonar returns, as the bubbles would present a view somewhat akin to what fog does to vehicle headlights when driving at night.27 Because dolphins don’t have better hardware than humans rely on in their biomimicry, dolphins hunting with bubble nets would need to be relying on their other senses (which seems unlikely, as they are less powerful and also prone to interference from this type of hunting activity), or they would have to hold some type of advantage over human technology. What some scientists think might be happening is that dolphins are able to vary the amplitude of their clicks within a single

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burst transmission, even though this would require processing difficult nonlinear mathematical data in real-time, which is no certainty, but would be an astounding feat if true.28 This would allow them to part the reflective veil, in order to peer inside the killing sphere of bubbles herding the voracious dolphins’ unwitting prey to their inevitable doom. Dolphin communication evolved from mammalian larynxes, which was probably very similar in formation to that of the modern wolf, who shares many traits with the land-roaming ancestor of all dolphins (though that ancestor, as mentioned above, is now thought to have been something more closely resembling a large carnivorous camel, but slightly less comical when considered as an example of an efficient land predator). From this base similarity, dolphins have become quite distinct from their land-based kin, and have developed the ability to make two sounds at once, much like some birds. Their two nasal passages connect to two sound-producing organs, which is what allows them to produce different sounds simultaneously.29 What is even more interesting, however, is that schooling dolphins may be able to employ a mass media approach to sense reception. In what Whitehead and Rendell call a “sensory integration system,” dolphins combine communication, mimicry, and awareness of other individuals’ sensory information (such as if all of the dolphins to your left start to echolocate, you could make the short leap to conclude that there is evidence of a food source in that direction).30 What makes dolphins such an interesting case is that they are among the very few land mammals to return to the sea. One could look at the results to their phenotype as a form of devolution, but that would miss the layers of complexity their forms and behavior have acquired, like steeping a tea bag by dunking it in and out of the hot water to make the flavor churn and mix with the milk and honey you’ve added. Dolphins suggest in some ways what humans could be, if we were foolish enough to melt the polar ice caps and live in an overly warm water world for a few million years (indeed, Kurt Vonnegut famously explored a similar theme, only his particular take involved nuclear radiation and a world where humans have evolved into something more closely resembling a human/fur seal hybrid). “They sense their environment differently from us, and it is a different environment,” argue Whitehead and Rendell; “three-dimensional, buoyant, opaque to light but transparent to sound, barrier free, and uniform over small scales but varying hugely over large scales.”31 And I would add, prone to impermanence. Because there is

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no building that would stand long under the sea, dolphins do not need hands (or even the paws their ancestors likely evolved while they were land mammals), even though they do manage to use tools in some specific situations.

Nonhuman Echolocators---Micro Bats Next to rodents, bats are the second most numerous order of mammals. Much of this success can be attributed to their abilities to fly and to echolocate.32 Bat echolocation is in some ways similar to that of dolphins, though differences would obviously exist due to differing goals and media. Sound, of course, travels differently through air and water. Nonetheless, both groups of animal hunt in open, 3-dimensional environments. Bat echolocation consists of a brief emission pulse of 0.3 to about 200 ms in duration.33 The frequencies are quite high by human standards, ranging from 12 to 200 kHz.34 The pulses are produced by the larynx and emitted through the mouth or nose, with the sound frequencies and patterns over time being particular to each species. For bats, the medium of communication is almost always the air of the lower atmosphere. However, some bats are able to locate small fish and aquatic species, tracking their ripples on otherwise smooth water surfaces (closely following their reflections, not unlike haughty Narcissus) to determine the location of the objects of their desire (which is generally prey, not their own captivating visages).35 This is something of a rigging together of abilities and circumstances, though, as conditions need to be right, or sound would simply reflect off the water without shaping its return echo. Echolocation can happen quite quickly; bats are able to echolocate several times per second in order to home in on prey.36 But locating things is not the only task of echolocation, despite the unfortunate naming: it is also used to distinguish prey from non-prey, perform pattern recognition tasks, differentiate between smooth or rough surfaces for landing sites, calculate distance, direction, and even target velocity.37 It is a multi-purpose tool. One researcher argues that it might be better off renamed as “a term analogous to visualization, such as audification,” which would be a more accurate way of representing the mental mapping power of echolocation.38 Bats seem to create tapestries of sound the way humans might think of themselves mapping the world through mental moving pictures.

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Mapping is possibly an apt metaphor, as bats do seem to position themselves in relation to others this way. Echolocation is known to serve orientation during foraging and to aid in navigation, while recognition of individuals is generally held to be done by visual or olfactory cues. However, bats are members of the most gregarious mammalian order, and form large colonies, in which they share roosts not only with other individuals and groups, but with other species, as well.39 While social calls of lower than 20 kHz (and thus audible to humans) are most often used for vocal identification, several experiments have found that bats’ ultrasonic echolocation calls allow familiar bats to distinguish between individuals. Indeed, there are a variety of traits embedded in bat echolocation signals, such as age, family affiliation, gender, and colony membership.40 Until very recently, echo pulses were considered a form of “autocommunication,” meaning that only the individual producing the sounds would perceive or process that info, but many studies have shown that these calls travel quite far, and can be very loud, thus encouraging eavesdropping.41 For the purposes of hunting this can be very effective, despite the returns from insect bodies being of much lower intensity than the initial pulses. Most insect echoes are only useful to other bats at a maximum range of 5 m, and normally not more than 1–2 m.42 By contrast, the calls themselves can be heard as far as 50 m away, this effectively extending the hunting ranges of bats who can listen in on the signals of other individuals. Bats have a repertoire of social calls that are distinct from echolocation signals, which are used primarily for navigation and hunting prey. However, echolocation pulses that are meant for one purpose by the sender and intended receiver can be hijacked for the use of other individuals or even members of other species.43 While each species of has their own “personalized frequency” of bat signal that its ears are best tuned to receive, much like the fictional comic book character, Batman, whose image the term “bat signal” conjures, sending out bursts of noise into the night is in many ways like shining a floodlight into the evening sky, waiting for a hero (or even a villain) to observe and respond. Minimizing frequency overlap does much to avoid other hunting bats jamming each others’ signals, but it does nothing to prevent eavesdropping. One species can therefore easily exploit the bursts of other species to gain information about prey type and frequency, as well as social or potentially navigational information.

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Researchers believe that more than 900 species of bats echolocate. Echolocation pulses are intense and emitted at a high rate, so there simply has to be overlap in signaling, as well as opportunities to exploit information floating through the air from one bat to the next.44 In addition to hunting and navigation information, we know that pulse output is affected by such traits as species, sex, individual and species size, age, social group membership, and geographic location; tests have found that bats can pick up on at least some of this information (and there’s no reason to think they would not be able to determine all of these things, as well as some things humans might not think of), showing test subjects discriminating on the basis of sex or individual identity.45 Bats will react to echolocation calls appropriately, based on embedded information and social context. For instance, free-ranging males will sometimes respond to female echo calls with courtship calls, while male calls will elicit aggressive vocalizations.46 Human scientists are having great difficulty in figuring out what acoustic parameters mark calls as male or female, or signify other identity information, but eavesdropping bats are nonetheless quite adept at it.47 Even humans can distinguish between the bat species themselves based solely on their echolocation calls, but this generally requires equipment to enhance our limited hearing capabilities.48 Echolocation pulses exhibit telltale patterns when studied in terms of frequency over time structures based on constant frequency (CF) and frequency modulated (FM) components.49 Humans using broadband microphones that can record the frequencies, durations, and patterns of frequency change over time, would be able to categorize bats reliably without the aid of sight or preexisting knowledge of range and habitat.50 Bats do this by simply hearing species differences. Humans on a dark night, where several species of bats range, would have less luck being able to sort the squeaks in the dark, so to speak. Bats, of course, have more advantages at this than simply being able to hear the calls naturally. They also learn to hunt through eavesdropping and imitation of adults of various species. Subadults learning their trade will frequently monitor both conspecifics and closely related species to help locate prey, which is a practice particular to this difficult learned cultural behavior.51 When following the leads of older bats to help find night roosts, nursery colonies, or mating/hibernation sites, these same bats will only pay heed to information from the calls of conspecifics.

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Echolocation is clearly beneficial, but it is so conspicuous that even some prey species (such as several types of moth) have evolved to detect it. Because acoustic signals for bats are recognized at such a far greater range than olfactory, tactile, and often visual signals, there is strong selection pressure favoring the evolution of idiosyncratic echo patterns of sound over time.52 At a bare minimum, bats need to easily recognize their own sonar to prevent jamming in flight. In practice, as mentioned above, bats gain much more information from echolocation calls than humans would think possible. Two researchers working on this problem acknowledged at least three reasons that this is difficult to imagine.53 The first is that echo calls have simple acoustic structure, so it is puzzling where the information might be encoded. Second, bats already vary their echolocation calls based on task or situation, meaning the information load placed on such simple calls is already compounded. The third reason this is difficult to understand is because any sort of propagation loss would blur signatures, especially in high frequency ranges. (For the non-expert, this simply means that stuff gets quieter as it travels across a medium like air or water, so it becomes more difficult to hear the nuance in a sound over time pattern.) One attempt to shed light on how these difficulties are overcome ended up raising doubts about the efficacy of individual signatures in echolocation calls, but this was a single test using only seven subjects, all from the same species, and in laboratory conditions.54 Much more study will be necessary to comprehend how (and how often and effectively) bats are able to gather this information from echolocation calls in the wild. Many species of tree dwelling bats are known to move their roost sites every 1–3 days, in order to avoid predator locating or to help prevent overhunting. Not all members of a single roost move along with the group, which creates a sort of fission–fusion society, similar to many dolphin species.55 (There does not seem to be a connection between echolocation ability and fission–fusion social organization, however, as many non-locating species are organized similarly.) Bats thus must share information with one another regarding the locations of suitable roost sites, which led researchers to ask which senses are employed in so doing. After performing several sense-deprivation experiments, it was discovered that the only cues that helped bats locate a roost faster than the control were passive acoustic cues; bats not only use social calls that are lower frequency and narrower band than echolocation signals, but as we have established they also eavesdrop regularly on echolocation calls from other

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bats.56 This discovery led to the need to rethink some other long-held assumptions about specific echolocation strategies. For instance, scientists assumed that because different bat species specialized in different sized insects (whose wing size variations affect reflection strength) they did not share echolocation frequencies. As it turns out, it is more likely that a species has a “private bandwidth” so that conspecifics will more easily recognize their own groupmates, as bats have learned to eavesdrop across species lines.57 Eavesdropping is often an activity that leads to more successful foraging, because bats will be informed when there is a rich supply of prey species in a nearby area. Once they locate a space (on their own or by eavesdropping), bats will hunt for prey, and the mechanism of this activity is most intriguing. Hunting bats in flight begin by passively observing by listening for flight sounds nearby. Once they’ve identified a target, they flood the air with sound, adjusting both the pattern and tempo of their high frequency sounds in order to track the small targets moving through a 3-dimensional environment. As the bats close in on their prey, pulse repetition rates increase markedly. Thus, they are able to finely tune their emissions in order to locate their prey precisely.58 Donald Griffin, one of the earliest experts in bat echolocation, identifies three phases of insect hunting behavior by echolocating bats. During the search phase, the bat flies generally straight forward, emitting pulses every once in a while, somewhat passively scanning for prey. Once a potential target is located, the bat moves on to the approach phase, wherein it turns toward the target and increases the pulse repetition rate. When quite close, it reaches the terminal phase, where the bat emits what is called “the buzz”—emitting bursts at a very high rate.59 This “buzz” will also occur when fine-tuning to avoid small wires or just before landing, but the prey-locating buzz of the terminal phase of hunting lasts longer, especially with wily prey. This method of increased intensity hunting is highly efficient. Bats in captivity have been observed catching two fruit flies in one half second, and up to 10 mosquitoes or 14 fruit flies per minute.60 While foraging activities pose the most technical difficulty, one of the more fascinating aspects of echolocation from a cross-species rhetorical perspective is demonstrated by the co-evolution of some bat species and the plants that have developed over time to house and protect them. This process, known as mutualism, is enacted by a small number of species of bats and their corresponding pitcher plants (apparently strictly one type of bat to one type of pitcher). Several pairs have co-evolved to their

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common benefit. Pitchers get nutrients from insectivorous bat guano, while the bats get shelter and a ready-built defense against parasites.61 The bats and plants make a sort of mutual defense pact in symbiosis, allowing both members of the team to thrive. What does this have to do with echolocation, though? Interestingly enough, researchers found that while there are pitchers that house both insect eating and fruit bats, the ones that house predatory bats have developed ultrasound reflector dishes. Bats are able to echolocate in the dense jungle growth until they hear a return that one might think of as the auditory equivalent of human hunters wearing blaze orange in a forest, so that other humans (but not their deer prey) see them sticking out starkly against the backdrop of dull browns and greys of the winter woods. Fruit bats don’t benefit from this ability because they are unable to echolocate, so they cannot take advantage of a plant-evolved homing mechanism such as this. While this may sound like something out of a Star Trek episode, or something that must be an isolated occurrence, several pitcher-bat pairings have evolved such methods to help them reunite.

Nonhuman Echolocation---Birds Cross-species co-evolution for echolocating bats and their pitcher plant homes is wildly sophisticated, far beyond anything human technological sonar achieves, and impressive in its utter rarity. Dolphins and bats are the Grade-A, top flight, blue ribbon examples of this form of sensation and communication, and the competition is not even close among the remaining participants. If this ability was conceptually mapped as a ladder, and we skipped many, many rungs, the next examples would come from various species of bird from several genuses, who are commonly known as oilbirds and swiftlets. Not sharing many other similarities, oilbirds and swiftlets nonetheless share this one special trait because of their adaptation to flight in sometimes near-complete darkness. Oilbirds (Steatornithidae) are neotropical, ranging from Bolivia up to Colombia and Trinidad, while swiftlets (Apodidae) are paleotropical.62 Oilbird social calls sound to the human ear like a “cacophony of ear-splitting demonic screams and snarls” while swiftlets have a more generic high-pitched squeakiness one identifies with many different bird species.63 What they do have in common is that they are both cave-dwellers that produce clicks while flying in dim light or darkness, which are generally audible to the human ear.64

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These birds echolocate primarily for navigation. Swiftlets and oilbirds navigate in the dark, but cannot detect small objects well, unlike bats of the suborder microchiroptera, who can avoid even wire as fine as 0.46 mm in diameter.65 In one study of swiftlets, by comparison, wires of 1.5 mm weren’t even detected, while 3.0 mm obstacles were avoided only slightly above chance.66 Swiftlets have even been observed flying right into medium-sized wooden rods, iron rods, and PVC tubing. Unlike the fine grain abilities of bats, bird echolocation seems to be useful mainly in detecting large, solid objects, like cave walls or stalactites. Oilbirds are fruit eaters, and would not be tempted by insect prey, but swiftlets that eat various species of insect nonetheless tend to use echolocation sparingly outside of their roosts, relying more heavily on visual cues during their crepuscular foraging routines. Unlike microchiropteran bats that capture prey with the aid of echolocation pulses, oilbirds and cave swiftlets are more interested in avoiding other objects in their flight path. Oilbirds do have an additional adaptation that cave swiftlets do not seem to claim—in fact, only deep sea fishes are known to share this trait with oilbirds—which is the production of three layers of rod photoreceptors placed one on top of another. This gives them one of the most sensitive visual systems found on land, and seems to challenge those who would come to the conclusion that echolocation always comes at the expense of vision.67 What we don’t understand about echolocation in birds could fill volumes, and species that have long been thought not to echolocate are being found to do so as researchers apply more hours and technology to their study. In fact, scientists once used the ability as a means of separating swiftlet genera, but it was later found that some of the birds that weren’t thought to echolocate do.68 Their strong vision and moderate ability to echolocate seem to be used in combination very effectively for navigation, as the latter is used almost exclusively when in or near their roosts. About 20 species of swiftlet are known to echolocate, and these calls occur mostly within the audible range of human observers— their highest energy output is at about 2–8 kHz (as a reminder, a young and regularly developed human ear detects sound within the 20 Hz– 20 kHz range).69 This is especially interesting, as most birds seem to have a hearing range roughly comparable to that of humans, which severely limits their (and our) echolocation abilities, especially in places with very much background noise.70

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The clicks these birds shuttle off in search of environmental information are produced in the syrinx. Return echoes are then perceived with a single middle ear bone and a simple cochlea.71 By comparison, humans (like all mammals) have 3 separate bones in their middle ear that are somewhat more sensitive. Oilbirds seem to be insensitive to much information transmitted higher than 10 kHz, while swiftlets seem to perceive slightly higher signals, but not by much. Their clicks have their greatest energy at 1–10 kHz, suggesting an ideal range.72 Hunting bats require a far more customizable signal, emitting frequency modulated (FM) signals which repeat in longer burst phrases, and are possibly time stamped to allow for direction and velocity tracking.73 All this serves to reiterate that the divide between top performers and amateurs in the echolocation game is significant. Oilbirds and swiftlets (along with humans) have the weakest echolocation senses in nature. These birds are still far more reliant on vision in situations when that sense is viable, and have been found to adjust their signal designs, or avoid signaling altogether, based on abundance of available light.74 It is important that oilbirds, in particular, have extremely light sensitive eyes, perhaps the most sensitive of all terrestrial vertebrates, for which they likely have sacrificed visual acuity and the perception of colors; if we proceed with the general assumption that there is some sort of rough trade-off between vision and echolocation, or that there are limited cognitive resources for processing both types of information, there is no wonder why gifted seeing species would only have need to evolve rough and ready substitutes. Even in moonlight on a clear night, oilbirds will greatly reduce the amount of clicks they broadcast.75 If they are already getting the information they need visually, then the less keenly developed senses are less necessary for navigation. There are more potential explanations for birds to have only evolved weak echolocating abilities, too, and the reasons could be manifold. To provide another example, it is possible, bird echolocation was a later adaptation than their sense of hearing in general. We know that oilbirds, for instance, emit echo signals that are most effective at 10–20 kHz, but their hearing is best at 2 kHz. This is interesting because “ears are typically broadly tuned to the most relevant signals for a given species (e.g., echolocation signals in bats, and mating calls, offspring distress calls, and predator cues in non-echolocators, including other birds).”76 An alternative explanation for this disparity is that there may be some physical constraint in avian ear evolution, where a useful morphological leap might

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be too large or costly from their present state. Or oilbirds could just be special.77 However special they might be, though, the evolution of echolocation seemed to favor those who were morphologically able to take a gradual approach rather than, to borrow an allegorical landmass from Richard Dawkins, attempted instead to climb Mount Improbable.78 As there are so few non-mammalian echolocators, oilbirds and cave swiftlets represent an interesting, if isolated, source of analogical information about mammalian evolution and the subsequent behaviors it allows. When humans echolocate, they do so weakly (compared to the masters— bats and toothed whales). Their echolocation clicks are below 20 kHz, which makes their efforts comparable to much more distantly related avians than to other mammals. Bird clicks are quite easily heard by most humans, which makes them much easier to observe without special equipment, and may contribute greatly to human biosonar aids.79

Human Echolocation---Practice and Theory The general public is well acquainted with at least the broad strokes of echolocation’s potential for human exploitation. Most people are aware of sonar and radar technology used by military service memebers, meteorologists, and aviation professionals, which is the application most widely known to the general public. Human-active sonar technology was, of course, derived from the study of cetacean communication, and shares similar principles with the airborne radar of bats. This adoption has caused its problems in the natural world, as most human technologies seem to do. Deborah Cox Callister considers the willy-nilly use of underwater sonar a “vivid example of colonization,” having discovered and co-opted the communication systems of other animals, despite the consequences to those animals.80 The dangers posed to cetaceans by human sonar is welldocumented elsewhere, and has persisted for decades. There are various examples of such colonization, which is often a result of biomimicry, and volumes could be written on the subject, but I want to avoid rehashing the entanglements of industry, as well as the obvious dangers of military application, in order to focus on the more immediate theme (for this book) of individuals struggling to navigate the social and environmental challenges they face because they detect only weak sensations and they employ flawed systems of communication. Without mechanical assistance, some humans have been taught to echolocate to varying degrees of utility. By clicking the tongue, returning

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echoes encode information about range, size, shape, and texture of objects. Using head movements to supplement the clicks, humans can distinguish the shapes of even 2-dimensional objects whose shapes differ significantly (e.g., square vs. triangular).81 The idea that humans do not seem to have specifically evolved to use our senses in this way, and have nonetheless found inspiration from the marvelous animals that did, presents fascinating challenges for theories of persuasion, psychology, cognition, and philosophy, to name a few. In terms of cognitive ability, it demonstrates yet again the delightful plasticity of brains to cope with entirely novel abilities in the absence of others. Much of the animal kingdom maps the world with visual cues taking the lead in the creation of a mental movie. However, there are several situations that prevent mental narration of our sensory input because of limitations to that all-important sense of vision. One researcher notes that echolocating bats have been able to supplement their vision in mindand evolution-altering ways because they have added another strong “primary” sense for use when vision loses its efficacy. “This ability [through echolocation] to create an internal representation of the external world independent of sunlight allowed bats to exploit the rich resources of nocturnal winged insects with hardly any competition from other vertebrates.”82 What the additional sense allows humans to do is to replace a sense that would in many ways be irreplaceable if it were not for the latent ability to learn echolocation, despite no known cultures employing this practice as a group. As Barrett argued (above) about dolphin cognition not being computer-like, or ape-like, human brains are not computers, either. They are more accurately (though still incompletely) thought of as narrative engines that make sense and story out of the input we gain from body and environment. Our minds make comprehensible stories out of the information our senses provide them, and in conversation with what training and experience has taught us. Minds are personal reality projectors, casting our narratives onto everything in our environment—stories that are shaped by, and in some ways help shape, the world around us. As many authors rightly note, communication with the intention of pure knowledge transmission is an impossible and noble act. Writing itself is a type of telepathy. Through symbols whose meanings are agreed upon in advance, we can relate to one another the contents of our minds, and our skill at this task is the measure of success in creating similar narratives in the minds of others. Barrett herself prefers what she calls a “performative” model of

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brain activity to a “representational” one, and though I think a powerful brain can do two things, it is worth noting that some people draw a sharp distinction between task-driven and story-driven cognition.83 What is important that we take away from this discussion is that, even if the performative model mentioned in the dolphin discussion is better than my narrative explanation, it is still subject to the 4E-cognition model, wherein it is embodied, embedded, emotive, and extended.84 No narrative would be useful without accounting for all or most of these concerns. For human animals, the goals of echolocation overwhelmingly focus on navigation and obstacle avoidance among those who have lost their sense of sight, or had been born without it. We have removed ourselves from many aspects of the struggle for life, especially when it comes to the necessity for every man or woman to hunt and kill their prey. Some humans have even stopped eating animal flesh entirely, and need not echolocate the eggplants and sweet potatoes that are available for purchase at the local greengrocer. Where echoic object information is most useful is in avoiding hazards, finding pathways, and in the cases of highly trained practitioners, discriminating between the shapes of household objects— which test subjects are able to do at a rate far greater than chance.85 While this does not seem much of a feat at first blush, sighted individuals are able to distinguish much more quickly between tools by using their vision (often well before they’ve even reached the items) before feeling the differences manually. It could even be dangerous digging around in a toolbox, or a kitchen drawer, where sharp objects may coexist with the spatula or the needle nose pliers one wanted to retrieve. Even knowing which object is the broom and which the mop before reaching for them makes life a tiny bit easier. While we are frail and temporary beings, groping in the dark of our own ignorance most of the time, becoming more efficient with even the most mundane tasks makes life slightly less oppressive from time to time. Our ability to be trained to echolocate weakly includes the possibility of detecting object ranges with great success. Researchers have found that as long as an echo reports at a delay of more than 5 ms from the original pulse, meaning an object is greater than 86 cm away from one’s mouth or cane, that trained echolocators are highly successful at estimating range.86 This helps avoid injury and to locate oneself in 3-dimensional space. While both blind and sighted subjects are capable of “substantial precision in the perception of properties of distal objects” such as distance, shape, size, and relative motion, most studies of the ability have been

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performed without distractions, and have included no noises that were not produced by the observer/participant.87 Like stereopsis in our vision, human ears are not normally functioning separately or alone. Our hearing is part of a system that includes ways to filter background noise and isolate ranges of sound to some degree, but click intensity would have to be fairly high for it not to be drowned out by other sounds in the same frequency range. While some people think we all use echolocation passively in our everyday lives, there is little evidence to support that; humans lack awareness of echoes normally because they are often weak or returned in milliseconds. We become distracted by our dominant senses, and are apt to ignore echo information if we sense it at all.88 When isolated in quiet laboratories, both blind and sighted people have shown the ability to detect objects great and small. In one study, both test groups were able to detect 20 cm diameter targets at a distance of 2.75 m 60% of the time; at 0.6 m away, they detected targets as small as 5 cm at the same rate.89 But, once again, the blind individuals performed much better than sighted ones. In a different study, sighted subjects were trained to gain spatial information about their positions in walled rooms, but performances were not very precise unless the subjects were already standing quite close to a wall.90 Echolocation in blind users leads to sweeping changes in how certain portions of the brain function. Practitioners who were studied showed cortical reorganization that recruits regions of the primary visual cortex in order to process audio returns.91 Human echolocators demonstrate increased functional activity in the calcarine cortex (but not the auditory cortex), during testing in fMRI machines.92 This, and other areas that blind echolocators recruit, are regions of the brain that would otherwise be used for visual information processing in sighted individuals.93 Some studies have found very specific pathways for the information as related to brain function: the location of moving surfaces recruits temporal-occipital brain areas, “potentially encroaching on visual motion area MT+”; shape processing activates the LOC; surface materials processing shows activity in the parahippocampal cortex; surfaces positioned on one side activate the contralateral calcarine cortex.94 This suggests that neural processing for various types of echolocation tasks could be ordered in a feature specific manner.95 That these reorganizations seem to be consistent from one echolocator to the next suggests certain areas of the brain are evolved to deal with certain types of world

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creation or modeling to aid our narrative processes, whether we receive visual clues to our whereabouts in space, or echoes. While early blind users have more robust calcarine activity when echolocating, both early and late blind individuals “use echolocation in a way that seems similar to vision.”96 More intriguing is that blind Braille users show a much higher ability to echolocate. Processing of this ultrafine tactile information “has been linked to striate and extra-striate visual areas” that may also be recruited for echolocation.97 As a trainable skill, this allows blind people a high level of independence, and blind people’s available neural resources tend to make them perform at a far higher rate than sighted individuals who are trained to echolocate. Without a need for visual data processing and interpretation, the brain is free to colonize that space for robust echolocation. This repurposing of available resources does not seem to be digital, either. In one interesting experiment, a group of near-sighted individuals was pitted against a group of normally sighted individuals, and the nearsighted subjects achieved “statistically significant higher performance” in echolocating tasks.98 This seems to indicate that for humans as vision degrades in quality, brain resources are freed up to process echo signals. The worse you are at seeing, the higher your echolocating potential may be. One reason for this could be because it is more difficult to recruit areas of the brain that are already functioning. In one study of a path direction task, sighted echolocators processed the information they obtained in a highly distributed manner, wherever resources happened to be; blind echolocators, on the other hand, relied heavily on the bilateral SPL within the parietal cortex, which is an area known to be used for spatial navigation in sighted people’s brains.99 Because these pathways are already in use among sighted subjects, the work of processing the new stimuli is shunted off to wherever spare resources can be found. Echolocation is an interesting case of what I am calling a “superhuman” sense, in that it is one of the few ways we are able to flip sense-environment relationships on their heads. Normally perception controls action, but here the action of sending a pulse controls perception (returning an echo).100 Touch and taste are also what we might call outgoing senses—ones that actively probe the world for sensations—while hearing is otherwise a passive, reactive sense when not using echoes. Of these, only echolocation can be useful for sensing distal objects. Humans have fantasized and fetishized echolocation as a superhuman skill for decades, perhaps because its mechanisms have been mysterious

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for so long, and perhaps because its most famous uses were by the bats who already populated the dark spaces of our psyches (not to mention our myths, legends, and eventually our horror films). The Marvel Comics superhero Daredevil is perhaps the best-known superhuman echolocator. After losing the use of his eyes in an accident involving a vague chemical spill, his other senses were heightened to heroic levels, allowing him to hear the heartbeats of his enemies and avoid the air currents made by their flailing fists as they rushed in to attack him. While we do have other abilities that we can sharpen and hone when we lose one sense, they never quite make it to this level of pure fantasy. The persistent myth of the blind kung fu master fighting crime is useful only as allegory, not as a healthy goal for people who have lost their vision. Falling generally outside the sensory abilities of humans, we innovate ways to use the extrasensory, but it endangers the lives of the very animals who taught us this form of communication. Whales may have a fighting chance, however. As charismatic megafauna who are culturally important to many different human groups, they are well represented in human media. Books, theme parks, stuffed toys, bumper stickers, and reality television shows are just some of the ways humans consume whale images.101 The fight to stop the consumption of whale flesh, on the other hand, is ongoing, and has spilled over to do great harm to dolphin and porpoise populations who are slaughtered to be passed off as whale meat in countries like Japan. However, biosonar mimicry on the part of humans is, like any tool, not necessarily all bad. One beneficial use for the technology is in developing mobility aids for the blind. As early as 1991, around 30 different models of blind mobility aids were in use around the world.102 The interesting thing about these devices is that they all were developed based on the assumption that because bats are such successful terrestrial mammal echolocators, that their methods were almost universally adopted. Bats use a downswept FM ultrasound to locate, so researchers attempting to innovate biomimic technology simply assumed that this was the best way to go. One such device used a signal sweep downward from 70 to 40 kHz within 1 ms, sharing some characteristics with certain bat species, but being far too high for human ears to detect.103 Many of these devices were tested in the 1980s, and they worked quite well, even if their apparatuses were quite bulky. Early designs required the user to carry a microcomputer motherboard and processor, a battery pack of considerable size, a wired earphone headset, emitters, and receivers.104

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All of this equipment would not only be impractical for most everyday applications, but could be potentially dangerous. More recent devices, like the Sunu Band or the H.E.L.P. device are indistinguishable from wristwatches if a passing stranger glances at them.105 As mentioned above, while most echolocation devices have used bats as their models, one team of researchers has recently modeled the spatial characteristics of human echolocation clicks in order to reproduce useful artificial clicks representative of the full range of human efforts, while avoiding pulses outside our hearing.106 Because higher frequencies translate into better spatial resolution, the bats and toothed whales that operate in the ultrasonic range (that is, greater than 20 kHz), are able to “see” much better than humans, whose peak frequencies fall within 2–4 kHz, which is nearly the middle of a healthy young person’s hearing range.107 Clicks are synthesized by the basilar membrane in the inner ear, which acts as a filter, allowing humans a narrow range to distinguish between our own clicks and background noise.108 Because of the ways our ears evolved, and because the vast majority of humans have used vision instead of echolocation as the most effective tool for mapping the world, any sort of automated pulse system would be most effective for humans if it falls within that very small peak frequency range. Even for the sighted individual, echolocation is being used to develop a variety of products. Some of these include jackets that help wearers navigate in urban environments, based on sleeve vibrations, which would be especially useful in unfamiliar cityscapes whose signs are not in a language the wearer reads. Jackets like this may be a way to incorporate more echo information into the lives of normal humans, while passing the cognitive load on to an artificial processor located outside the body.109 Echolocation presents an interesting case of a skill we can develop with our current physiology, and which we can enhance through technology, but only shows up normally as a very useful substitute for a sense we rely upon much more heavily as a species. And while sighted individuals can be trained, they are never as good as those without sight; moreover, the very best human echolocators are those who were blind very early in life and whose brains have adapted to more efficiently process audio information as if it were visual, or at least using those visual spatial resources. For most of us, Echo’s responses are mere entertainment when we visit canyons and cathedrals, but for some people it is a sense that in some sense makes them superhuman.

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It seems inevitable that one day echolocation will inform the lives of most humans, but we are not there yet. Most of us remain in the auditory dark. However, the suggestion that humans could add this supplemental sense to their repertoire is amazing, and should be taken as a fact most reassuring to those who have despaired at the themes of this book that remind members of an arrogant species that we are often so very ignorant of most of the information around us, as if we’ve cut a few tiny holes in a dark sheet, hoping that if we can peer out of them and concentrate, we will be able to make some sense of the universe and all its goings on. For now, we detect few things and reason out a few more. Nonetheless, we are far from being the pinnacle of evolution we are in the habit of thinking we are, and our deeply flawed systems of communication with the natural world and with others of our own kind is evidence enough of our lack.

Notes 1. Dina K. N. Dechmann and K. Safi, “Studying Communication in Bats,” Cognition, Brain, Behavior 9, no. 3 (2005): 490. 2. Ibid., 508. 3. Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell, The Cultural Lives of WHALES and Dolphins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 77. 4. Ibid., 78. 5. Ibid., 99. 6. John Speakman and Paul Racey, No Cost of Echolocation for Bats in Flight, vol. 350 (1991). 421. 7. Ibid., 423. 8. Whitehead and Rendell, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins: 47. 9. Ibid., 49. 10. Ibid., 226. 11. Signe Brinkløv, Coen P. H. Elemans, and John M. Ratcliffe, “Oilbirds Produce Echolocation Signals Beyond Their Best Hearing Range and Adjust Signal Design to Natural Light Conditions,” Royal Society Open Science 4, no. 5 (2017): 7. 12. Adam A. Pack and Louis M Herman, “The dolphin’s (Tursiops truncatus ) Understanding of Human Gazing and Pointing: Knowing What and Where,” Journal of Comparative Psychology 121, no. 1 (2007): 38. 13. For examples of this argument in rhetorical theory and the life sciences, respectively, see: Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (Berkeley: University of California Press,

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15.

16.

17. 18.

19. 20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31.

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1966). or Terrence William Deacon, The Symbolic Species: The Coevolution of Language and the Brain, 1st ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997). Louise Barrett, “Why Brains Are Not Computers, Why Behaviorism Is Not Satanism, and Why Dolphins Are Not Aquatic Apes,” The Behavior Analyst 39, no. 1 (2016): 11–12. Heidi E. Harley, “Whistle Discrimination and Categorization by the Atlantic Bottlenose Dolphin (Tursiops truncatus ): A Review of the Signature Whistle Framework and a Perceptual Test,” Behavioural Processes 77, no. 2 (2008): 246. The pun is, shamefully, my own. A fuller discussion of dolphin signature whistles is discussed in Alex Parrish, “Humans, Dolphins, and Other People,” in Rhetorical Animals: Boundaries of the Human in the Study of Persuasion, ed. Kristian Bjørkdahl and Alex Parrish (Lexington Books, 2017), 154–59. S. Datta and C. Sturtivant, “Dolphin Whistle Classification for Determining Group Identities,” Signal Processing 82, no. 2 (2002): 257. Marina Scheumann et al., “Vocal Correlates of Sender-identity and Arousal in the Isolation Calls of Domestic Kitten (Felis silvestris catus),” Frontiers in Zoology 9, no. 1 (2012): 1. Martina Schiestl, “Individuality and Foraging Strategies in Free Ranging Crows (Corvus corone corone; Cc cornix)” (uniwien, 2013). Irene Pepperberg, “Cognitive and Communicative Abilities of Grey Parrots,” in The Cognitive Animal: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives on Animal Cognition, ed. Marc Bekoff, Colin Allen, and Gordon M. Burghardt (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). W. W. L. Au, “Echolocation Signals of Wild Dolphins,” Acoustical Physics 50, no. 4 (2004): 454. Harley, “Whistle Discrimination and Categorization by the Atlantic Bottlenose Dolphin (Tursiops truncatus ): A Review of the Signature Whistle Framework and a Perceptual Test,” 244. Richard A Altes, “Computer Derivation of Some Dolphin Echolocation Signals,” Science 173, no. 4000 (1971): 912. Ibid., 914. Au, “Echolocation Signals of Wild Dolphins,” 459. Ibid. T. G. Leighton, G. H. Chua, and P. R. White, “Do Dolphins Benefit from Nonlinear Mathematics When Processing Their Sonar Returns?” Proc. R. Soc. A 468, no. 2147 (2012): 3517. Ibid., 3519. Whitehead and Rendell, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins: 60. Ibid., 124. Ibid., 269.

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32. G. Neuweiler, “Auditory Adaptations for Prey Capture in Echolocating Bats,” Physiological Reviews 70, no. 3 (1990): 615. 33. Ibid., 618. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid., 636. 36. Björn M. Siemers and Gerald Kerth, “Do Echolocation Calls of Wild Colony-Living Bechstein’s Bats (Myotis bechsteinii) Provide IndividualSpecific Signatures?,” Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 59, no. 3 (2006): 443. 37. Neuweiler, “Auditory Adaptations for Prey Capture in Echolocating Bats,” 616. 38. Ibid. 39. Silke L. Voigt-Heucke, Michael Taborsky, and Dina K. N. Dechmann, “A Dual Function of Echolocation: Bats Use Echolocation Calls to Identify Familiar and Unfamiliar Individuals,” Animal Behaviour 80, no. 1 (2010): 59. 40. Ibid., 60. 41. Ibid., 64. 42. M. R. Barclay Robert, “Interindividual Use of Echolocation Calls: Eavesdropping by Bats,” Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 10, no. 4 (1982): 273. 43. Gareth Jones and Björn M. Siemers, “The Communicative Potential of Bat Echolocation Pulses,” Journal of Comparative Physiology A 197, no. 5 (2011): 448. 44. Ibid., 449. 45. Ibid., 447. 46. Mirjam Knörnschild et al., “Bat Echolocation Calls Facilitate Social Communication,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 279, no. 1748 (2012): 4827. 47. Ibid., 4830. 48. M. B. Fenton and G. P. Bell, “Recognition of Species of Insectivorous Bats by Their Echolocation Calls,” Journal of mammalogy 62, no. 2 (1981): 233. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid., 235. 51. Robert, “Interindividual Use of Echolocation Calls: Eavesdropping by Bats,” 271. 52. Siemers and Kerth, “Do Echolocation Calls of Wild Colony-Living Bechstein’s Bats (Myotis bechsteinii) Provide Individual-Specific Signatures?” 444. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid., 451.

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55. Gareth Jones, “Sensory Ecology: Echolocation Calls Are Used for Communication,” Current Biology 18, no. 1 (2008): R34. 56. Ibid., R35. 57. Ibid. 58. Donald R. Griffin, Frederic A. Webster, and Charles R. Michael, “The Echolocation of Flying Insects by Bats,” Animal Behaviour 8, no. 3 (1960): 141. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid., 153. 61. Michael G. Schöner et al., “Bats Are Acoustically Attracted to Mutualistic Carnivorous Plants,” Current Biology 25, no. 14 (2015): 1. 62. Signe Brinkløv and Eric Warrant, “Oilbirds,” Current Biology 27, no. 21 (2017): R1145. 63. Ibid. 64. J Jordan Price, Kevin P. Johnson, and Dale H. Clayton, “The Evolution of Echolocation in Swiftlets,” Journal of Avian Biology 35, no. 2 (2004): 135. 65. Donald R. Griffin and Roderick A. Suthers, “Sensitivity of Echolocation in Cave Swiftlets,” The Biological Bulletin 139, no. 3 (1970). 66. Donald R Griffin and David Thompson, “Echolocation by Cave Swiftlets,” Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 10, no. 2 (1982): 119. 67. Brinkløv and Warrant, “Oilbirds,” R1146. 68. Jordan Price, P. Johnson, and H. Clayton, “The Evolution of Echolocation in Swiftlets,” 136. 69. Griffin and Suthers, “Sensitivity of Echolocation in Cave Swiftlets,” 495. 70. Ibid., 500. 71. Signe Brinkløv, M. Brock Fenton, and John Morgan Ratcliffe, “Echolocation in Oilbirds and Swiftlets,” Frontiers in Physiology 4(2013): 3–7. 72. Ibid., 7. 73. Ibid., 9. 74. Brinkløv, Elemans, and Ratcliffe, “Oilbirds Produce Echolocation Signals Beyond Their Best Hearing Range and Adjust Signal Design to Natural Light Conditions,” 2. 75. Ibid., 5. 76. Ibid., 9. 77. Ibid. 78. Richard Dawkins, Climbing Mount Improbable (New York: Norton, 1996). 79. Brinkløv, Fenton, and Ratcliffe, “Echolocation in Oilbirds and Swiftlets,” 1.

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80. Deborah Cox Callister, “Beached Whales: Tracing the Rhetorical Force of Extraordinary Material Articulations,” in Perspectives on HumanAnimal communication: Internatural Communication, ed. Emily Plec (New York: Routledge, 2013), 49. 81. Xuelian Yu et al., “Human Echolocation: 2D Shape Discrimination Using Features Extracted from Acoustic Echoes,” Electronics Letters 54, no. 12 (2018). 82. Neuweiler, “Auditory Adaptations for Prey Capture in Echolocating Bats,” 615. 83. Barrett, “Why Brains Are Not Computers, Why Behaviorism Is Not Satanism, and Why Dolphins Are Not Aquatic Apes,” 13. 84. Ibid. 85. Santani Teng, Amrita Puri, and David Whitney, “Crossmodal Transfer of Object Information in Human Echolocation,” i-Perception 2, no. 8 (2011): 894. 86. Roman Kuc and Victor Kuc, “Modeling Human Echolocation of NearRange Targets with an Audible Sonar,” The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 139, no. 2 (2016): 581. 87. Thomas A. Stroffregen and John B. Pittenger, “Human Echolocation as a Basic form of Perception and Action,” Ecological psychology 7, no. 3 (1995): 181–82. 88. Ibid., 183. 89. Ibid., 185. 90. Ludwig Wallmeier and Lutz Wiegrebe, “Ranging in Human Sonar: Effects of Additional Early Reflections and Exploratory Head Movements,” PloS One 9, no. 12 (2014): 18. 91. Gavin Buckingham et al., “The Size-Weight Illusion Induced Through Human Echolocation,” Psychological Science 26, no. 2 (2015): 237. 92. Lore Thaler, Stephen R. Arnott, and Melvyn A. Goodale, “Neural Correlates of Natural Human Echolocation in Early and Late Blind Echolocation Experts,” PloS One 6, no. 5 (2011). 93. Ibid., 10. 94. Katja Fiehler et al., “Neural Correlates of Human Echolocation of Path Direction During Walking,” Multisensory Research 28, no. 1–2 (2015): 196. 95. Ibid. 96. Thaler, Arnott, and Goodale, “Neural Correlates of Natural Human Echolocation in Early and Late Blind Echolocation Experts.” 97. Fiehler et al., “Neural Correlates of Human Echolocation of Path Direction During Walking,” 198. 98. Timos Papadopoulos et al., “Identification of Auditory Cues Utilized in Human Echolocation—Objective Measurement Results,” Biomedical Signal Processing and Control 6, no. 3 (2011): 280.

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99. Fiehler et al., “Neural Correlates of Human Echolocation of Path Direction During Walking,” 216. 100. Stroffregen and Pittenger, “Human Echolocation as a Basic Form of Perception and Action,” 210. 101. Callister, “Beached Whales: Tracing the Rhetorical Force of Extraordinary Material Articulations,” 41. 102. T. Ifukube, T. Sasaki, and C. Peng, “A Blind Mobility aid Modeled After Echolocation of Bats,” IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering 38, no. 5 (1991): 461. 103. Ibid., 462. 104. Ibid., 465. 105. Ibid. 106. Lore Thaler et al., “Mouth-Clicks Used by Blind Expert Human Echolocators–Signal Description and Model Based Signal Synthesis,” PLoS Computational Biology 13, no. 8 (2017): 10. 107. Ibid., 14. 108. RSA Raja Abdullah et al., “Bio-Inspired Signal Detection Mechanism for Tongue Click Waveform Used in Human Echolocation,” Electronics Letters 53, no. 22 (2017): 1456. 109. One example of research theorizing humans all echolocate to some degree is: Stroffregen and Pittenger, “Human echolocation as a basic form of perception and action.”

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Schöner, Michael G., Caroline R. Schöner, Ralph Simon, T. Ulmar Grafe, Sébastien J. Puechmaille, Liaw Lin Ji, and Gerald Kerth. “Bats Are Acoustically Attracted to Mutualistic Carnivorous Plants.” Current Biology 25, no. 14 (2015): 1911–16. Siemers, Björn M., and Gerald Kerth. “Do Echolocation Calls of Wild ColonyLiving Bechstein’s Bats (Myotis Bechsteinii) Provide Individual-Specific Signatures?”. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 59, no. 3 (2006/01/01 2006): 443–54. Speakman, John, and Paul Racey. No Cost of Echolocation for Bats in Flight 350 (1991). doi:https://doi.org/10.1038/350421a0. Stroffregen, Thomas A., and John B. Pittenger. “Human Echolocation as a Basic Form of Perception and Action.” Ecological psychology 7, no. 3 (1995): 181– 216. Teng, Santani, Amrita Puri, and David Whitney. “Crossmodal Transfer of Object Information in Human Echolocation.” i-Perception 2, no. 8 (2011): 894–94. Thaler, Lore, Stephen R. Arnott, and Melvyn A. Goodale. “Neural Correlates of Natural Human Echolocation in Early and Late Blind Echolocation Experts.” PloS One 6, no. 5 (2011): e20162. Thaler, Lore, Galen M. Reich, Xinyu Zhang, Dinghe Wang, Graeme E. Smith, Zeng Tao, Raja Syamsul Azmir Bin Raja Abdullah, et al. “Mouth-Clicks Used by Blind Expert Human Echolocators–Signal Description and Model Based Signal Synthesis.” PLoS Computational Biology 13, no. 8 (2017): e1005670. Voigt-Heucke, Silke L., Michael Taborsky, and Dina K. N. Dechmann. “A Dual Function of Echolocation: Bats Use Echolocation Calls to Identify Familiar and Unfamiliar Individuals.” Animal Behaviour 80, no. 1 (2010/07/01/ 2010): 59–67. Wallmeier, Ludwig, and Lutz Wiegrebe. “Ranging in Human Sonar: Effects of Additional Early Reflections and Exploratory Head Movements.” PloS One 9, no. 12 (2014): e115363. Whitehead, Hal, and Luke Rendell. The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Yu, Xuelian, Lore Thaler, Christopher J. Baker, Graeme E. Smith, and Linsen Zhao. “Human Echolocation: 2d Shape Discrimination Using Features Extracted from Acoustic Echoes.” Electronics Letters 54, no. 12 (2018): 785–87.

PART IV

The Dangers of, and Alternatives to, Human Exceptionalism

CHAPTER 11

Rhetoric’s Role in Human Exceptionalism

If the chapters in the previous section of the book bring us closer to accepting that human persuasion is no more special than the other special forms of persuasion in nature, if it breaks us down and shows our ignorance in so many media and modes of communication, then it is only fair that the final section of this book offers something in the way of an explanation of how we got here and what we can do now that we know there is so much more to learn. Adaptive or animal rhetorics, along with new materialist programs of inquiry in other fields (biosemiotics, evolutionary cognitive psychology, etc.), are growing and thriving, and will likely fade and be replaced by another reaction in the long cycle of especially Western scholarship. If new materialism has learned from the mistakes of positivism before it, then there could be a long growth and maturation process before any course correction is once again needed from idealists. If idealism is ever truly necessary. Human exceptionalism exists in both materialist and idealist monist paradigms, and in dualist ones, as well. Its chains are strong, but they are disguised as the vestments of the wise, which we willingly don in order to join the literati. But there is hope. Just as any of us could notice when the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes, we are all free to begin the lengthy process of extricating ourselves from animal oppression based on notions of human supremacy. Make no mistake: it will be a process. In © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. C. Parrish, The Sensory Modes of Animal Rhetorics, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76712-9_11

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the West there is almost no religion or philosophy that consistently treats nonhuman animals with decency. There are no intellectual or scholarly trends that have effected actual significant changes that make animal lives even approach the freedom of the humans who control them. Indeed, we can’t even guarantee members of our own species have the freedom to self-determine. Is it a wonder that the very roots of rhetoric and philosophy are steeped in hierarchy? For the majority of written history, people have been almost obsessive in their need to draw a distinct line between humans and all other animals. There are many reasons for this, and I and others have discussed them elsewhere, but it is important to consider briefly how and why this drive to bifurcate exists. The desire to distinguish between, and promote ourselves against, the animal other underpins an important ethical crisis as it developed in the Western tradition. While its roots reach far into prehistory, some of the earliest philosophers and rhetoricians of Greco-Roman descent were preoccupied by the question of what separates us from the “lesser beasts.” For Isocrates, there were two interrelated distinctions between human and nonhuman animal. In his Panegyricus, he claims that to be human is to use the powers of eloquence and reason (he employs the plural, logoi, to indicate that these are two concepts), which other animals, he asserts, are incapable of demonstrating (Pan. 47–48). But the argument does not end there, by merely marking out what is human and what constitutes the category of other animal. Later he also makes the claim that in order for one to be truly Greek, one must not only be of Greek descent, but one must also gain an Athenian education (Pan. 47–48). This furthers the distinction between Greek and barbarian, which is a primarily linguistic divide, to include even the poor, the uneducated, or the vast majority of other Greeks who did not employ the right tutors. Cicero provides a parallel from Hellenistic Rome. In his first rhetorical treatise, he follows Isocrates in suggesting that persuasion was responsible for “the domestication of the human animal” (Inv. rhet. I.i.2).1 Over forty years later when he wrote the dialogue De Oratore, Cicero has Crassus mouth the same sentiment, nearly word for word (De or. I.30– 35). His appeals to persuasion in De Inventione and De Oratore mirror those appeals to reason found in his best known philosophical exposition, De Officiis. In this text, Cicero uses his theory of the origins of civil society to justify his outline of natural reason, a concept tied intimately to his conception of persuasion (Off. I.4). The civilized man would, through use

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of his highly developed mental abilities, seek society with his fellowmen, develop love for his offspring, and nourish and support his family and those he is bound to protect. It is this natural reason that allows society, formed on the basis of persuasive action, to thrive. Put simply, Cicero seems willing to say persuasion is the key when writing about rhetoric, while reason is the key when writing about philosophy—it seems more important that we make a distinction than we remain entirely consistent in what the basis of that distinction is. This sentiment remains important throughout the dark ages of Europe, when Christian theologians like Thomas Aquinas devoted much mental effort into defining and subdividing the Great Chain of Being (derived from the pagan scala naturae), which imposed a rigid hierarchy onto the world, ranking both mythical and natural bodies from the Christian god through several types of angels and demons, to humans (separating nobles from peasants, of course), animals (wild before domestic), and plants, on down to the minerals of the earth.2 And if you were wondering whether limestone or sandstone is superior in God’s eyes, the answer is sandstone. It was not until evolutionary thinkers like Lamarck, Lyell, and Darwin began recasting life as expressions of complexity or adaptedness to environments that this idea of a Great Chain of Being lost popularity (though it still holds surprising sway, both in some Christian sects, as well as in popular thought). Nonetheless, many religious and secular scientists maintained through the twentieth century that human and nonhuman animals were different in kind, not degree. It is only very recently that this claim has begun to be questioned—most ethologists today are more circumspect about the issue. An example of forward-thinking comes from a nearly 50-year-old speech by Niko Tinbergen, one of the fathers of modern ethology, who commented on the problem of separating humans from other animals. “One is greatly tempted to use the Orwellian phrase and say no more than: all animals are unique, but Man is more unique than others,” but, Tinbergen continues, the reality is that “in spite of much that we know, or suspect, our real knowledge is really extremely poor.”3 More recently, the psychologist David Howe notes, “Many key characteristics have been suggested that mark us out from the rest of the animal kingdom…. [but] these defining features are clearly not peculiar to human beings.”4 Some of these features include the use of tools,

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language, or abstract symbols, which echoes the claims of classical philosophers who suggested reason and persuasion as defining characteristics. But none of these are unique to humans, and in fact humans are deficient in many of these traits, when compared to other animals. The belief has waxed and waned over time, but every major age has seen philosophers and rhetoricians attempting to demarcate boundaries between us and them, the bestial and the human. What is most important to consider for this argument is not the classical and the medieval, ground that has been well-trodden. What is more troubling is the influence of continental philosophy and the postmodernism it blossomed into. Continental philosophy, as a continuance of Neo-Platonistic idealism and an aider and abettor of Christian hegemony over the West and all its animals, sees its conclusion in the postmodernism of the late twentieth century, which is now finally turning back toward a connection with the natural world. This mystical idealist tradition has been one of the most harmful philosophical movements with regard to environmental consciousness and minority oppression that the world has ever seen, and its right-wing fundamentalist branches continue to threaten the existence of human and nonhuman animals on this planet. As Louise Westling reminds us, “in spite of Darwin’s revolutionary theories that placed humans back within the community of animals, western philosophy has vigorously resisted such a conclusion until very recently.”5 (Though I would hasten to add, to the shame of my home country, this coming around to see reason only includes about half of the population of the United States at this time. Mysticism, idealism, and superstition still reign in large swathes of the nation.) Derrida, although his thought is steeped in religious tradition, still argues that Christianity should be taken to task for its relentless subordination of the Other: Christian mythology, he asserts, insists on hierarchy. Not only are Adam and Eve placed above the other animals, but Adam is made the master of Eve.6 The very nature of what constitutes an individual species in nature is constituted “by and through human hierarchies – ideas of animality and of ‘nature’ are vitally entangled in the constitution of race, gender, class.”7 Hierarchies spread as they travel downward, enveloping more and more individuals, assimilating them into the collective Other. But idealism cannot take sole credit for animal (or female) subordination. Descartes was among the most influential rationalists, who despite his proto-scientific and methodical thought, did much to damage humanity’s relationship with other animals. Foremost among our concerns is

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Descartes’s assumption that animals do not respond. They are incapable of intention or cognition and are little more than automatons. (Because they don’t think, they are not, we might say.) Despite Descartes’s intimate knowledge of Montaigne’s philosophical works, and his adoption of Montaigne’s suggestions for self-education, Descartes rejects Montaigne’s view that animals reason, feel, and communicate with each other (and possibly with us).8 In fact, if Derrida is to be believed (which in this case I believe he should), Descartes—as well as Kant, Heidegger, Lacan, and Levinas— would have denied animals the ability to see at all. To “see” in this context means slightly more than having vision, of course—the animal in question is thought not to possess a rational mind and therefore is a mere automaton using its eyes only to process the data needed to trigger instinctual response.9 If we have taken anything from the previous two parts of this book, it should be that nonhuman animals are adept at sensing, processing, and adapting to new information in their environments in ways that are far too complex for mere instinct to encompass. Animal thought exists. There is only so much behavioral information that can be passed down through genes alone. Imitative learning, cultural learning, trial and error, and experience are by far more valuable, and most animals share at least some of these abilities with humans. Yet animals are mere machines to Descartes—a claim that would sour many Western philosophers on animal intelligence for centuries to come. Derrida criticizes Levinas for an ethics that were insufficient to “break with the Cartesian tradition of the animal-machine without language and without response,” nearly 350 years after Descartes’ death.10 It is a common and erroneous belief that animals do not feel, or that they do not feel “like we do,” as if that is somehow a meaningful distinction. Heidegger shared this conviction, envisioning an intellectual, affective, and moral gulf between human and nonhuman animals. Heidegger follows a Western philosophical tradition that has “defined humans in dualistic terms as essentially outside of nature, functioning as disembodied minds with access to timeless spiritual realms.”11 He is an increasingly difficult thinker to come to terms with, as his worldview is so alien to those familiar with the changes beginning in the mid-twentieth century. Moreover, his intellectual commitments (as both a member of the Nazi party and an evolution denier) make him especially unsympathetic to educated modern readers. The gulf that Heidegger proposes exists, he claims, via Dasein. While this term generally means “existence”

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or “being with” in German, Heidegger’s definition was far more specific. It involved a mode of living that raises one up above the mindless crowd in a somewhat Thoreauvian sense. The everyday toiler and the drone who does not fulfill his or her destiny by living properly is not a real person, does not actually exist. Since animals cannot make this choice, he would say, they do not exist—they merely are. Heidegger insists on “the unique status of humans as shepherds of Being,” apart from nature.12 He cannot stress highly enough that the animal does not have access to the world, “as such,” which Derrida reads as having no conception of the Other.13 Without logos, the animal misses out on the “as suchness” of humans, and Heidegger carries this claim even further, being so bold as to say that animals are unable to die because they lack the rationality of humans (and, in fact, they never truly live).14 Animals are tools to Heidegger, no more worthy of care than a hammer or chisel. It is a bankrupt worldview, and it is not difficult to see why Fascists would latch on to its tenets in support of rigid hierarchies. One would hope that American pragmatism of the period would have followed a more Peircean view of nature’s broad palette of symbol-making systems, but alas the early twentieth century was a hard time for animals and the environment. George Herbert Mead, like Heidegger and others on the Continent, draws a “hard line” between human and nonhuman animals. His reasoning presages later attempts to maintain a sharp distinction between one species and the entire animal world, thus upholding the asymmetrical binary, in that he looks to symbolic interaction as a purely human process.15 This is based on Mead’s faulty assumption that the intersubjectivity of symbolic interaction is only possible via human language, strictly defined.16 The exceptionalism inherent in this assumption leads Alger and Alger to ask (rhetorically, I might add) “How likely is it that something so evolutionarily advantageous would develop in humans and not in related animals, who also face situations in which competing courses of action are presented.”17 While this is a great way of prodding a modern, forwardthinking materialist in the right direction, the question likely falls flat where the problem mainly lies: What would a person who denies evolution, or global warming, or vaccine efficacy care about the subtle forces of natural selection? What may be somewhat more effective is a nod toward the thousands of examples that have accumulated of nonhuman animal symbol use and symbolic interaction.

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Alger and Alger present one situation that almost all individuals who’ve lived with pets should find familiar. Cats and dogs often create “collective representations” with their guardians, such as a certain place that becomes designated as the “play rug” or the “affection chair,” or even a series of bedtime or morning rituals most pets create in conjunction with their human families.18 (You may even have a “reading cat” attached to you now, while I currently have an “editing cat” who is “helping” as he normally does—by chewing up the corners of this manuscript and attacking my red pen.) Such a reminder of the lived intersubjectivity of human-animal relations does much more to convince those who could not be reasoned out of a position that they did not reason themselves into. The post-postmodern thinker (and indeed, most contemporary postmodern ones, despite the problems it poses with established Theory) would have no trouble imagining animal symbol use and could probably list a few examples, but those who for religious, economic, or political reasons do not want to acknowledge animal intelligence would be resistant to mere facts when they threaten preformed opinion, identity, and especially profit margins. One of the more stable bridges between twentieth-century exceptionalism and modern anti-hierarchical activism comes from the rhetorician, Kenneth Burke. Burke described humans, in his vaunted Definition of Man, as “the symbol-using (symbol-making, symbol-misusing) animal, inventor of the negative (or moralized by the negative), separated from his natural condition by instruments of his own making, goaded by the spirit of hierarchy (or moved by the sense of order), and rotten with perfection.”19 Burke was aware of the difficulty of this claim, that humans were the inventors of the negative, as he had certainly taken advantage of much of Darwin’s work. His claim here had more to do with symbolic negation than behavioral (though he does seem to think that human behavior is preceded by linguistic symbol). What Burke overlooked is Darwin’s concept of antithetic or reversed signals: these convey negative motivational information, such as when a dog adopts a submissive posture, signaling to others that “I will not fight.”20 Dogs can even use “play bows” to indicate that they are negating the negation, in that they are saying something a human might conceive of as “in response, I am attacking but not really attacking.” The idea that humans are goaded by hierarchy is a much stronger position within his definition, and one that will receive fuller treatment in a

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later chapter. However, it is worth noting here that humans, especially in the West, have a long tradition of dividing nature into at least two categories: US (at the top) and THEM (on the bottom). As this distinction receives more thought, more divisions are made between the single category of USes and the many THEMs that exist in the world. Some THEMs are more like US, and so they sit directly below US. Other THEMs are more different and deserve to be located further down in our hierarchy. This traditional method of viewing the other can be applied to nearly any trait one desires: race, species, skin color, and religion. The limits of its harm are nearly endless. A later contemporary of Burke, Jacques Derrida, offers an even stronger branch to cling to for those sinking in a river of twentiethcentury exceptionalist philosophical thought. While Derrida has an ambivalent relationship toward evolution, at once claiming that we need to consult more biology and anthropology when thinking about our relationship with animals, he also insists on maintaining a fundamental gap between humans and other primates. While we should continue to mind the gap, this is a much narrower chasm than Heidegger’s definitive gulf separating humans from all other animals (and functionally negating human animality in the process). Nevertheless, despite maintaining human supremacy, Derrida takes Bentham to task for asking if animals feel. He figured that this question, more than any other, highlighted the war that Western philosophers have waged on pity for animals over the last few centuries.21 Derrida’s hierarchy is a softer sort, indeed. He posits that the “abyss” between human and NHAs is a matter of degree, not of kind. While most continental philosophers claimed that this abyss lies in an animal’s inability to “respond,” thus making it a communications gap, Derrida said it was not language, but the ability to “pretend, to lie, to cover its tracks” that comprised the abyss.22 While Derrida did not have access to the very latest scholarship on animal signaling, his error in this statement could have been avoided with some minimal research (which is ironic, considering his criticism of Descartes, Heidegger, Lacan, and Levinas for not integrating ethological or primatological knowledge into their work on animals).23 I have made this argument more fully in the first part of this book and elsewhere, so I will leave it at this: animals do pretend, lie, and cover their tracks more often than one would imagine.24 Deception is a basic force driving the evolution of communication.

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The abyss, as Derrida saw it, is once again an illusion. All we needed was the dust of actual animal behavioral research in order to, like the titular character of the Indiana Jones films, see that the chasm is an illusion. Only, on our side of the metaphor, there are many behavioral bridges over the human-animal divide. Those familiar with the work of C. S. Peirce would have been able to avail themselves of an alternate trajectory, one which should have had more influence on Burke and Derrida. Instead, they seemed to be influenced more by Saussurean semiology, which they were at times able to overcome in its limited scope of studying language alone, with little reference to context and creature.25 Peirce believed that generality, or continuity, was operative in nature: “natural laws, relations, habits, and meanings are real and knowable,” he claimed, and similar survival challenges should often produce similar responses in the evolution of animal behavior.26 He avoided when possible the divisive emphasis so many have placed on difference, in favor of finding those traits that unite us. In Peirce’s “synechist” world, borders are continuous and vague; similar species have continuity, presenting the opportunity for communication across species, or even across genera.27 We see this proven time and again in nature, and it seems to take a certain level of willful blindness on the part of humans to ignore the ubiquity of cross-species communication. Peirce’s transdisciplinary work would heavily influence Thomas Sebeok, who appreciated a more inclusive approach to communication.28 This would eventually lead to the study of human and nonhuman animal signals as mutually informative phenomena. Sebeok was among the early adherents of biosemiotics, which will be discussed below.

Current Thought on Human Exceptionalism The ethological turn in biology and the animal turn in the humanities are important correctives to postmodernism, which takes for granted the “disconnect” between nature and culture, as if one could ever be separated from the other to any meaningful degree.29 Such a division serves to privilege the “socially constructed” human over the presumed asocial or cultureless animal. Many researchers in critical animal studies feel that, as “environmental problems loom larger, healing the divide between humans and other animals is an important aspect of addressing our alienation from nature.”30 One way to do this is to stop insisting on artificial, poorly defined, and generally unthoughtful divisions between human

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and nonhuman animals. Natasha Seegert’s study of coyote rhetorics is a wonderful example of how animals disrupt our human-centered view of communication. “The coyotes’ disruption,” she asserts, “reveals that the master narrative that divides nature and culture was never as stable as we might think.”31 More work along this vein is necessary, and a growing amount is being performed by researchers from various disciplinary perspectives. These generally would not have been possible without the rise of ethology in the last half-century. As biologists Whitehead and Rendell relate, there is an asymmetry of logic underlying the study of humans and the study of all other animal species: “In the study of humans, culture is usually taken as the null [hypothesis], and so the burden of proof lies with those testing hypotheses about genetic causation, while in nonhuman studies the direction of proof is always reversed and, thus, ascribing culture without reason would be the false positive.”32 This makes little sense from the perspective of someone actually trying to get at the roots of communication behaviors, as almost all communication is going to be both culturally and biologically constrained. If nonhuman animals who demonstrate social learning are treated like human animals, the starting point for all discoveries should be similar. The ethologists of the late twentieth century broke with the mechanistic view of animal behavior, but kept a sort of tongue-in-cheek exceptionalism in place that acknowledged that their human audiences wanted to learn about the similarities of animals without their own specialness being threatened. Biologists who we would now call early ethologists, like Nikko Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz, would question the usefulness of even asking questions about whether a behavior is cultural, genetic, or both. What does this matter, when animals are not running purely on instinct? There is a matter of choice that must be admitted, however smoothly the early ethologists tried to avoid acknowledging animal intent by means of other metaphors about how behaviors are triggered or unlocked through interactions with other individuals and their environments. Modern animal studies scholars in ethology, biology, sociology, anthropology, and the various arts and humanities have little issue adopting what Daniel Dennett calls “the intentional stance” toward other animals.33 That is, we approach the study of animals not as things (which up until very recently even rhetoricians were unlikely to ascribe agency), but as sentient creatures that can act with intent. This expansion of the category

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of [those who can intend] to include more than just regularly developing adult humans of currently sound mind and body is quite new in the history of ideas. While some ancient thinkers might have leaned in this direction in the cases of some very smart animals, however they defined that, the dark age for animals has extended much longer than it did in human intellectual history. Animals in the earliest years of ethological research were treated as purely instinctual beings whose behavior relied on a lock and key metaphor—when one animal sent a signal to another, that signal could unlock a stereotyped response, much like the automatic process of turning a key to unlock a door.34 Later, as the era of computers emerged, people like John Maynard Smith would begin to treat animals as information processors.35 Signalers transmit information that perceivers actively assess for usefulness and validity, allowing animals a bit more freedom from pure instinct, but still assuming a naive, honest model of communication that rarely exists in nature. As these early researchers continued to observe animals, their estimations of animal cognitive abilities grew and evolved. Instincts, locks and keys, mechanistic models, and now even computational metaphors have mostly gone by the wayside. In terms of communication, starting in the 1970s naive views of honest signaling began to be replaced by more sophisticated models that took into account how important, and ubiquitous, deceit is for pretty much all animal species—especially humans. Two important early theories of dishonest communication present more accurate views of the variety of types (both honest and dishonest) of signals animals use to persuade others. Zahavi and Zahavi introduced the concept of costly signaling. The main idea behind this theory is that signaled information is only as accurate or honest as the time and energy it takes to produce that signal; for instance, some signals could be very persuasive, but they cost a lot in time or resources, so only the strongest or smartest individuals could reliably produce them.36 Krebs and Dawkins presented another useful way of looking at some signals when they suggested that communicators are not merely providing neutral information to others—they were shaping the information they transmitted, in order to manipulate receivers.37 Later developed into a selfish signaler theory, this idea of manipulation expands our view of animal communication, allowing us to see animals not as members of a species or group, but as individuals with needs and desires that often come into conflict with others, which compels them to find ways of convincing others to behave in ways beneficial to the signaler.38

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Some of these forms of communication even demonstrated the use of symbols to stand for things that were unrelated to the forms the symbols took. We should be very clear, too, that symbol use among nonhuman animals is no longer controversial. Many species do it, and more are found every year. One of the studies that helped make this idea palatable to even the harshest critics is Seyfarth and Cheney’s work with vervet monkeys. Vervets were found to utter three distinct calls to warn groupmates of danger. Each call corresponded to a different type of danger and inspired a separate adaptive response. The “leopard call” inspires other monkeys to climb high into the trees to avoid that predator. The “snake call” signals a need to stand up tall on one’s tippy toes and look down for danger, often leading to animals pelting snakes with rocks and other objects and following their movements until they are long gone. Finally, the “eagle call” symbolizes a need to look upward and hunker down in the branches and denser foliage that prevents large raptor flight. Just like humans, “vervet monkeys appear to process vocalizations according to an abstraction – their meaning – and not just according to acoustic similarity.”39 Moreover, this abstract thought is influenced by multiple symbol modifiers. For instance, the receivers of alarm calls will not only take into account the signal’s meaning, but also the identity (ethos) of the signaler.40 As in human societies, if an individual tends to “cry wolf,” it isn’t long before groupmates stop heeding their calls. Interestingly, vervets will also monitor alarm calls across species lines, as well—even as distant a relation as a small bird. The superb starling, vervets have realized, has two distinct types of alarm calls—one for ground predators, and one for raptors. When the starlings make either alarm call, the vervets are able to recognize which it is and take the appropriate action.41 To vervets, calls do not merely stand for things iconically; they represent things symbolically. The call means something approximating our own meaning, especially when we share context—a snake or leopard call for a human is often just as startling as it is for monkeys, while an eagle call may seem less imposing to us because of our large size. Tim Ingold would have us revisit the idea of symbol use as something opposed to genetically encoded behavior. Teaching can occur through observation, when two or more animals are present at the site of the sign’s referent. Symbols are only necessary when teaching or communicating out of context.42 (Although Ingold goes against the grain of opinion to claim that the bee waggle is not a symbol that connotes an idea, but a sign that commands an action.43 But this argument only works when taken out

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of the context of the material world; we need merely ask what this sign asks bees to do, and where, to realize that there is a symbolic relationship between movement and physical space in a concrete location.) Despite the widespread acceptance in various life and social sciences of animals as symbol-using communicators, Kenneth Burke’s Definition of Man as the symbol-using species has in the past been implicitly accepted in the field of rhetoric and composition. What Stephen Lind describes as “the distilled and most-remembered portion” of Burke’s definition of what it means to be a human “has served to bracket all nonhuman animals from a healthy, inquisitive and open field of study.”44 Perhaps we should heed the warning note of another clause from Burke’s definition, which claims that humans are goaded by hierarchy—our need to place ourselves at the top of some great chain of communicating has long gotten in the way of the fair treatment of other animals and their sophisticated forms of persuasion. When Michel Foucault claimed that the author is dead, this seemed to be a breaking point in the hierarchical view of transmission from an empowered speaker to a subordinate audience, but no egalitarian ideal ever emerged because the speaker is always exercising power (or at least attempting to do so) when uttering persuasive words or demonstrating persuasive gestures. Many animals need to share information about their intentions and beliefs in order to avoid unnecessary conflict, secure mating rights, form and strengthen group identities, and other essential outcomes. One rather mundane example comes from canid play. I mentioned above a striking phenomenon which is often initiated with what is called a “play bow,” wherein the animal desirous of play seems to bow down its head and front legs, in order to inform its fellows that its aggression is all in fun. This would be impossible without at least some rudimentary theory of mind— the idea that other beings have feelings and beliefs that can be altered through communication. I’ve explained this concept more thoroughly in my first book, and it is essential to understanding the basic drive behind suasory activity.45 It could be close to what George Kennedy famously referred to as the energy that precedes rhetorical action.46 Play signaling actions like the canid bow allow for aggressive posturing and simulated fighting, without violent misunderstandings. “Given the possible risks that are attendant on mistaking play for another form of activity, it is hardly surprising that animals should have evolved clear and unambiguous signals to solicit and maintain play.”47 These signals need to throw a metaphorical switch in the brains of conspecifics, altering the ways

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they perceive what would otherwise be considered aggressive, dangerous actions. Again, Tim Ingold presents objections to my interpretation of animal intelligence and communication. He claims that animals, including humans, most of the time do not think before they act, so theories of mind might not be that important in the grand scheme of animal rhetorics.48 I am unconvinced Ingold has any special insight into the matter of what animals are thinking, so I can only use a parallel from human thought. The fact is, most of our mental functions are so well routinized from years of childhood development that we no longer actively think about how to do mundane activities like shaking hands with a colleague or waving goodbye. This does not mean it is thoughtless—it merely means that we have, through much practice, moved some of these actions forward in the brain, in order to make room for more pressing demands on our mental resources. Waving goodbye is still symbolic, even if it is routinized and thoughtless, so I would argue that there is a false dilemma at play here. If dog play bows are meaningless, how genuine are the “Best wishes!” someone sends you when concluding an email. Indeed, the wishes may be part of their electronic signature, which automatically pops up after every message they send. Is this an example of the advanced level of thoughtfulness some humans assume we employ? Much of our communication is pro forma, especially in the business world. Few people care how you are when they say, “Hi! How are you?” Moreover, the polite response most of us are taught as children is to respond, “Fine, thank you!”, no matter how dismal life currently seems. If we reject the impossible claim that someone knows what is going on in another animal’s mind (even the true thoughts of our favorite humans are opaque and impenetrable most of the time), then can we suggest that it is a human’s ability to use language that makes our theory of mind stronger, special, or more persuasive? Until recently most scholars across disciplines claimed that language use is a uniquely human trait, but this is an argument made from ignorance. We are not smart enough yet to translate the complex communication of any other species, but we have discovered various forms of syntax used in several species’ communications. Moreover, we know that a high proportion of human communication is deceitful—either strategically, or by omission or for the sake of expedience.

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Moreover, statements about language being unique in humans “are surely trivial, owing to the equally unchallengeable fact that the communication system of every other species stamps it with a unique hallmark.”49 As one’s inner cynic would be quick to recognize, when everything is unique, nothing is special. The solution to this is to treat every form of communication as interesting and informative, without succumbing to the urge to rank order them by purely human standards. If the chemical trails of ants, or the electric fields of fishes, are less prone to confusion and duplicity than human language—even if these other forms are less “sophisticated,” whatever that means—then is our ability truly the better one? We know other complex communication systems exist—it is eminently dishonest to pretend we understand their functioning well enough to say that ours is different in kind rather than degree. While syntax and vocabulary are often cited as limiting factors, we have discovered many species that use syntax in varying degrees of complexity in their communicative acts. Ravens, to cite but one example, have both complex syntax and vocabulary that vary culturally. They differ not only between continents, but each mated pair develops its own distinctive syntax and vocabulary.50 (Many of my married friends claim a sort of shorthand exists between them, and some have even made up words to mask their true meaning around children, for instance, but most do not bother to alter their syntax.) In fact, defining language is becoming trickier as we discover more about its neurocognitive basis: Cognitive neuroscience makes it impossible to define language in narrow anthropocentric terms based on logic and human communication. Instead we need a practical definition that accords with what we know about the evolution and structure of the brain and about the embodied quality of thought and language. Such a concept of language would account for the membership of human language among the complex communication systems of many animals.51

Language cannot have climbed Mount Improbable, or it could not be so complex. Nothing evolves of nothing, to paraphrase Lucretius; just as human eyeballs don’t spontaneously evolve intact, there are intermediate phases between what exists now and what existed in the past, and many animals share the trait of having light-detecting eyes. Some even far

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exceed our own, and if this wasn’t the case, you can rest assured that the faculty of vision would have been added to the list of false evolutionary teloi that are used as tools to subjugate animals. Most people are already, on a personal level, very interested in other forms of communication. As Celeste Condit notes, “all living things are coders, and all the codes of living things are relevant to rhetorical critics.”52 We just need to find a place for animal communication to exist within rhetorical scholarship, as the world is populated by all sorts of species communicating in their own languages (in both the common and technical sense). In fact, there are no clear lines of demarcation between the human and nonhuman animal. Donald R. Griffin describes Hockett’s (1958) attempt to “formulate objective criteria” that distinguish human communication from that of all other animals. Of the sixteen criteria that resulted from this effort, eight of them had already been disproven by animal researchers at the time Griffin was writing, in 1981.53 The other eight have either since been disproven, or are arbitrary to the point of uselessness, in that they rely on extremely specific ways of defining human communicative traits so as to make them different by the mere fact of defining. Attempts like these fall into sociologist Erika Cudworth’s category of “speciesism.” She argues that speciesism, as a form of prejudice, is not merely a discriminatory practice, but a definitional one. Humans with this ideology have the “tendency to measure the extent to which animals do or do not approximate to human capabilities.”54 Put simply, we measure things that are meaningful to humans and assume that any creature that is more human is better than one that is more different. Just as Socrates claimed that the philosophers should be kings, I have mentioned elsewhere in this book that the fishmonger down the street probably similarly claimed that the person selling the best red snapper should rule the world. We are so deeply solipsistic that most of us are completely oblivious to our innate biases. Those biases drive humans to grasp desperately for a way to make our species the most special in the animal kingdom. Culture, as well, was once thought to separate humans and nonhuman animals. It was thought that culture defined the distinctly human, “yet nobody can agree on what culture actually is.”55 Among the most common of the hundreds of definitions of the term “culture” is the ability to learn social and behavioral information from other individuals and the environment. Yet, as early as the nineteenth century, Charles Darwin showed that earthworms are

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capable of this “cultural” behavior. Since then, countless studies have shown animals learning and passing on behaviors, some of which differ from other cultural groups within the same species. These differences will affect evolution and genetic inheritance, thereby causing the possible beginnings of eventual speciation. Cultural anthropologists are perhaps the most skeptical group of academics with regard to nonhuman animal cultures. They will often attempt to define culture very rigidly, adding particularly human traits to their list of requirements—a habit that is at minimum calculated pedantry, and at worst is dishonest turf protection.56 Many modern life scientists have now completed long-term studies on animals that have borne fruit in this area of interest. Whiten (et al.) report that chimpanzee groups, for instance, show differences in behavioral repertoires that suggest these groups display “significant cultural variation.”57 Chimpanzees even outstrip us in areas humans have traditionally defended as their most peculiar trait—rational thought. Christopher Flynn Martin describes a series of experiments wherein chimps performed consistently better at game theory studies than their human counterparts.58 Their superiority of mind showed up especially in situations where players needed to adjust their strategies as payoffs for various actions changed. They were also more adept at responding to the action histories of others, whereas humans were more likely to forget individual “reputation” when anticipating the moves others would make. It is possible that humans and chimpanzees differ so because of a cognitive trade-off: while humans sacrifice large portions of their brainpower to enable language complexity, this could come at the expense of our ability to track the choices of other individuals and monitoring their success.

Rhetoric’s Future: Animals and New Materialism The New Materialism, or a return to materialist thought that is picking up steam in the modern humanities and social sciences, is one remedy to the continued exceptionalism that one would have hoped postmodernism would have addressed. Instead, the postmodern/poststructuralist turn that led to the currently entrenched power structure in rhetoric, writing, and communications departments and their overarching professional organizations served not to break down the ideas of “master texts,” canonical literature, or the hope of universals, so much as shift who was the master or mistress of the sacred texts we all need to read, cite, and reference at every opportunity. It is nigh on impossible to make it through

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a single presentation at a major rhetoric and composition conference without hearing the names Derrida or Foucault, both of whom would have likely enjoyed the irony of becoming the universal masters they’d railed against. The author is not only not dead, but is in fact the author of the saying “the author is dead.” But this does not militate against the need to keep our scholarly hero worship in check; it merely suggests how difficult a process that might be. Master texts and hierarchies may always exist, but we can soften their boundaries and be vigilant against their more deleterious effects. Human exceptionalism, for all other animals, causes great harm. Several of the new materialist (and here I would prefer the term renewed materialist, as the shifting dominance periods of idealism and materialism have shaped the long history of rhetoric more than almost any other general ideological trend)… again, several of the new materialist movements are tackling problems of exceptionalism, agency, and hierarchy in more effective ways than the postmodernists and deconstructionists have been able thus far, and many materialists are willing to allow scientific methods back into the conversation after a very long hiatus in rhetorical theory. Scientism and positivism were so effectively thrown out of the discipline that proper science and the ability to be positive about anything at all went with them. The new movements indicating a return to respect for actual science include object-oriented ontology (OOO), actor-network theory (ANT), posthumanism, more-than-humanism, cyberhumanism, and other general materialist and scientific approaches to understanding persuasion, such as my own pursuit of adaptive rhetoric, which is simply a cross-cultural and cross-species approach that includes interdisciplinary research from the life and social sciences that had largely been ignored in the late twentieth century. Most of these movements, as Joshua Ewalt writes, “posit that the capacity to act rhetorically on others extends beyond the human” or beyond human modes of discourse.59 In his review of four books working under OOO, ANT, materialist rhetoric, and anthropology paradigms, Ewalt notes that while the approaches differ, it is primarily in degrees of flatness, autonomy, and materiality.60 Flatness in Ewalt’s discussion refers to the level at which each paradigm considers the idea that all human and nonhuman (including object) phenomena have the same capacity to effect change on others. Autonomy is whether a phenomenon is defined purely by its relationships with other people or things; or, rather, is something reducible to its parts or

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embroiled in an irreducible ecosystem of agents acting on agents. That is, is something independent or part of an eco-communicative gestalt? Finally, materiality is the degree to which a theory is truly monist, rather than a dualist paradigm that simply holds the material in the fore while allowing that ghosts and souls and stuff are floating around somewhere in the ether. The last category is probably where I would disagree with Ewalt’s assessment, as a paradigm simply isn’t materialist if it requires the existence of angels and faeries. Dualism is a very different thing and is a major problem for materialist accounts of persuasion, as it lacks the courage of materialism’s convictions. Pace Stephen Jay Gould, there is no such thing as non-overlapping magisteria in the understanding of natural forces.61 There are several reasons materialism must be monist, in addition to the strictness of the meaning of the title “materialism.” Through this lens we see a world connected not by spirit or soul, but through the actual physical connections between beings, objects, and environments. Like Gorgias tried to tell us more than two millennia ago, if the gods are ultimately in control of our rhetoric, then there can be no art of rhetoric—we’re simply fancifully decorated socks jabbering away in a heavenly puppet show, acting without agency.62 The basis of materialist rhetoric is that we have agency. What the “we” in that statement encompasses varies based on the specific paradigm, but it can include oppressed humans, nonhuman animals, and even objects or things. As Barnett and Boyle suggest in the introduction to their edited volume on the rhetoricity of things, “the interdisciplinary reassessment of things recognizes that we do not simply point at things but act alongside and with them.”63 Things are “vibrant actors” whose effects “exceed (and are sometimes in direct conflict with) human agency and intentionality.”64 Their vision of rhetorical ontology highlights the interactions of all sorts of agents in order to move and persuade, even in cases where intent cannot exist at surface level. Previously, under epistemic paradigms, “the human subject occupie[d] a privileged and central position in the rhetorical scheme of things,” which means nonhuman actors matter only in their relation to human knowledge-making.65 New materialist paradigms reject that automatic and unthinking exceptionalism, recognizing the agency of animals (and, yes, sometimes things). What Jeanne Fahnestock argued a decade and a half ago remains true: language doesn’t exist merely to express culture, or cognitive modules, or biological rules—humanity “uses language as a means to satisfy needs and

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achieve intentions or purposes.”66 This idea could be expanded beyond language use, as that is not even humanity’s primary mode of communication. Rhetoric writ large can designate nearly any attempt by an organism to secure its needs and achieve its purposes without resort to brute force, but sometimes in nonetheless oppressive ways. It is the manipulation of another mind, in an amoral sense. Rhetoric is to telepathy as syllogism is to enthymeme: there is a missing function in the latter of each pair rendering valid induction a somewhat magical process. The communicative function of rhetoric allows us to leap from telepathy into a more reliable system of explaining what’s in our minds rather than expecting people to guess (which is nonetheless a popular strategy among those who seek to oppress, because there is always a potential for anger when one’s communications partner cannot guess what’s in your mind). The animal brain needs to know why something is important to another creature, or it won’t care. It isn’t evolved to do so without connection. Connection can be shared ancestry, group membership, or empathy, to name a few examples, but without some metaphorical tug at the heartstring, it is not natural to think too deeply about the desires of others you’ve never met or share nothing with. It takes effort, if that’s the goal, or sneaky cooptation of other forces (like parental instincts, as many species benefit from fostering, whether the adoptive parents realize what they are doing or not—and this instinct is mercenarily manipulated by brood parasites like the common cuckoo). All animals use some form of rhetoric, and often many forms, to communicate and persuade. What I hope to have shown by this point in the book is that even a small sampling of the modes of communication demonstrate just how out of touch humanity has been in its insistence that it is the master communicator, the apex of persuasion. We are blind children wandering in a forest, and by sheer luck and a sense of cooperation that hangs on a knife-edge from teetering toward mutual destruction have we survived this long in ignorance. We haven’t done a graceful job of it. Communication and asymmetries of strength, power, and coalition building skills have contributed to genocide, slavery, and never-ending war with members of our own species, on a scale no other animal could accomplish. If language was the prime achievement of an intelligent species, it would not lead us to these ends. It’s only one solution in a suite of evolved responses to animals coexisting with competing desires. Animals would not last long as a branch on the tree of life if every disagreement ended in murder. So rhetoric has evolved at every level, and

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rules govern its use in various media. We need to continue to investigate the rules of all modes of communication, as these will inform our own uses. Natasha Seegert argues that, despite rhetoric’s “critical embrace of poststructuralism,” rhetoricians still hold up the human as the central figure of rhetoric’s drama, the epitome of the rhetor; yet she does not see “the more-than-human world as dethroning the human’s privileged status of the ‘symbol-using’ animal,” so much as expanding it. I agree that animal rhetorics are expansive. The study of other forms of communicating teaches us far more than existing in our bubbles, studying ourselves out of context, ever would. However, humans also need to check themselves, for we are arrogant and dismissive of others. That includes members of other species, as well as our own—and the two acts of dismissal stem from the same beliefs. Selfishness and fear of the other must have helped us in extreme survival situations in the past, because they seem reinforced to some degree. They exist in all known cultures, but they become wildly exacerbated in the more disconnected megacultures of the city and the nation-state. It is more than just apocryphal to tell a story of when one went to a small, close-knit community and fell in love with the people and the way of life, and how giving and accepting everyone was. However, the much-vaunted “simple life,” as condescending as that can sound, is also something most people in the United States have chosen or been forced to flee, and we have adopted an Orientalizing voyeurism toward the rustic living in village and pasture. This has interfered with our ability, as Aldo Leopold lamented (and I discussed in Chapter 3), to see land and animals as a community rather than as distinct parts, pieces, and commodities. We reach desperately for contact, but because we live in fear and selfishness in our cities and on our internet, we dismiss too easily the voices of others. Those voices are as important as our own, though it is difficult to always acknowledge this fact. Part of the problem is also decidedly cultural, in that we have constructed symbolic systems of communication that exclude and oppress by their nature. We are so saturated with words that we invent nonexistent organs to account for them, like Chomsky’s language organ. But words are merely symbolic of reality, making it the lesser partner in a material world. Barnett and Boyle urge us to remember how easy it is to strip others of agency: “when we assume that words matter more than matter, we assume that things matter only in a metaphoric or symbolic sense.”67 It should be easy to see how this applies

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to animals and oppressed human groups at least as much as it does to unfeeling objects. Two lines of cooperating and competing thought now exist in animal studies located in the humanities and social sciences. Animal studies or human-animal studies (AS, or HAS) is a broad brush that paints most any activity that addresses animal lives, animals as symbols, animals in literature, media, or history. The philosophy of what makes something animate, animal, or an agent. All sorts of questions that would interest humans from the perspective of humans. The other approach is critical animal studies (CAS), which is the more activist branch of current animal studies. Taylor and Twine define the difference between the two as follows: animal studies is concerned with the “question of the animal,” while critical animal studies is also concerned with the “condition of the animal.”68 The ideological stance in CAS is presupposed, while some adherents of HAS strive for historical objectivity (which we all know may be impossible, but is nonetheless often worthy of effort). While HAS often carries baggage of historicism, modernism, or postmodernism, CAS—as its name suggests—carries the baggage of critical theory writ large. It is activist, engaged in high theory, often anti-capitalist or outright socialist, and has in its sights human exceptionalism. While Taylor and Twine claim that the humanist legacy in H/AS is the suggestion that “the importance of animals lies only in their contrast to humans,” this is something of a simplification.69 While it is true that humanists are focused heavily on the “human” in that appellation, many also care deeply about animals and their wellbeing. What troubles many CAS scholars is the use of animals as subjects, not objects in their own right. This is reasonable when the vast majority of animal studies texts still treat animals purely as literary symbols, rather than as agents, and that research into the animals themselves is rarely performed, in favor of finding more and more allusions to other symbolic uses of the same animal by other human authors. Lynda Birke echoes this sentiment, remarking in one study that actual animals don’t often take center stage in animal studies—rather, “what predominates… are studies of how we humans represent nonhuman others, or how we build infrastructures around them (in farms, zoos, labs, the wilderness).”70 If we are to truly understand animals, many CAS scholars claim that we need to move beyond mere human depictions of them. Just as CAS scholars feel HAS does not go far enough in its duties to animals and activism, what troubles some HAS scholars about CAS is that

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ideology and activism in intersectional “critical theory” have a tendency to place outcomes over scholarly accuracy. One rather benign example comes from Kay Peggs’s statement that ten billion land animals per year are slaughtered in the United States “for meat, milk, or eggs.”71 A savvy reader will quickly note that most egg and milk producing animals are intentionally not slaughtered for long periods of time, so that they may continue producing as long as possible. This is not to say that the lives of dairy and egg producers are easy, or that they always end well; it is merely an example of the data being used to signify a more universal claim than it actually represents. Nonetheless, my sympathy almost always lies with the critical theory scholars who are working against oppressive tendencies that seem to be well engrained in human nature. As Peggs concludes, “in light of the oppression of billions and billions of nonhuman animals, how can the study of ‘human’—‘animal’ relations fail to be politically engaged?”72 We simply need to be moderate and careful in our application of data, if we are to make a strong foundation for animal rights and humane treatment policies. Human and nonhuman animal communication occurs across species lines and is bioculturally constructed. Signing apes do not occur in nature, and humans do not generally teach animals language. Thus, captive signing apes are the result of “communities established between man and animal.”73 As apes innovate signs when the language is insufficient, and humans are thus taught by apes as well, there is mutual teaching and learning occurring between members of two species who are treating one another as social equals (in terms of communication, at least). Nonetheless, we must always remember that these apes are not captive by choice. Our use of other primates for laboratory testing, for education, and even for public entertainments, has a troubled history that often finds humans fighting against their own demons. Frans de Waal, ever the advocate for animal intelligence, relates the story of Victorian mock tea parties in his book The Ape and the Sushi Master. The organizers of these events dressed chimpanzees in coats and tails, or the current upper-class dress fashions for women, and invited the public in to view what they presented as a ridicule of upper-crust English society. However, what they really were doing was mocking the chimps. “That we select apes for this job,” says de Waal, “is logical because it is particularly in the face of animals similar to us that human uniqueness needs confirmation.”74 Because it is very important for humans to remain the only cultured species, making light of chimps dressing up and having a tea party is a fairly targeted shot

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at their inability to conceive of proper table manners. Functionally the chimps are perfectly able to drink tea or eat cakes. The food makes it into their mouths just as predictably as it does for humans. They simply don’t care if crumbs get on the carpet, because carpets have no meaning for chimps. Dirt is their carpet and more dirt won’t hurt it. Ape culture and communication is adapted to different needs. “Having grown up in the absence of adult models of their species, young apes [raised in captivity by humans] are rarely successful in the forest, often starving to death.”75 Apes are highly reliant on culture and communication; their forms are simply different from ours. Relationships between human and nonhuman animals can be strong and important to both individuals. Research has shown that “pet owners can feel toward their companion animal as if it were human,” which should surprise very few animal lovers.76 It is also the case that some animals may view humans as members of their own species. Desmond Morris suggests that domestic cats remain in a juvenile state in their relationships with humans, thinking of their guardians as “mother cats.”77 Animal kinship might be more important to human psychology than we ever expected, too. Positive human youth development is heavily linked to positive and habitual animal interactions. One study shows that childhood rates of depression, stress, and anxiety are significantly lower among children who grew up with significant animal interaction.78 Having one or more pets as a child correlates with having high selfesteem in adulthood, and attachment to pets is strongly linked to mental health, empathy, and prosocial orientation.79 Touching, petting, caring for, and communicating with animals lead to positive youth development outcomes that parents should take note of. Much of the latest work in rhetoric and in communication studies, to a lesser degree, regards cross-species communication and mediation rather than actively pursuing a discrete animal rhetorics. Following a disability studies model, inspired by work such as Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson’s, mediation still requires a regularly developed (or abled) human agent signaling on behalf of an Other who may not be able to signal unassisted.80 Amy Propen describes one such situation, which involves seismic testing in the waters near a new Californian nuclear plant. In this encounter, human and nonhuman welfare hierarchy seems to have been reversed by the action and awareness raising efforts of thoughtful humans. Instead of disturbing the marine mammals, voters preferred to do without sonic testing at the site of the Diablo Canyon power plant, which sits nearby two known fault

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lines.81 This action could have endangered the human population in order to save the lives of several species of marine mammal, thus representing an interesting exception to the rule that humans generally will support even minor human interests over the interests of nonhuman animals.

Notes 1. Translations are mine, unless otherwise noted. Classical texts are referenced as per the Oxford Classical Dictionary. 2. Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being; A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936). xxiii. 3. Niko Tinbergen, The Animal in Its World; Explorations of an Ethologist, 1932–1972 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1972). 161. 4. David Howe, Empathy: What It Is and Why It Matters (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 20. 5. Louise Hutchings Westling, The Logos of the Living World: Merleau-Ponty, Animals, and Language (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014). 45. 6. Jacques Derrida and Marie-Louise Mallet, The Animal That Therefore I Am (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). 15. 7. Erika Cudworth, “Beyond Speciesism: Intersectionality, Critical Sociology and the Human Domination of Other Animals,” The Rise of Critical Animal Studies: From the Margins to the Centre (2014): 21. 8. Westling, The Logos of the Living World: Merleau-Ponty, Animals, and Language: 61. 9. Derrida and Mallet, The Animal That Therefore I Am: 14. 10. Ibid., 119. 11. Westling, The Logos of the Living World: Merleau-Ponty, Animals, and Language: 13. 12. Ibid., 24. 13. Derrida and Mallet, The Animal That Therefore I Am: 142. 14. Ibid., 144. 15. Janet M. Alger and Steven F. Alger, “Beyond Mead: Symbolic Interaction Between Humans and Felines,” Society & Animals 5, no. 1 (1997): 65. 16. Ibid., 67. 17. Ibid., 70. 18. Ibid., 78. 19. Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966). 16. 20. Peter Marler, “The Logical Analysis of Animal Communication,” in Readings in Zoosemiotics, ed. Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli, and Aleksei Turovski (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011), 263.

292 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26.

27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38.

39.

40. 41.

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Derrida and Mallet, The Animal That Therefore I Am: 27–29. Ibid., 32–33. Ibid., 89. Alex C. Parrish, Adaptive Rhetoric: Evolution, Culture, and the Art of Persuasion, Routledge Studies in Rhetoric and Communication (New York: Routledge, 2013). 67–103. W. Wheeler, The Whole Creature: Complexity, Biosemiotics and the Evolution of Culture (Lawrence & Wishart, 2006). 16. Douglas R. Anderson, “Peirce’s Horse: A Sympathetic and Semeiotic Bond,” in Animal Pragmatism: Rethinking Human-Nonhuman Relationships, ed. Erin McKenna and Andrew Light (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004), 86. Ibid., 87. Wheeler, The Whole Creature: Complexity, Biosemiotics and the Evolution of Culture: 16. Pat Munday, “Thinking Through Ravens: Human Hunters, Wolf-Birds, and Embodied Communication,” in Perspectives on Human-Animal Communication: Internatural Communication, ed. Emily Plec (New York: Routledge, 2013), 209. Ibid. Natasha Seegert, “Play of Sniffication: Coyotes Sing in the Margins,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 47, no. 2 (2014): 161. Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 191. Daniel Clement Dennett, The Intentional Stance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987). Niko Tinbergen, The Study of Instinct (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951). John Maynard Smith, Mathematical Ideas in Biology (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1977). Amotz Zahavi and Avishag Zahavi, The Handicap Principle: A Missing Piece of Darwin’s Puzzle (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1997). Richard Dawkins and J. R. Krebs, “Animal Signals: Information or Manipulation?,” in Behavioural Ecology: An Evolutionary Approach, ed. J. R. Krebs and N. B. Davies (Oxford: Blackwell Scientific, 1978). J. R. Krebs and R. Dawkins, “Animal Signals: Mind-Reading and Manipulation,” in Behavioural Ecology: An Evolutionary Approach, ed. J. R. Krebs (Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates, 1984). Robert M. Seyfarth and Dorothy L. Cheney, “Meaning, Reference, and Intentionality in the Natural Vocalizations of Monkeys,” in Readings in Zoosemiotics, ed. Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli, and Aleksei Turovski (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011), 163. Ibid., 164. Ibid.

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42. Tim Ingold, “The Animal in the Study Of Humanity,” in Readings in Zoosemiotics, ed. Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli, and Aleksei Turovski (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011), 358. 43. Ibid., 368. 44. Stephen J. Lind, “Un-Defining Man: The Case for Symbolic Animal Communication,” in Perspectives on Human-Animal Communication: Internatural Communication, ed. Emily Plec (New York: Routledge, 2013), 228. 45. Parrish, Adaptive. 46. George A. Kennedy, Comparative Rhetoric: An Historical and CrossCultural Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). 47. Marc Bekoff and Colin Allen, “Intentional Communication and Social Play: How and Why Animals Negotiate and Agree to Play,” in Readings in Zoosemiotics, ed. Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli, and Aleksei Turovski (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011), 182–83. 48. Ingold, “The Animal in the Study of Humanity,” 369–71. 49. Thomas Sebeok, “Prefigurements of Art,” in Readings in Zoosemiotics, ed. Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli, and Aleksei Turovski (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011), 196. 50. Munday, “Thinking Through Ravens: Human Hunters, Wolf-Birds, and Embodied Communication,” 212. 51. Westling, The Logos of the Living World: Merleau-Ponty, Animals, and Language: 105. 52. Celeste M. Condit, “Contemporary Rhetorical Criticism: Diverse Bodies Learning New Languages,” 2006, 371. 53. Donald R. Griffin, “Is Man Language?,” in Readings in Zoosemiotics, ed. Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli, and Aleksei Turovski (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011), 349. 54. Cudworth, “Beyond Speciesism: Intersectionality, Critical Sociology and the Human Domination of Other Animals,” 25. 55. Ingold, “The Animal in the Study of Humanity,” 357. 56. Whitehead and Rendell, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins: 32. 57. A. Whiten et al., “Cultures in Chimpanzees,” Nature 399, no. 6737 (1999): 682. 58. Christopher Flynn Martin et al., “Chimpanzee Choice Rates in Competitive Games Match Equilibrium Game Theory Predictions,” Scientific Reports 4 (2014). 59. Joshua P. Ewalt, “Points of Difference in the Study of More-Than-Human Rhetorical Ontologies,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 21, no. 3 (2018): 525. 60. Ibid., 525–30. 61. Stephen Jay Gould, Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life, 1st ed. (New York: Ballantine Pub. Group, 1999).

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62. Gorgias and Douglas M. MacDowell, Encomium of Helen (Bristol [Avon]: Bristol Classical Press, 1982). 63. Scot Barnett and Casey Boyle, eds., Rhetoric, Through Everyday Things (2016), 1. Emphasis theirs. 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid., 3. 66. Jeanne Fahnestock, “Rhetoric in the Age of Cognitive Science,” in The Viability of the Rhetorical Tradition, ed. Richard Graff, et al. (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005), 161–62. 67. Barnett and Boyle, Rhetoric, Through Everyday Things, 4. 68. Nik Taylor and Richard Twine, The Rise of Critical Animal Studies: From the Margins to the Centre (Routledge, 2014). 1–2. 69. Ibid., 3. 70. Lynda Birke, “Listening to voices. On the Pleasures and Problems of Studying Human-Animal Relationships,” The Rise of Critical Animal Studies: From the Margins to the Centre (2014): 71. 71. Kay Peggs, “From Centre to Margins and Back Again: Critical Animal Studies and the Reflexive Human Self,” (2014): 38. 72. Ibid., 42. 73. Dominique Lestel, “The Biosemiotics and Phylogenesis of Culture,” in Readings in Zoosemiotics, ed. Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli, and Aleksei Turovski (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011), 392. 74. Frans de Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master: Cultural Reflections of a Primatologist (Basic Books, 2008). 4. 75. Ibid., 27. 76. Mary Pilgrim, “Communicating Social Support to Grieving Clients: The Veterinarians’ View,” in Perspectives on Human-Animal Communication: Internatural Communication, ed. Emily Plec (New York: Routledge, 2013), 129. 77. Desmond Morris, Cat Watching, 1st American ed. (New York: Crown Publishers, 1987). 19. 78. Megan K Mueller, “Is Human-Animal Interaction (HAI) Linked to Positive Youth Development? Initial Answers,” Applied Developmental Science 18, no. 1 (2014): 5. 79. Ibid., 5–6. 80. Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson, “Rethinking Rhetoric Through Mental Disabilities,” Rhetoric Review 22, no. 2 (2003). 81. Amy D. Propen, “Technologies of Mediation and the Borders and Boundaries of Human-Nonhuman Animal Relationships in Marine Species Advocacy,” in Rhetoric Across Borders, ed. Anne Teresa Demo (Anderson, SC: Parlor Press, 2015).

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References Alger, Janet M., and Steven F. Alger. “Beyond Mead: Symbolic Interaction between Humans and Felines.” Society & Animals 5, no. 1 (1997): 65–81. Anderson, Douglas R. “Peirce’s Horse: A Sympathetic and Semeiotic Bond.” In Animal Pragmatism: Rethinking Human-Nonhuman Relationships, edited by Erin McKenna and Andrew Light. 86–94: Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004. Barnett, Scot, and Casey Boyle, eds. Rhetoric, Through Everyday Things, 2016. Bekoff, Marc, and Colin Allen. “Intentional Communication and Social Play: How and Why Animals Negotiate and Agree to Play.” In Readings in Zoosemiotics, edited by Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli, and Aleksei Turovski. 175–93. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011. Birke, Lynda. “Listening to Voices: On the Pleasures and Problems of Studying Human-Animal Relationships.” The Rise of Critical Animal Studies: From the Margins to the Centre (2014): 71–86. Burke, Kenneth. Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966. Condit, Celeste M. “Contemporary Rhetorical Criticism: Diverse Bodies Learning New Languages.” 2006. Cudworth, Erika. “Beyond Speciesism: Intersectionality, Critical Sociology and the Human Domination of Other Animals.” The Rise of Critical Animal Studies: From the Margins to the Centre (2014): 19–35. Dawkins, Richard, and J. R. Krebs. “Animal Signals: Information or Manipulation?” In Behavioural Ecology: An Evolutionary Approach, edited by J. R. Krebs and N. B. Davies. 282–309. Oxford: Blackwell Scientific, 1978. de Waal, Frans. The Ape and the Sushi Master: Cultural Reflections of a Primatologist. Basic Books, 2008. Dennett, Daniel Clement. The Intentional Stance [in English]. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987. Derrida, Jacques, and Marie-Louise Mallet. The Animal That Therefore I Am. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Ewalt, Joshua P. “Points of Difference in the Study of More-Than-Human Rhetorical Ontologies.” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 21, no. 3 (2018): 523–38. Fahnestock, Jeanne. “Rhetoric in the Age of Cognitive Science.” In The Viability of the Rhetorical Tradition, edited by Richard Graff, Arthur E. Walzer, Janet M. Atwill, and Steven Mailloux. 159–79. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005. Gorgias, and Douglas M. MacDowell. Encomium of Helen. Bristol [Avon]: Bristol Classical Press, 1982. Gould, Stephen Jay. Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life. 1st ed. New York: Ballantine Pub. Group, 1999.

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Griffin, Donald R. “Is Man Language?” In Readings in Zoosemiotics, edited by Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli, and Aleksei Turovski. 343–56. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011. Howe, David. Empathy: What It Is and Why It Matters. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Ingold, Tim. “The Animal in the Study of Humanity.” In Readings in Zoosemiotics, edited by Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli, and Aleksei Turovski. 357–76. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011. Kennedy, George A. Comparative Rhetoric: An Historical and Cross-Cultural Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Krebs, J. R., and R. Dawkins. “Animal Signals: Mind-Reading and Manipulation.” In Behavioural Ecology: An Evolutionary Approach, edited by J. R. Krebs. 380–402. Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates, 1984. Lestel, Dominique. “The Biosemiotics and Phylogenesis of Culture.” In Readings in Zoosemiotics, edited by Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli, and Aleksei Turovski. 377–410. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011. Lewiecki-Wilson, Cynthia. “Rethinking Rhetoric Through Mental Disabilities.” [In English]. Rhetoric Review 22, no. 2 (2003): 156–67. Lind, Stephen J. “Un-Defining Man: The Case for Symbolic Animal Communication.” In Perspectives on Human-Animal Communication: Internatural Communication, edited by Emily Plec. 226–44. New York: Routledge, 2013. Lovejoy, Arthur O. The Great Chain of Being; a Study of the History of an Idea. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936. Marler, Peter. “The Logical Analysis of Animal Communication.” In Readings in Zoosemiotics, edited by Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli, and Aleksei Turovski. 253–78. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011. Martin, Christopher Flynn, Rahul Bhui, Peter Bossaerts, Tetsuro Matsuzawa, and Colin Camerer. “Chimpanzee Choice Rates in Competitive Games Match Equilibrium Game Theory Predictions.” Scientific Reports 4 (2014): 5182. Maynard Smith, John. Mathematical Ideas in Biology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Morris, Desmond. Cat Watching. 1st American ed. New York: Crown Publishers, 1987. Mueller, Megan K. “Is Human-Animal Interaction (Hai) Linked to Positive Youth Development? Initial Answers.” Applied Developmental Science 18, no. 1 (2014): 5–16. Munday, Pat. “Thinking Through Ravens: Human Hunters, Wolf-Birds, and Embodied Communication.” In Perspectives on Human-Animal Communication: Internatural Communication, edited by Emily Plec. 207–25: New York: Routledge, 2013.

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Parrish, Alex C. Adaptive Rhetoric: Evolution, Culture, and the Art of Persuasion. Routledge Studies in Rhetoric and Communication. New York: Routledge, 2013. Peggs, Kay. “From Centre to Margins and Back Again: Critical Animal Studies and the Reflexive Human Self.” (2014). Pilgrim, Mary. “Communicating Social Support to Grieving Clients: The Veterinarians’ View.” In Perspectives on Human-Animal Communication: Internatural Communication, edited by Emily Plec. 129-41. New York: Routledge, 2013. Propen, Amy D. “Technologies of Mediation and the Borders and Boundaries of Human-Nonhuman Animal Relationships in Marine Species Advocacy.” In Rhetoric Across Borders, edited by Anne Teresa Demo. Anderson, SC: Parlor Press, 2015. Sebeok, Thomas. “Prefigurements of Art.” In Readings in Zoosemiotics, edited by Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli, and Aleksei Turovski. 195–244. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011. Seegert, Natasha “Play of Sniffication: Coyotes Sing in the Margins.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 47, no. 2 (2014): 158–78. Seyfarth, Robert M., and Dorothy L. Cheney. “Meaning, Reference, and Intentionality in the Natural Vocalizations of Monkeys.” In Readings in Zoosemiotics, edited by Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli, and Aleksei Turovski. 157–73. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011. Taylor, Nik, and Richard Twine. The Rise of Critical Animal Studies: From the Margins to the Centre. Routledge, 2014. Tinbergen, Niko. The Animal in Its World; Explorations of an Ethologist, 1932– 1972. London: Allen and Unwin, 1972. ———. The Study of Instinct. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951. Westling, Louise Hutchings. The Logos of the Living World: Merleau-Ponty, Animals, and Language. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014. Wheeler, W. The Whole Creature: Complexity, Biosemiotics and the Evolution of Culture. Lawrence & Wishart, 2006. Whitehead, Hal, and Luke Rendell. The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Whiten, A., J. Goodall, W. C. McGrew, T. Nishida, V. Reynolds, Y. Sugiyama, C. E. G. Tutin, R. W. Wrangham, and C. Boesch. “Cultures in Chimpanzees.” Nature 399, no. 6737 (1999): 682–85. Zahavi, Amotz, and Avishag Zahavi. The Handicap Principle: A Missing Piece of Darwin’s Puzzle. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1997.

CHAPTER 12

The Study of Animal Rhetorics as an “Awareness Raising” Effort

The man in the tent lies bathed in signals hundreds of millions of years older than his crude senses. And still he can read them. —Richard Powers, The Overstory1

Humans have only survived to the present day due to their reliance on other animals. We enjoy their flesh, their labor, their superior senses, and even their communicative abilities that we don’t share. They track our prey, locate those we’ve lost to natural disasters, and even help us manage mental illnesses. Our fascination with animal calls and animal sign is deeply embedded in our culture and our genes. This was obviously originally a utilitarian phenomenon, before our societies became so intertwined with other animal cultures, and Steven Mithen describes the vast stores of information early humans compiled on animal signs, such as their calls, their scat, their tracks, what they eat, where they hide, their migration patterns, and how to tell which individuals are the healthiest. These traits and many more were stored in early cave art and other visual media for purposes of education and hunter training.2 For a long period of time in the West, which is increasingly becoming disconnected with agriculture and the demands of hunting and herding, animal calls served as education and entertainment. Fancy ladies kept songbirds in their parlor, and young boys made wolf calls in the night while camping to enhance their scary stories. Even when we do not think © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. C. Parrish, The Sensory Modes of Animal Rhetorics, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76712-9_12

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of nonhuman animals, they are there, serving us with their labor and their amazing abilities. They even give their lives, like canaries in coal mines, or dogs hunting landmines, so that we can continue on caging and using and being fascinated by them. As the twentieth century developed, so did our reliance on animal calls, with nonhuman animals seeing increasing service in times of war, and as guides and helpmates to the disabled. Thankfully, not all of these relationships are the result of humans forcing animals into the dangerous situations they’d prefer to avoid themselves. Some are rhetorical negotiations. Others are indeed coercive, abusive, and some would claim genocidal (see below). Differences exist based on often trivial traits, such as perceived charisma, overall size, eye-to-body size ratio, fluffiness, usefulness in industry, the taste of their flesh, and even racial associations (such as American bison during the nineteenth century). As we civilize ourselves, we often do it by grinding the bones of those animals who are lower in our hierarchies. Just as the great cathedrals of Europe were built by starving and working the peasantry to death, modern society has been built on the backs of many, many animals who need to be treated more fairly. This chapter will serve as a bridge between what came before and what follows, suggesting several ways that we must raise our awareness of animal suffering, and some hopeful cases of humans identifying very closely with other animals, possibly inspiring more compassionate treatment to the nonhuman animals in our care and under our watch. Just as any attempt by humans to mitigate the harm they cause to other animals is necessarily flawed and incomplete (even the most well-meaning vegans and animal advocates exist because of a long history of human reliance on animals), this chapter will present a flawed and incomplete argument for the well-being of other species. It is a snapshot of several much larger arguments that could be fairly treated in one or more scholarly volumes themselves (and some have, so the bibliography can point to expanded treatments in many cases). Nonetheless, the argument in this chapter will meander and saunter, in a consciously Thoreauvian manner, in order to help us think together about the ways humans have—often willfully— made themselves unaware of animal lives and welfare. I am interested here in raising awareness, not immediately and forcefully imposing my preferred policies on problems that may or may not have clear solutions. This chapter is the beginning of a conversation—one that others will hopefully carry on and refine in years to come. ∗ ∗ ∗

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There are four modes of oppression that animal studies scholars have taken up in the last decade or so. They are represented by various definitions of what I would call subjection, servitude, consumption, and linguistic exploitation (or cooptation as symbols themselves). Jacques Derrida, speaking in the 1990s, was adamant that human cruelty was increasing as regular contact with animals decreased in frequency. He proclaims, in The Animal That Therefore I Am, that “no one can deny the unprecedented proportions of this subjugation of the animal” that was being carried out in his day.3 And it had gotten worse as his life was reaching its end. Despite the shine most corporations try to put on their treatment of nonhuman animals, welfare and health claims are often (and often intentionally) misleading and under-regulated. The average consumer needs to do nothing to maintain the abusive status quo, but to make an informed decision requires wading through terminology screened by marketing jargon meant purely to deceive and abet evil. This asymmetry of effort is intentional, designed for the benefit of the rich, who do not care at whose expense profits come. In the poultry industry alone, the amount of junk terms invented to smooth over abusive practices is shameful. Buying “all-natural” chicken means nothing more enlightening than that you’ve purchased dead poultry of a particular species, no matter how much the term suggests that you are virtuous for not choosing the “unnatural” chicken (which, of course, no one sells). No other health or welfare benefits accrue on the side of chicken or consumer, as the term signifies nothing. Likewise, cagefree chickens sound like they should be happier, but all this claim means is that the chicken are allowed out of their tiny cages and into overcrowded barns covered in feces, where their beaks need to be cropped so that they are less likely to peck each other to death. Free range, then, must be an improvement, right? Well, it is better than chickens never receiving exercise outdoors, but it is still less than what most inmates at federal prisons are afforded. For “free range” to mean what most consumers think it means, one must look for the terms “pasture-raised” or simply “pastured.” This means the birds are allowed to roam and are limited in number of birds that can exist per square meter (which limitations differ by locality). What’s more maddening to the average concerned consumer is that ridiculously meaningless terms are often associated with meat products because they are deceptive in that they encourage fad diet compliance that is more likely to be harmful in the long term. The idea that a package of

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chicken drumsticks is “gluten-free,” for instance, does not even register as deceitful to some consumers and might be seen as favorable. But it is deceitful, unless the chickens have been breaded in wheat flour. Marketing is the cause of great suffering to other animals. It is an industry that even the staunchest sophists of the ancient world would denounce, as it is ruled by one goal: to sell products by using persuasive language to cover up abuse and—worse yet—to profit off the suffering it causes. The beef industry, for instance, has taken steps to legislate its marketing goals, even succeeding in making it a crime to report animal cruelty because such “libel” would disrupt a necessary agricultural process. Many human beings are well aware of what goes on, but are content to sweep it under the rug. We take great pains to hide the violence we do to animals from ourselves, “which some,” Derrida claims, “would compare to the worst cases of genocide.”4 Animal servitude, while not murder made wholesome by marketing efforts, is nonetheless an excuse for many people to be cruel to animals. But servitude under the right conditions can also lead to strengthened social relationships across species and within our own. Nick Trujillo examines human-animal relationships in terms of established communications theories, such as social exchange theory, which leads him to believe we form relationships with animals when the benefits outweigh the costs.5 One of the many possible ways he suggests pet guardianship can benefit humans stems from another idea with a rich tradition in communications scholarship: uncertainty reduction theory. What this explains is how people seek to reduce uncertainty about one another when meeting someone new. Dogs, Trujillo suggests, may act as a sort of social lubricant among fellow dog enthusiasts, breaking down some of the social barriers to meeting new people that otherwise would make it more stressful to walk up to a stranger and begin a conversation.6 While his article deals exclusively with dogs and humans, one can imagine that these benefits do not accrue only to dog lovers who meet fellow dog lovers. Love for any animal presents an easy common ground with likeminded individuals. In the same collection as Trujillo’s essay on dogs, Leigh Bernacchi paints a much bleaker portrait of the ways animals serve humans symbolically—both in life and in death. Because some animals are much more sensitive to environmental change, humans have long exploited them as instruments to measure the safety of certain activities (safety for the human, not the animal). Birds are particularly obvious examples to most people, as the aforementioned canary in a coal mine has long since passed

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into the vernacular as symbolizing not an animal that thinks and feels, but an early warning tool that signals danger to humans by its own death.7 Hence, the animals in service to humans become symbolic not in their manner of life but in their manner of death; their existences and agencies being sacrificed for what their dead bodies are able to communicate. Another thing animals communicate from themselves to others is nutrients. Animals are, unfortunately for them, excellent sources of protein and fat. Before humans were even human, the fight for life between predator and prey began an evolutionary arms race of increasing speed, sharpening claws, thickening hides, and most importantly to us, growing brains. Just as herd animals living on grasses had to learn to evade, the predators trailing them needed to be ever smarter in order to hunt as a group.8 We see this in countless scenarios in nature, but one example should here suffice. That is the arms race between grouse hens, who have developed distraction displays in order to lead approaching predators away from her young, and foxes, who are learning to ignore distracting displays. Young foxes often fall for the displays of grouse hens, but as they get older, they learn to take these displays as cues to search the ground for nearby chicks, rather than following the hen.9 Eventually, one can imagine that foxes will get better and better at identifying distraction displays, which will require grouse hens to either improve the quality of their displays or try a different approach to luring foxes away from their young. While the ability to eat, and later cook, meat is extremely important to the development of modern Homo sapiens, our reliance on animal flesh is one of the more dangerous habits for humans living in the twentyfirst century. While hunting some animals has always been dangerous, or at least very annoying—Pat Munday recounts, having shot a crow one time, never being able to return to that area because the remaining crows would always mob him—factory farming and feed lots have dramatically increased the environmental impact and cruelty involved in consuming animal protein.10 As a hopeless and possibly hypocritical life-long omnivore myself, I have no interest in making sweeping generalizations about the benefits or drawbacks of veganism or the ethics of family farming. I grew up on a small ranch myself and understand the struggle to maintain that way of life in the face of vast corporate entities that will use any tactic available to separate a farmer from the land. What I am arguing here is that the mass production model of farming is neither healthy for humans nor sustainable for the environment, so something has to give if the majority of us want to continue eating meat.

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Happily, there are several movements bringing us better, and less cruel, food to the table. Some of which, like eating local, also cuts down heavily on fossil fuel use and carbon release. Farm to table restaurants source their food more ethically, and many chefs behind this movement practice “snout to tail” methods of cookery that waste as little of an animal as possible. Organic movements in general have helped reduce or eliminate unnecessary antibiotic use in some industries, and have reduced the sheer number of chemical poisons pumped into our food chain. Renewed efforts at hunting for at least a portion of one’s food are also helping reduce cruelty, chemical use, and unhealthy feeding practices that actually make meat unhealthy by comparison. Killing adult, free-ranging animals that have not been treated with chemicals, and performing clean kills to drastically reduce suffering, helps animals and hunters alike. Managed populations like deer in many states of the United States require hunters to do the jobs wolves, cougars, and other endangered predators would have done in past centuries; and, to be clear, some deer must die to predation in order to prevent the suffering of the herd. Deer starving to death in the winter, because of lack of food and over-grazing, is not a preferable outcome for the deer. While some of my vegan colleagues will disagree on principle, it is sometimes a kindness to kill. A much less harmful type of subjugation than factory farming, and cruel living conditions, is the use of nonhuman animals as signs and symbols for various human endeavors that benefit the animals in no appreciable way. Animals can function as media, often in ways that (while humorous to humans) can take away the dignity and autonomy of the individuals being so used. Tony Adams describes in several scenarios what happens when animals become “tools humans use to facilitate human interaction.”11 Examples of this include dogs in costumes, dogs with advertisements for establishments on the boardwalk, and even a Labrador with a Kerry/Edwards political bumper sticker (which admittedly may not have been as effective as the dog’s guardian had hoped). If we take Marshall McLuhan’s famous statement that the medium is the message at face value, then we need to examine the appeal of animals as media, whether it is chiefly pathetic (“Oh, cute! That fuzzy kitten wants us to buy a sandwich.”), or whether ethos plays a factor (when “man’s best friend” advertises a political party, he wouldn’t lie, right?). Animals are not neutral delivery systems like some other media are claimed to be—they “harbor personal and political human agendas.”12 They are also

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living, breathing beings, not unfeeling posters and placards to be used and thrown away. Anticipating the theme of this book, Adams argues that media, even animal media, “are sensory ‘extensions’ of human bodies, extensions that make new and unique ways of human interaction possible.”13 What I would argue should be treated as an agent in its own right—an animal— is in some cases made to function as a medium when a human co-opts its agency in order to communicate or persuade something wholly human. And although these meanings are only potent for human consumption, the animals make possible ways of speaking that wouldn’t otherwise be available. Several new materialist approaches to persuasion have begun to recognize that “all kinds of entities are vulnerable and responsive to one another,” and that agency is not the preserve of human animals—or even just animals—alone.14 Just as humans can be used by other humans as media (think especially of sports sponsorship or fashion modeling), it is easy to draw in other agents to act on our behalf, especially when the agents are subjugated or unwitting participants in this case. “Beings, human and otherwise, are constantly responding to each other, modifying each other’s behavior in ways that are, perhaps, strange to us, but are, nevertheless, simultaneously oddly familiar.”15 Whether humans meddle or not, and it is difficult to ever claim in any instance that we have not, animals interact and express themselves in dynamic ways. Their interactions can hold agency, or, like humans, sometimes they are unwitting pawns in the games of other agents. Nonetheless, if we are to be fair to human animals, as we urge our readers to be fair to all animals, there are many cases where associations with humans directly benefit the other animals involved. Thomas Sebeok reminds us of a wonderful reciprocal arrangement that is a result of the coevolution of humans and a species of sub-Saharan African bird, known as the honeyguide.16 The honeyguide got its name because of its propensity to beckon and make distinct visual displays when it encounters humans. These can lure to a beehive that it is unable to crack open on its own. Humans of the area recognize the opportunity and follow the bird to a rich source of tasty carbohydrates. They break into the hive to get the honey they desire, leaving the beeswax the bird desires in exchange for its guide services. Without the bird, the humans likely would never have located the beehive, and without the humans, the honeyguide has little chance of collecting all that wax and spilled honey.

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The honeyguide is not the only example of human symbiosis with other animal species. (It’s not even the only honey-related example! Humanhoneybee cooperation has been going on since before the written word.) In fact, researchers have even found relationships that go beyond the bipartite tit-for-tat of one species directly benefiting the other in repayment for an original favor. A triadic relationship seems to exist between humans, ravens, and wolves, which may help to explain the early domestication of wolves as hunting partners. Ravens, of course, are highly intelligent animals, and several Inuit peoples traditionally depend on these birds for their gossip about the location of game.17 Many northern peoples have likely had similar relationships, as examples crop up in the myths and histories of several cultures. Odin, king of the Norse gods, for example, used his twin ravens, Huginn and Muninn as intelligence officers. Huginn, who served as his thought, and Muninn, who was his memory, whispered the secrets of the world into the god’s ears, so the Allfather would know what his children were up to. In practice, commonly, the human will ask a raven to guide him or her to prey, and sometimes the raven obliges (often enough for this to be a fairly successful method of shortening the time spent hunting). In return, the hunter will leave soft, nutrient-rich gut piles for the ravens to enjoy for their trouble. Likewise, modern animal researchers in Yellowstone National Park will follow flocks of ravens to locate recent wolf kills. The relationship between wolves and ravens is likewise reciprocally altruistic. Ravens, upon learning of an injured elk’s existence, will loudly harass the animal in order to attract the attention of wolves, who will open up the animal allowing the ravens to feed when they are done. And, while ravens are still rightly wary of hungry grown wolves, they can often be seen playing with the pups, biting each other’s tails, and chasing one another. A more widely-spread symbiotic relationship is the (once again dyadic) agreement among members of dolphin-human fishing cooperatives. How the cooperatives function varies by human-dolphin cultures, but generally involves dolphins scaring large schools of game fish into tightly packed shoals for humans to net, or up onto shore for people to collect. The dolphins are always paid handsomely for their efforts, as these arrangements encourage both parties to invest in the common good for the future. Such cooperatives have been reported in Brazil, Australia, India, Mauritania, Burma, and the Mediterranean, with further examples more likely to exist than not.18 Many such arrangements have been entrusted

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by previous generations to the young humans and dolphins who have inherited this effort for the common good. The dolphins seem to have a sense of fairness in these interactions that crosses species lines, for at the Tangalooma Resort in Moreton Bay, Australia, dolphins that are provisioned in order to delight visitors with their presence have been known to return the favor, bringing dead fish or cephalopods to members of the staff who often feed them.19 When one member of the group prospers, everyone benefits. Human and nonhuman animals do not exist in isolation, and the rise of urban living is making this more difficult for the average person to understand. Even if we consider our pets, we might think we are the masters and they the servants (or even property, if we are cruel). However, Barbara King suggests that social partners of multiple species arrange their environments and their ways of living under mutual consent. She likens this to a “dynamic dance,” much like two highly trained ballroom dancers would perform, co-regulating the physical interactions between them, so that they move gracefully in space together.20 Meaning isn’t made between two living things in a linear fashion, with one always sending and another always receiving; gestures and speech are co-constructed by the parties involved. Carolyn Miller demonstrates this point convincingly when she outlines what she calls a three-day conversation she once had with a snake. Finding a snake in her study one afternoon, she was surprised and startled, but wanted to return the snake to nature, where it belongs. She first attempted to catch it and eject it from her house. The snake, being savvy about not letting much larger predators capture it, quickly took shelter between two heavy bookshelves that Miller was loathe to unpack and move in order to access the snake that would probably just slither off somewhere else while she had a heavy bookshelf in her grasp. Miller thus attempted several rhetorical appeals over the course of the next three days, to convince the snake it was in everyone’s best interest if it went outside. The snake, of course, listened attentively but at first took no action more energetic than an occasional lazy flick of the tongue under its dubious lidded gaze. Miller, severely miscalculating the serpent’s diet, attempted to bribe the critter with water and lettuce, but these remained untouched for obvious reasons. She thought perhaps a nice, warm heat lamp would be tempting, but alas! the snake was unreceptive to a heat lamp in the middle of the floor, completely exposed as it was. Finally, thinking to herself that the snake must have gotten in when she had

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brought in some plants from outside, Miller brought a potted fern to her study, which the snake happily settled into sometime in the final night of the standoff.21 (The astute reader will note that Miller literally provided the snake something akin to its natural Umwelt in this situation, and it reacted positively.) In responding to conflicts across species lines, we can, of course, do what Miller was unwilling to do, which is to move the heavy books and their shelves that hid the startled snake. This may or may not have solved the problem, and it would definitely have been a spot of bother. We also could have attempted to hurt or kill the snake, which Miller, being a kind soul, was not prepared to do. If we extend the metaphor of this encounter, some human industries might have thought it justifiable to simply blow up the house—snake, books, and all—in order to solve an unwanted infestation. It sounds horrible (especially to Dr. Miller, I’m sure), but it is a common approach. People are often happy to employ scorched earth policies just to be able to wash their hands of what they might later describe as “that whole bloody snake affair.” What makes this story intriguing is that Miller addressed nature rhetorically. The snake was a fellow thinking creature, who could be convinced rather than coerced. Through some trial and error, she learned a bit about the logics of snakedom. A warm lamp didn’t lure it out, nor did lettuce (and likely a proper meal for a snake wouldn’t have, either). However, the potted fern offered shelter from all that human attention, and the snake must have thought a snakey version of “Ah, now you’re speaking my language!” as it slithered into position under the sheltering fern. That is the functional translation anyway, as the appeal worked smashingly and Miller was finally able to whisk pot, plant, and snake out the door to live once again in her garden.

Overcoming Traditional Views of Animals Because of long-standing religious and cultural assumptions, the West has looked upon animal communications in a completely wrongheaded manner. Derrida’s famous question of the animal “foregrounds a mutually constitutive relationship between language and violence…through factory farming, laboratory testing, and… the destruction of habitats.”22 Linguistically, the paradox of animalism—that humans are animals who separate themselves from animals—allows humans to murder the bodily, the emotional, and the material by sacrificing all other animals without

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considering this act criminal in almost any case. This liberty to destroy the animal is a main driving force in the philosophical doublespeak that has defined animal treatment in the West for centuries. The “category of ‘animal’ is contingent and shifts according to the convenience of the dominant,” writes Jennifer McDonnell.23 It is also inextricably linked to human rights, which are defined negatively against the other animals and their perceived abilities. In a real, legal sense, “human language becomes, for certain animals, quite literally a matter of life and death.”24 To any impartial observer—and we can once again imagine the proverbial aliens reporting back to the mothership about human behavior—holding all of nature to the standard of human language would seem preposterous. Why not the ability to groom ourselves with our tongues, or our capacity for holding our breath under water? We aren’t even close to understanding the languages of other creatures, yet our ignorant judgments about their qualities are used to condemn them. Animals “communicate in myriad ways that are, at least for most humans, either poorly understood or entirely unrecognized.”25 Often our ignorance is intentional, as it is more difficult to torture and kill beings who think, speak, and feel. The agricultural revolution turned our brothers and sisters of the plains and forests into property, to be dissected and sold piecemeal today, wrapped in plastic so as to render them unrecognizable as living things. It is far easier to eat a steak when one doesn’t have to look into big cow eyes, let alone kill it, clean out its entrails, and remove its skin and fur. Says Gregory Bateson, on the study of dolphin language: “The point is not either to discover that dolphins have complex language or to teach them English, but to close gaps in our theoretical knowledge of communication by studying a system that, whether rudimentary or complex, is almost certainly of a totally unfamiliar kind.”26 The purposes of classification have up until recently been hijacked by a desire to reinscribe a hierarchical notion of existence. That dolphin communication might be complex was a novelty, but the scientist would say it’s not language. That it might be language was amusing, but it doesn’t have syntax. That it does, indeed, have syntax was shocking, but does it have the type of syntax that most human languages demonstrate? And on, and on, drawing purely arbitrary lines by which to rank each animal’s signs as “less than,” or “more rudimentary than” human language.

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This rank-ordering and the constantly shifting goal posts gain us nothing. They only further cloud our minds by reinforcing our anthropocentric biases. What we lose by doing this is the ability to understand communication on its own terms, rather than comparing all other forms of it to a baseline of human communication. That causes the staggeringly vast modes of communication on our planet to be treated as comparative communication, and it privileges all comparisons toward what is most human, for that is the best, or the most complex, or the most linguistic, or the most syntactical, or whatever arbitrary “fittest thing” we make up to reassure ourselves that we are the best communicators around, the mythical telos of evolution. Measuring by human standards alone means we miss out on the wonderful whys of communication. Such as, relying on Bateson once again, the very interesting idea that cetaceans once had, but have now lost, a whole host of paralinguistic abilities that would have accompanied their uttered signs when they lived on land. Why would these fall out of fashion? Because it’s difficult to see very far under water, so gestures only serve a purpose when very close, meaning they are reserved for family and friends alone, most of the time.27 Nonetheless, trainers of captive cetaceans report many distinct gestures that serve communicative functions, which arise without human prompting. Dominique Lestel suggests that we should study human culture in all its facets—including the communicative—as one among many animal cultures.28 But before we can understand communication and culture in the natural world, we have to acknowledge that so much goes on outside of human awareness. Caitlin O’Connell tells a story about the matriarch of an elephant herd she had been observing in Africa for some time. Occasionally, Broken Ear would turn herself in a particular direction and freeze, sometimes with ears flat against her head and sometimes with ears held out, looking like a satellite dish, scanning the horizon. As she scanned, she seemed to cue the other adults to follow her lead.... they all oriented in the same direction, froze again, sometimes with ears flat, leaning forward, one foot propped up on the toenails. Other times, they extended their ears, sometimes keeping their toenails in contact with the ground, sometimes lifting one front foot completely off the ground, swinging it front to back.29

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What sounds like a bit of elephant hokey pokey was actually something of a mystery to elephant researchers. It makes sense, of course, for the matriarch of this herd to listen for danger, pivoting her head and ears like a satellite dish, watching the horizon but what could she have been doing with her feet? It turns out she was listening with those, too. Much like certain bugs, elephants seem sensitive to what is called seismic communication, which is simply another form of hearing, except that soundwaves are transmitted through the ground and are carried up through the foot, all the way to the ear.30 Elephants encountering a downed loved one will investigate by placing one of their front feet slightly above the surface of the other elephant’s body, scanning it almost like a sensor; what they are likely doing is using their sensitive feet to search for vital signs, hoping to sense a heartbeat or breathing.31 That we can have no inkling of such culturally important abilities, such as hearing with one’s feet, most often when aggressive male elephants are communicating at very low frequencies, means we have terribly incomplete pictures of communication and culture across species lines. We must also reexamine our biases about what animals have value to humans, and whether humans are really the ones most qualified to determine value. For instance, the label of “invasive” is based entirely on human aesthetic, environmental, or economic goals. In short, invasiveness is a matter of taste.32 As Natasha Seegert tells us, the line between these categories is poorly defined, and in some cases fluid. When coyote populations began to thrive in downtown Chicago, it raised a serious question of category: coyotes are considered vermin in many states in the United States, and yet they are tolerated in Chicago because of their role as consumers of vermin, such as rats, mice, and voles.33 How an animal can at once be vermin and exterminate vermin is a problem of category that could cause legal, health, or financial issues down the line. The fact is, most animal ethicists believe that animals have intrinsic value, and that classifications like “vermin” or “invasive” further the general human failing of lacking respect for that value.34 Nonhuman animals can even suffer from racialization, or profiling of the human races associated with their care. Harlan Weaver uses queer theory, in his study of rhetoric about pit bulls, in order to “trace out a different kind of multispecies politics rooted in inhuman intimacies and queer kinships.”35 What he finds is that several breeds of dog are often lumped together as pit bulls, based purely on the looks of the dog and its guardian. He notes that the profiling effect of pit bulls and their owners draws strong

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parallels to outright racial discriminations in human-human interactions. He even criticizes one journalist, describing the atrocities committed by former professional athlete, Michael Vick, because the ways he described Vick smacked of the ways dog breeders would describe a pure bred animal they were trying to sell. While some of this criticism might stem from unfamiliarity with a sporting culture in the West that has the tendency to treat athletes like slabs of beef, describing their bodies in vulpine, breathy sentences that would seem highly inappropriate in other contexts, there is also no doubt that these descriptions when taken out of a sporting context and into the realm of contemporary law and politics suddenly rhyme with the sorts of descriptors that might be used for a slave at market in the early nineteenth century, or a dog at a modern kennel club show. Once the parallel is drawn, one cannot help but cringe at the objectification of all athletes and become even more uncomfortable when bestial comparisons are brought to light. As these cases gain more notoriety, and more and more examples accumulate, it becomes so obvious that the fate of animals is often tied to their associations with humans, not on any innate value or merit. The associations work in the other direction, as well. Taylor and Twine describe one-way capitalism is sustained through the subjection of humans considered bestial: “the exploitation of human workers takes place alongside that of animals and partly through a symbolics of animalisation, wherein an implicit culture/nature dualism positions the low paid and the unpaid as ‘closer to animals.’”36 Human groups are used as an excuse to oppress certain breeds and species of nonhuman animal, just as nonhuman animals are used to prop up hierarchies that demean the less fortunate of our own species. Animals are almost always better off without human intervention—but once we have caused our harm, we need to be extremely careful of the remedies we deploy. Franz de Waal describes the case of the last wild condors, which were rounded up in the 1980s in order to begin an artificial breeding program. This was necessary because humans had driven the birds to the brink of extinction through the use of chemical pesticides, like DDT, which were of course sold as harmless wonders of corporate chemistry. (If one cares to, it is an easy Internet search to find pictures of children in public swimming pools being sprayed with these chemicals as they played in the water, inhaling them, swallowing them suspended in the water, and letting them absorb in their skin.)

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Before Rachel Carson’s Cassandra-like silent spring could occur, and through massive ecological activist efforts, DDT was taken off the market, but only after it had caused the shells of raptor eggs to become thin and too weak to protect the next generation of birds. Condors were saved because they were charismatic and large, and humans loved them. They were fed with condor-shaped hand puppets, but nonetheless still associated humans with free meals, so the first generation of birds released into the wild stayed dangerously close to human dwellings and depended on people to help them scavenge enough food to survive.37 Vulture culture had been forgotten, replaced by a sort of assisted living program for senile species who couldn’t remember where they’d left their way of life.

Potential Objections to Animal Rhetorics as Awareness Raising Activism One concern for those trying to categorize nonhuman animal behaviors is, of course, that of anthropomorphism. It is very easy to think of instances when humans are prone to ascribing their own feelings or emotions to behaviors that appear to be similar in others. Much like parents who think their newborns are happy when they are actually gassy (babies don’t develop a social smile for nearly two months), it is often tempting to say a pet “loves” you or that it feels “guilty” for having soiled the carpeting. These may be accurate descriptions, but it is difficult to know for sure without our knowing what other animals mean when they smile, grimace, or sulk. This is not to say that all anthropomorphism is automatically bad. Nor need it be avoided. Much of the time, the more closely related you are to an animal, the more similar their physical communication will be to your own. Also, those who have pets learn to interpret—sometimes imperfectly, of course—the body language of species that are not very close to our own species, even outside the mammalian order. Anthropomorphism as an absolute, meaning there is no way we can ever translate an “animal” feeling or sensibility into a “human” one, is indeed an anthropocentric accusation, in that it assumes that any trait a human has could not possibly be shared by another animal, no matter how closely related.38 (I will deal with overcoming the related charge of anthropocentrism in the following chapter.) The problem with this charge is that we continue to discover animal behaviors that are only explicable by describing them as we would describe human behaviors. Culture,

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language, intent, emotions like shame or contentedness, even individual personality differences are found in creatures as tiny as spiders. Why would a purely instinctual being need a personality? There is simply no other explanation than that animals are like us and we are like animals—in fact, we are animals! In delivering lectures and doing interviews based on my research, I have found this fact extremely difficult for some people to grasp, so it might be useful to repeat this several times, so that the idea of anthropomorphism will start to sound as silly as it is in most cases. We are animals. We are animals. We are animals. We are animals, and other animals are very much like us in several ways. But then how do we study nonhuman animals in disciplines so steeped in “us versus them” dualisms—especially the critical theory that inspires much animal studies research? Thinking about animals as natural beings is difficult in environmental and animal studies because of the theoretical limitations of mainstream approaches in both fields. Even theoretical models that challenge dualistic understandings of nature and culture or body and mind still take for granted the divisions between domesticity and wildness and between individuals and wholes. In order to build a nature ethic that does justice to animals, ecosystems, and people, we need to begin with encounter and concrete engagement with nonhuman nature. To make sense of... any animal, wild or domestic, human or other, requires a theoretical approach that starts with real animals, not abstractions.39

Anna Peterson (quoted here) maintains that the separation of animals and nature, or of nature and culture, is a way of thinking that is “both strange and destructive.”40 These dualities are simply comforting to the lazy mind that needs things bifurcated so one side can be demonized and the other celebrated. Perhaps what should set the critical study of animals apart from other expressions of critical theory is that it attempts to celebrate similarities, not underline differences. This, too, presents its dangers. Confirmation bias is one such concern. Having delivered a paper to the Rhetoric Society of America Conference in 2014 on the ways breaking down the walls between species could help us to overcome human exceptionalism, a colleague I have known for a number of years asked whether it is fair to use different animals as examples of each different communicative trait I wanted to demonstrate. This is a fair question, and one that was a fair bit easier to overcome when the examples I used in a 20-minute

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presentation could all have been demonstrated equally well by using one very intelligent animal species, like dolphins or chimpanzees. The broader principle, however, was indeed worth thinking about. Do we flirt with confirmation bias by scouring the bestiaries in order to cherry-pick the examples that best support our theories? In this case, I would answer with a qualified “no,” as much of what I am trying to do so early in the life of the research program I’ve come to call adaptive rhetoric is to raise awareness that animal rhetorics even exist. To be able to say, “This is a traditional genre of human rhetoric, and – Hey, look! – other animals do this too,” serves only to confirm an ontological claim that can be easily confirmed by any untrained observer who is able to detect the signals in question. When the overwhelming historical and disciplinary assumption is that “animals can’t do this,” then providing examples of animals “doing this,” no matter how much I may have curated my examples using only the right animals, does not play to a confirmation bias so much as a disconfirmation bias (which does not appear on any list of logical fallacies I have read thus far in my career). Another important aspect of using many different animals as examples is in presenting the broad array of rhetorical behaviors found in nature. While it is easy to convince some people that primates may be rhetorical, it is increasingly difficult to argue the same for aquatic mammals and birds, let alone fish and lizards and insects. Arraying a multiplicity of persuasive actors before the naysayer is very much in line with the awareness raising efforts of this volume and of adaptive rhetoric in general.

Animals as Models: Identification Two male penguins, Roy and Silo, who live in the Central Park Zoo in New York, raised a motherless baby named Tango together in 2004. As a result of the ongoing debates about legalizing gay marriage in the United States at this time, same-sex advocacy groups latch onto the three penguins as models of the “naturalness” of homosexuality. This is a troublesome term in the history of the West, as what is natural has often been assumed to be good—one needs only remind oneself that rape, murder, and other forms of violence are all “natural” acts for our species, in order to sense the fundamental problem of arguing from the natural to the good. The responsible parties for introducing this term into the debate, however, were those who claimed homosexuality is somehow “unnatural,” which is not only equally troublesome, but immoral and

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self-righteous. Despite the politically fraught terms being tossed about by advocacy groups and evangelists, “Roy, Silo, and Tango started to function as media, as vehicles for promoting human social change.”41 Because some humans could identify with two loving penguin dads more easily than two loving human fathers, it may have been easier to move some audiences by using animals as the medium for gay advocacy groups’ pleas for tolerance. Often humans in power will attempt to restrict this ability of animals to become a medium, as religious groups did for the penguins in our example. They did not want others to identify with them, because they presented gay marriage in a positive light, rather than as an unnatural act. When animals are used as media, especially as tools for political struggles like the penguins above, we often erase the true meanings of their actions, or overemphasize some aspect of a metaphorical relationship (which, of course, leads back to charges of anthropomorphism, which in some cases is not unjustified). This strips the animals of their agency, which exacerbates the already intolerable conditions of many caged beasts. In Tema Milstein’s essay about an incident between a zoo gorilla named Akenji and a group of young children who had been verbally taunting him in his enclosure, Milstein describes how the zoo guide potentially misrepresents the actions of a frustrated animal in order to provide a “soft” explanation for a very sad situation, one suspects in order to shelter children from the harsh realities of animal captivity and to put a happy face on zoo life. The guide mediates, ostensibly on behalf of the animal, giving him voice, but seems to cover up the animal’s true goal of communicating with an interpreted goal more palatable to her own interests. As Akenji the gorilla banged violently on the glass of his enclosure, the guide asked the children why they thought he was doing that. The children provided some explanations, and then, the guide offered them the “correct” interpretation of the gorilla’s outburst—that he was merely showing off for them.42 This interpretation is dubious at best, and the guide in this situation employs the full power of her ethos as both adult and teacher to pacify the children, who are (rightly) dissatisfied with her answer. What this demonstrates is the danger of mediation and identification as a powerful tool for bulldozing over the communicative intentions of another creature. In this case, it was done in order to maintain the fantasy of the ideal zoo, populated by happy and willing animal performers, whose lives are enhanced and prolonged by their captivity.43

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In the case of the gay dad penguins, it was to score points in a political struggle that the birds frankly cared nothing about. What rhetoricians must be aware of, then, is the potential oppressiveness of mediation. When George Kennedy treated crow rhetorics, the danger was that, since Kennedy is a human, he did not understand the Umwelt of the crow and could easily have fit their actions into human assumptions based on our unique psychology. But “Kennedy does not simply impose rhetoricity on the crows’ activity,” insists Thomas Rickert.44 Instead, he is moved by crow communication and interaction with the environment, on their own terms and by their own means, just as we may move them in our own manner. The debate over mediation in differing environments (by species with different sensory abilities) is so neatly encapsulated by Douglas Adams’s line from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.45

There are many variations on this basic premise that predate Adams’s masterpiece of comedic science fiction, including the well-traveled story about the businessman and the fisherman (wherein, to simplify the story, a businessman urges a fisherman to stay out longer, work harder, and catch more fish, so that he can retire some day. The fisherman asks the businessman what he would get up to when he retires, then, to which he responds that he would relax, not work so hard, and do some leisurely fishing). If we see business executives and fishermen as different species, then their differing outlooks can be made to look as humorous as those of the fictional humans and dolphins of Adams’s world. Central to literary animal studies are questions of representation and mediation.46 Most rhetorical theory thus far in the nascent animal turn replicates this focus, treating animals as symbols, metaphors, and devices to better understand human writing and culture. (The animals you see in movies are merely humans with fuzzy avatars and human voice actors dubbed over their scripted or animated expressions.) Very few take up George Kennedy’s call to study communication in a continuist vein

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that could bring us closer to a unified (and unifying) theory of animal rhetorics. The problem, of course, is that it is so much simpler to treat animals as symbols, to represent them, to mediate “on their behalf,” or to use them to represent human traits. Mediation is a step closer to useful for the animals, but it still falls short of actually hearing animal voices, and can be used dishonestly to great effect for those who lack integrity. The problem of mediation and differences in Umwelten can be exacerbated by other common communication challenges. The framing effect, for instance, is a widely distributed problem, not only in human persuasive efforts, but to an almost incessant degree in some of our more specialized areas of communication (such as marketing). As one researcher has noted, the framing effect represents “one of the most frequently studied violations of rational choice,” which operates on the basic presumption that better presentation can overcome a more desirable result.47 When presenting logical equivalents, receiver preferences can be reversed by reversing which aspect is highlighted in conversation. For instance, if a high school guidance counselor were to claim that 85% of her students graduate on time, it tends to sound better than claiming that 15% of her students either drop out or get held back a year or two. In terms of mediation, the potential dangers could be significant if the mediator chooses to frame his rhetoric in a way that runs contrary to his subject’s interests. What about the future, then? How do we raise up the animal in order to recognize the animals that make up this artificial category of supposed lesser beasts? I will discuss several remedies in the final chapter of this book, which hopefully fulfills the reconstructive promise of a postdeconstructive (or post-postmodern) materialism. Breaking down can be helpful, but the difficult work is rebuilding something once everything has been picked clean from the carcass of prior ages. I am encouraged by some of the forward-thinking research I have seen cropping up recently in various disciplines—work that realizes that human ignorance is vast, but by understanding the communication of other species, the so-called wise apes can actually become somewhat wiser. Sean Morey builds from early work on adaptive rhetoric to suggest one future for humans, dogs, and cats. In the next few years, he claims (with the support of Slobodchikoff, the famous prairie dog researcher who discovered the depth of that species’ language) that we will have the technology to develop translator devices no larger than a cellular telephone, which would allow us to understand communication across these species lines. “This technologically enabled communication wouldn’t just allow

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us to better understand companion animals, and eventually perhaps wild animals, but would fundamentally change the cultural dynamics of how we interact with animals, including animal rights and the legal questions that surround how we treat them.”48 This conclusion, which I think is more realistic in terms of decades, not years, is nonetheless in line with several of the communication devices I have dealt with in previous chapters. This is especially true for the attempts humans are making to develop sensory-assistive technologies from echolocation, thermal imaging, distributed cognition, and even repellent from electrical discharges (all discussed in Part III). There are hundreds of examples I have not even covered in this book, such as Japanese researchers hoping to use catfish (who we learned in the electroreception chapter can detect electrical signals) as early warning systems to detect earthquakes, as the pressure buildup preceding quakes emits telltale electrical pulses.49 Even from a purely utilitarian perspective, animal diversity is valuable as each seems to be a case study in how to detect and react to the various challenges that arise out of natural environments— challenges and opportunities to which humans are more often than not oblivious. If we are so busy adopting animal sensory systems for personal use, wouldn’t a species with any sense of humility stop neglecting the magnificent abilities of these creatures when discussing our own forms of communication, which we perceive as far more effective than they often are? There is so much work to do for animal activists, scientists, and especially the humanists and social scientists who see themselves as the bestowers of ethical and critical thought. If post-positivist revolutions have given us the authority to check the overreach of science, to keep the Jurassic Park dinosaurs from being created simply because they can (to invoke the popular image of the role of the humanist), then part of our job of lifting up the animal is lowering the human who has for far too long grown into adulthood retaining the confidence of children who Fred Rogers assured were special. While this attitude is helpful developmentally, adults are supposed to realize at some point that they are not special. The world was not given to us to exploit so we can buy more junk. And even if your religion teaches you that the world indeed was given over to human keeping, it is difficult to envision any god thinking highly of the way we’ve been treating that gift. We may have few chances

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left to be thoughtful, compassionate guardians of nature and everyone in it. That is why it is so very important to proceed with humility, so that we can understand animals rather than rank and judge them.

Notes 1. Richard Powers, The Overstory: A Novel (W. W. Norton & Company, 2018). 2. Steven J. Mithen, Thoughtful Foragers: A Study of Prehistoric Decision Making, New Studies in Archaeology (New York: Cambridge University Press., 1990). 233. 3. Jacques Derrida, and Marie-Louise Mallet, The Animal That Therefore I am (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). 25. 4. Ibid., 26. 5. Nick Trujillo, “The ‘Golden’ Bond: Exploring Human-Canine Relationships with a Retriever,” in Perspectives on Human-Animal Communication: Internatural Communication, ed. Emily Plec (New York: Routledge, 2013), 119. 6. Ibid. 7. Leigh A. Bernacchi, “Flocking: Bird-human Ritual Communication,” in Perspectives on Human-Animal Communication: Internatural Communication, ed. Emily Plec (New York: Routledge, 2013), 143. 8. Paul Shepard, The Others: How the Animals Made Us Human (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1996). 18. 9. Geir A Sonerud, “To Distract Display or Not: Grouse Hens and Foxes,” Oikos (1988): 233. 10. Pat Munday, “Thinking Through Ravens: Human Hunters, Wolf-birds, and Embodied Communication,” in Perspectives on Human-Animal Communication: Internatural Communication, ed. Emily Plec (New York: Routledge, 2013), 213. 11. Tony E. Adams, “Animals as Media: Speaking Through/with Nonhuman Beings,” in Perspectives on Human-Animal Communication: Internatural Communication, ed. Emily Plec (New York: Routledge, 2013), 17. 12. Ibid., 18. 13. Ibid., 20. 14. Laurie E Gries, “In Defense of Rhetoric, Plants, and New Materialism” (paper presented at the Forum: Bruno Latour on Rhetoric, 2017), 438. 15. Ibid., 441. 16. Thomas Sebeok, “‘Talking’ with Animals: Zoosemiotics Explained,” in Readings in Zoosemiotics, ed. Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli, and Aleksei Turovski (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011), 89. 17. This, and what follows, Munday, “Thinking Through Ravens: Human Hunters, Wolf-birds, and Embodied Communication,” 210–11.

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18. Hal Whitehead, and Luke Rendell, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 110. 19. Ibid., 117. 20. Barbara J. King, The Dynamic Dance: Nonvocal Communication in African Great Apes (Harvard University Press, 2009). 11. 21. Carolyn R. Miller, “The Appeal(s) of Latour,” RSQ: Rhetoric Society Quarterly 47, no. 5 (2017): 454. 22. Jennifer McDonell, “Literary Studies, the Animal Turn, and the Academy,” Social Alternatives 32, no. 4 (2013): 6. 23. Ibid., 8. 24. Ibid., 9. 25. Emily Plec, Perspectives on Human-animal Communication: Internatural Communication (New York: Routledge, 2013). 1. 26. Gregory Bateson, “Problems in Cetacean and other Mammalian Communication,” in Readings in Zoosemiotics, ed. Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli, and Aleksei Turovski (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011), 304. 27. Ibid., 308. 28. Dominique Lestel, “The Biosemiotics and Phylogenesis of Culture,” in Readings in Zoosemiotics, ed. Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli, and Aleksei Turovski (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011), 400. 29. Caitlin O’Connell, The Elephant’s Secret Sense: The Hidden Life of the Wild Herds of Africa (University of Chicago Press, 2008). 4. 30. Ibid., 6. 31. Ibid., 75. 32. Adams, “Animals as Media: Speaking through/with Nonhuman Beings,” 26. 33. Natasha Seegert, “Play of Sniffication: Coyotes Sing in the Margins,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 47, no. 2 (2014): 160. 34. Anna Peterson, Being Animal: Beasts and Boundaries in Nature Ethics (Columbia University Press, 2013). 43. 35. Harlan Weaver, “Pit Bull Promises: Inhuman Intimacies and Queer Kinships in an Animal Shelter,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21, no. 2–3 (2015): 344. 36. Nik Taylor, and Richard Twine, The Rise of Critical Animal Studies: From the Margins to the Centre (Routledge, 2014). 9. 37. Frans de Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master: Cultural Reflections of a Primatologist (Basic Books, 2008). 28. 38. Louise Hutchings Westling, The Logos of the Living World: Merleau-Ponty, Animals, and Language (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014). 5. 39. Peterson, Being Animal: Beasts and Boundaries in Nature Ethics: 4. 40. Ibid., 5. 41. Adams, “Animals as Media: Speaking Through/with Nonhuman Beings,” 23.

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42. Tema Milstein, “Banging on the Divide: Cultural Reflection and Refraction at the Zoo,” in Perspectives on Human-animal Communication: Internatural Communication, ed. Emily Plec (New York: Routledge, 2013), 176. 43. I elaborate on the idea of mediating on behalf of, and in spite of, nonhuman animals in Alex C. Parrish, “Review of Perspectives on HumanAnimal Communication: Internatural Communication (2013),” JCAS: Journal for Critical Animal Studies 12, no. 4 (2014). 44. Thomas J. Rickert, Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013). 281. 45. Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (New York: Ballantine, 2009). 141. 46. McDonell, “Literary Studies, the Animal turn, and the Academy,” 7. 47. Gad Saad, and Tripat Gill, “The Framing Effect When Evaluating Prospective Mates: An Adaptationist Perspective,” Evolution and Human Behavior 35, no. 3: 5. 48. Sean Morey, “Speculative Zoopoetics,” Rhetorical Speculations: The Future of Rhetoric, Writing, and Technology (2019): 50–1. 49. O’Connell, The Elephant’s Secret Sense: The hidden Life of the Wild Herds of Africa: 167.

References Adams, Douglas. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. New York: Ballantine, 2009. Adams, Tony E. “Animals as Media: Speaking through/with Nonhuman Beings.” In Perspectives on Human-Animal Communication: Internatural Communication, edited by Emily Plec. 17–34: New York: Routledge, 2013. Bateson, Gregory. “Problems in Cetacean and Other Mammalian Communication.” In Readings in Zoosemiotics, edited by Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli and Aleksei Turovski. 303–12. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011. Bernacchi, Leigh A. “Flocking: Bird-Human Ritual Communication.” In Perspectives on Human-Animal Communication: Internatural Communication, edited by Emily Plec. 142–61: New York: Routledge, 2013. de Waal, Frans. The Ape and the Sushi Master: Cultural Reflections of a Primatologist. Basic Books, 2008. Derrida, Jacques, and Marie-Louise Mallet. The Animal That Therefore I Am. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Gries, Laurie E. “In Defense of Rhetoric, Plants, and New Materialism.” Paper presented at the Forum: Bruno Latour on Rhetoric, 2017. King, Barbara J. The Dynamic Dance: Nonvocal Communication in African Great Apes. Harvard University Press, 2009.

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Lestel, Dominique. “The Biosemiotics and Phylogenesis of Culture.” In Readings in Zoosemiotics, edited by Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli, and Aleksei Turovski. 377–410. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011. McDonell, Jennifer. “Literary Studies, the Animal Turn, and the Academy.” Social Alternatives 32, no. 4 (2013): 6. Miller, Carolyn R. “The Appeal(S) of Latour.” RSQ: Rhetoric Society Quarterly 47, no. 5 (2017): 454–8. Milstein, Tema. “Banging on the Divide: Cultural Reflection and Refraction at the Zoo.” In Perspectives on Human-Animal Communication: Internatural Communication, edited by Emily Plec. 162–81: New York: Routledge, 2013. Mithen, Steven J. Thoughtful Foragers : A Study of Prehistoric Decision Making. New Studies in Archaeology. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Morey, Sean. “Speculative Zoopoetics.” Rhetorical Speculations: The Future of Rhetoric, Writing, and Technology (2019): 45–57. Munday, Pat. “Thinking through Ravens: Human Hunters, Wolf-Birds, and Embodied Communication.” In Perspectives on Human-Animal Communication: Internatural Communication, edited by Emily Plec. 207–25. New York: Routledge, 2013. O’Connell, Caitlin. The Elephant’s Secret Sense: The Hidden Life of the Wild Herds of Africa. University of Chicago Press, 2008. Parrish, Alex C. “Review of Perspectives on Human-Animal Communication: Internatural Communication (2013).” JCAS: Journal for Critical Animal Studies 12, no. 4 (December 2014): 157–64. Peterson, Anna. Being Animal: Beasts and Boundaries in Nature Ethics. Columbia University Press, 2013. Plec, Emily. Perspectives on Human-Animal Communication: Internatural Communication. New York: Routledge, 2013. Powers, Richard. The Overstory: A Novel. WW Norton & Company, 2018. Rickert, Thomas J. Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013. Saad, Gad, and Tripat Gill. “The Framing Effect When Evaluating Prospective Mates: An Adaptationist Perspective.” Evolution and Human Behavior 35, no. 3 : 184–92. Sebeok, Thomas. “‘Talking’ with Animals: Zoosemiotics Explained.” In Readings in Zoosemiotics, edited by Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli, and Aleksei Turovski. 87–98. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011. Seegert, Natasha “Play of Sniffication: Coyotes Sing in the Margins.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 47, no. 2 (2014): 158–78. Shepard, Paul. The Others: How the Animals Made Us Human. Washington, DC: Island Press, 1996. Sonerud, Geir A. “To Distract Display or Not: Grouse Hens and Foxes.” Oikos (1988): 233–37.

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Taylor, Nik, and Richard Twine. The Rise of Critical Animal Studies: From the Margins to the Centre. Routledge, 2014. Trujillo, Nick. “The ‘Golden’ Bond: Exploring Human-Canine Relationships with a Retriever.” In Perspectives on Human-Animal Communication: Internatural Communication, edited by Emily Plec. 113–28. New York: Routledge, 2013. Weaver, Harlan. “Pit Bull Promises: Inhuman Intimacies and Queer Kinships in an Animal Shelter.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21, no. 2–3 (2015): 343–63. Westling, Louise Hutchings. The Logos of the Living World: Merleau-Ponty, Animals, and Language. New York : Fordham University Press, 2014. Whitehead, Hal, and Luke Rendell. The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.

CHAPTER 13

Rhetoric and the Animal Turn: Concluding Thoughts on the Benefits of the Cross-Species Study of Persuasion

Despite being a field with such a rich tradition of interdisciplinary inquiry, rhetoric is sometimes uncharacteristically late to the table when new scholarly paradigms grip the other humanities and social sciences, offering a new perspective on old problems. Some of these new ways of envisioning our discipline—such as through the lens of queer studies or disability studies—have changed the way we think about persuasion, identification, and difference. However, the changes these areas of study brought came slowly to this field (perhaps because it is the student of persuasion who is most difficult to persuade), and only in the last decade or two have carried the influence they are due. Recognizing this tendency, it should not be shocking that rhetoric and composition scholars have paid little attention to the animal turn that has been influencing humanists and social scientists in the early years of the twenty-first century. There were sporadic early adopters, but the nearsilence immediately following George Kennedy’s revival of animal studies in the field of rhetoric was deafening.1 This, despite the long history of interconnectedness between rhetorical theory and biology: from Aristotle to Kenneth Burke there are numerous links in a chain of major theorists who treat humans (rightly) as animals whose persuasive strategies differ from those of other animals by degree, not necessarily by kind. However, this is not always appealing to those who believe the human © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. C. Parrish, The Sensory Modes of Animal Rhetorics, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76712-9_13

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exceptionalism of the Middle Ages is something that needs defending, either by defining away connections between species through narrow conceptions of words like culture or language, or by neglecting the natural, the instinctual, and the nonverbal aspects of human persuasion and identification. Our discipline had forgotten for some time what it always knew: human thought, communication, and especially persuasion are embodied. While it can be studied fruitfully in abstraction, or broken down to study the tiny working parts, the operative whole does not act without reference to the bodies and environments (both physical and social) in which a signaler sends information to one or many receivers.2 Moreover, neither signaler nor receiver exists in a vacuum; they are subject to biology, to history, to culture, and to what one theorist has called the “ambient rhetorics” of a world that will continue to chug along with or without any particular individual.3 Thus we must not study only rhetoric in theory. We must free the specimens from their isolated cages and allow our rhetorical subjects to interact with the world in a natural setting. We must, as it were, re-embody rhetoric. We must socialize it like a new puppy, so we can monitor its interactions with people, environments, other animals, because the ways we communicate alter our interactions with both other species and our environment.4 In addition to other useful ways of exploring the impact of this rerevelation that rhetoric is embodied and influenced by an environment (which each body also influences), such as feminist studies or dis/ability rhetorics, the animal turn represents a refocusing of the humanities as a whole, a contextualization. It suggests that we should study the human animal in relationship to the other animals it interacts with and affects. Human art, and behavior, and communication are related to the behaviors of other animals, and the time is ripe for rhetoricians to consider the benefits of expanding the scope of their discipline to include the persuasive efforts of individuals not only from other cultures and other types of bodies, but also from other species as well, whose communication strategies we have only barely begun to understand despite thousands of years of observation. Debra Hawhee agrees that we can expand and enliven the study of persuasion: “Considering the places in rhetorical theory that are infested with nonhuman animals might help us find more lively, less predictable and tame theories of rhetoric, however dormant.”5 In order to succeed in this project of expanding the scope of rhetoric to include nonhuman animal voices, there are some difficulties to overcome.

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The most pressing is that of anthropocentrism. As discussed in an earlier chapter, Jacques Derrida attempted to address this problem toward the end of his career, wondering at the arrogance it takes to divide an entire kingdom of beings into two equal categories: the human and the animal.6 Not only does this gloss over the great abundance of species, the incomprehensible variety of life forms on this planet, but it also elevates humans to an artificially dominant status. We are special, the idea goes, because we are different from all other animals. But all other animals are different from all other animals, so exceptionalist thinking has always required help through clever definition with an eye toward exclusion. Hierarchy: the spirit by which “man” is “goaded,” according to Kenneth Burke in his widely cited “Definition of Man.”7 It is our desire to impose order on the natural world and our understandable assumption that we should be on top (though we be but mortals) that makes the creation—and the sometimes violent enforcement—of hierarchy so appealing to human animals. Hierarchy, especially as Derrida saw it, as reductive essentialism, inspires the sort of oversimplification that Burke warned against when using key terms and categorical nomenclature in his Dramatism and Development.8 But rhetoricians are aware of the dangers of hierarchy, at least when we attempt to create and enforce divisions based on the differences between bodies among our own conspecifics (Burke himself was more likely to side with the other animals, if any ranking were to occur between species).9 Yet the problem has never contained itself within our species; as I will discuss below, many of the world’s most troubling problems, including racism, murder, and even genocide, are based on the ability to animal others—to make them bestial or to place them lower on our hierarchies because they are perceived to be more animal pests or vermin than they are human. If we are to overcome the dangers of hierarchies, we cannot simply choose which groups we can and cannot apply them to. We need to rethink the logic of ranking living beings according to the worth we ascribe to them, rather than their inherent value. Even the hunter respects an animal he has just killed; should the rhetorician be satisfied to subjugate all of the animals even further? What is required to overcome the challenges of anthropocentrism and hierarchy is the recognition of animal voices and agency, to challenge hierarchy by demonstrating the abilities of other animals that far outstrip our own, like in the examples provided in Part III of this book. In a discipline that has warmly embraced Bruno Latour’s use of a talking train

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to demonstrate how even artifacts are agents in his explication of ActorNetwork Theory, it should be a very short step indeed to allow truly animate beings the same courtesy.10 Yet the mere idea of animals having intentions, let alone the will to pursue goals that are not purely instinctual, is offensive to some. This point of view, that nonhuman animals are mere slaves to instinct, furry little automata, has long been out of favor in biology and ethology. That rhetoricians lag behind these discoveries is no surprise; as one fellow conference presenter once joked, “We are humanists, not animalists, after all!” Yet we sometimes forget that humans are animals with (presumed) agency and often with a voice in most things that rule our daily lives. To be a humanist is merely a subcategory of being an animalist, and it would be awfully inhumane of us to continue ignoring the plight of the nonhuman.

Overcoming Anthropocentrism It should not come as a surprise to any student of communication that human language is assumed the best, the most complex, and the most intelligent form found in nature. While it may be the case that human language is more complex than other animal signals, we honestly do not have enough evidence to back up such a statement, because we do not understand other animals’ forms of communication except in a very rudimentary manner. Likewise, claiming we are the best communicators, or the smartest, assumes that all animals share the same persuasive goals, which is not necessarily the case. The root of these assumptions is an uncritical stance toward the rhetorical practices of other animals and a willingness to accept the fallacy of human exceptionalism. Yet, it is hard to blame people for this view, because anthropocentrism is so natural that it leads many animal studies scholars to believe that “it is too often unquestioned.”11 We are human, so we privilege the human. As noted earlier, Plato made a similarly egocentric assumption when, as a philosopher, he suggested that philosophers would make the best rulers in his new republic (one wonders, if he had been a fishmonger, if he would have attempted an argument to put them in charge). It is comforting to believe we are special, and it is natural to use our own abilities as humans to inform the criteria by which we evaluate all other species. Human language use serves as a benchmark for all other forms of verbal and nonverbal communication, which is often an error of category, in that the purposes of each may vary even within the same species’

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practices. That a dog and a human communicate in precisely the same way when they lift their eyebrows “sympathetically” is probably anthropomorphic, but to think that the same gesture enacted by two co-evolving mammals does not share similarities of meaning or possibly even intent is more than merely anthropocentric—it is short-sighted. The benchmark of human communication is most commonly a tool used to degrade the rich complexity of nonhuman animal communication. Louise Westling expands on this sentiment, commenting that typically, “when a previously unknown communicative ability is discovered in an animal community, skeptics rush to discount its validity by detailing ways in which it differs from human language in complexity of syntax, creativity, or indication of independent agency.”12 What these animal abilities threaten is humanity’s special place in the world, a necessary primacy if we wish to dissociate ourselves from the “lesser” beasts. To treat the comparative study of communication this way would be scandalous if one were discussing differences of culture, yet we develop a double-standard for evaluating animal persuasion, even among animal species that are known to have culture, such as dolphins.13 One researcher of dolphin behavior suggests we attempt, to the best of our ability, to keep human communicative goals, methods, and desires out of the conversations we have about animals that live in very different environments and face environmental pressures we do not. Gregory Bateson studies cetaceans, but not in order to see where they stack up against humans. Rather, he investigates their communication strategies outside the narrowly defined criteria that humans value, in order to close gaps in our knowledge of communication on the whole, rather than only as it exists in a single Umwelt.14 The idea is that, if we consider communication in each species’ own Umwelt (a usage particular to biosemiotics—we may recall that Umwelt theory refers to the effects of environment on one’s “rhetorical stance”), we will not be forcing a square peg into a round hole by expecting this communication to resemble what a human might attempt in the same circumstances. The gaps Bateson is working on are surprisingly broad. Marine mammals are considered some of the most intelligent creatures on earth. They have long been esteemed among the most likely candidates for extended cross-species communication, and indeed we have been able to teach multiple species a wide array of verbal and visual symbols in order to understand our desires. Some scientists even note that, according to a great many philosophers’ attempts to define what makes a person a

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person (being alive, aware of their environment, having emotions, personalities) dolphins should be included in that category.15 Yet, of the 80 known species of marine mammals, only four species have ever been studied seriously.16 This is shocking, when we consider that many feel marine mammals are among the most intelligent non-primates on earth. Extended study could yield valuable insights about their intelligence, their culture, and their communicative abilities. As it stands we know that dolphins are sophisticated users of symbolic communication, and some whale songs demonstrate syntax. What more a focused study of the 76 mostly ignored species could tell us is something worth pondering, but we will not unlock the secret to whale song anytime soon—it is a mystery and a complex one at that. Yet we know that the study of cetaceans offers one of the best correctives to human anthropocentrism. Randy Harris reminds us that Kenneth Burke divided human and nonhuman animal minds by claiming an “unbreachable divide” signified by the use of symbols.17 But we now know that this divide is not only permeable, but that it is a veritable sieve, being crossed by species from wildly varied groups including birds, cetaceans, and other primates. Capuchin monkeys, for example, have been shown to recognize not only that certain tokens (in the case of the experiment cited, different colored poker chips) can represent specific food items, but they also recognize the transitive properties of the tokens.18 That is, if food A is more desirable than food B, and food B is more desirable than food C, then food A is more desirable than food C. The capuchins were quick to extend this transitive property symbolically when each color of chip could only be traded in later for one specific type of food, recognizing then that chip A > B, chip B > C, and therefore that chip A > C. Pace Burke, we are not the only symbol-using (or potentially misusing) animals.19 A more direct example of communicative symbol use comes from the aforementioned cetacean family—the bottlenose dolphin performs what scientists call vocal labeling of other individuals.20 Put simply, dolphins have names. These names come in the form of a specific whistle given to only one individual, which represents that dolphin symbolically. It is used as both a label and when addressing the individual so named. When wild bottlenose dolphins hear their names, they consistently respond by calling back to the individual who used the name call. There are two important components to this discovery. First, these signals are learned, individually

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specific symbols. Second, this occurs naturally within the dolphins’ own communicative system, not as a learned behavior in captivity. Symbol use among nonhuman animals is one phenomenon that indicates that there are problems with evaluating other animal communication systems using only one aspect of our own system as a benchmark. The position that human communication is objectively better, or even more complex, than that of other animals merely confirms our own evolved predispositions. Because we do not have powerful senses of smell, pheromones are less influential over humans than other mammals (although they still hold sway). Because we cannot detect electric fields, we did not develop a means of altering them in order to persuade. The artifacts of our evolutionary history lead directly to the artifictions of disembodied rhetorical theory. In order to treat cross-species communication both honestly and holistically, rhetoricians will need to reexamine the hierarchies that have built up over two millennia of Western philosophy and religion—hierarchies that reinforce an artificial divide between human and nonhuman animal.

Breaking Down Hierarchical Thinking Animals are rhetorical creatures with feelings and desires that have been traditionally subordinated to the desires of humans, whether those desires were ethical, legal, or neither. Our species has propped up hierarchies supported by religious, political, and linguistic ideals that signal either ignorance or an uncaring attitude toward others. What is tragic about this is that these hierarchies have led to horrible abuses of animals and humans alike. Humans have been called animals because of their race, their religion, their culture, or their political ideologies, and this naming of animal is meant to be insulting and degrading (which speaks volumes about our traditional attitudes toward animals in the West). Naming a person or group an animal can even contribute justifications for mass-murder and genocide.21 Not all humans are granted personhood, either.22 It is humanity’s sadistic desire to impose order on nature that causes some scholars, including Kenneth Burke, to cast that as a defining characteristic of humanity: we are, once again, “goaded by the spirit of hierarchy (or moved by the sense of order).”23 In many cases, Burke would argue that this is a harmful trait, and he is not alone. Susannah Le Baron questions the human need to constantly order and rank nature, and our somewhat

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predictable trend of placing ourselves always at the top. She asks two important questions relating to this matter: (1) To what end do we continually find that our comparisons between humans and animals necessitate the conclusion that we are so significantly different that our difference alone is sufficient means by which to know ourselves as humans? and (2) By what pretense of objectivity or rationality have we determined that those differences make us better than those we have categorized by our criteria?24

These are important questions to consider, as they point out the casual bias involved in the assumption that humans are defined by their differences from animals, while animals themselves are all of one category. Surely a shrew and a platypus would beg to differ, if only we were wise enough to hear what they had to say. Such is the nature of confirmation bias: we have cherished for so long the idea that humans are special that we weigh more heavily the evidence which confirms this position than that which argues against it. Thus the animal Other arises, and it is a lower other (as most Others are). Even worse than symbolically degrading human and nonhuman animals by comparing them to an Other we see as lower down in our hierarchy, animals may become easy targets for the mentally ill and cowardly among our species because of these associations: “‘Hating’ animals may not only refer to the projection of one’s own faults but extend to animosity for certain human groups, the animal serving as scapegoat for venting these feelings.”25 Thus, we see in the history of Europe and America the more craven of our ranks hunting domestic cats because they fear their association with witches or magic. We see people abuse animals because of their association with certain ethnic groups or even sports teams. We even hate and try to eradicate them because they are non-native, judging that only those groups of plants and animals that lived here first deserved to stay, while potential immigrants should be kept out by any means. If the reader detects a parallel between the terms and conditions we apply to invasive species and those we apply to “invasive” human populations, the reader is not alone. This is yet another problem that stems from the rank ordering of populations and species, and it is initially a linguistic-categorical problem. Invasive species language mirrors immigration and security discussions in ways that point out the inherent

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racism and speciesism involved in the creation of hierarchies of human and nonhuman animals; terms like “alien,” “nonnatives,” and “foreign invaders” have been used to describe both human and nonhuman visitors to the United States.26 As in the case of invasive species of plants and nonhuman animals, citizens have selectively applied these descriptions in order to demonize certain populations while allowing others to move in without comment. The very idea of the “native” is a harmful one—especially when speaking of the short history of H. Sapiens. Nativity defines both negatively and positively, with an inherent and unavoidable value judgment. Speaking of individuals who were “here first” at once denies the reality that all human populations have been forced to migrate, divide, and intermarry with other groups, and overlooks the basic foolishness of that claim to authority. Regular users of the internet might already anticipate a parallel worthy of note—that of the “FIRST!!!!!” person to comment on a new forum message. What this is meant to earn someone using a shared resource that is out of their control, but necessary for future generations to thrive in that location, is unclear. The same attitude, however, has often led to the callous treatment of others—the idea that I am here first, last, or now is a petty justification for an unwillingness to share, whether the resource in question is a message board or a planet. There is no slice of this particular planet that any one group can claim was theirs first, and this, I think, is a good thing: if the construction of the categories of native and invader is historically used to justify violent action against those deemed lower on the Great Chain of Being, then these arbitrary criteria need to be reexamined. Further arbitrary criteria fuel our desire for hierarchy, but the central problem in the study of animal rhetorics is not found in the ontogeny or communicative ability of nonhuman animals. The problem stems from a purely human flaw. Despite our lack of knowledge regarding most forms of animal communication, we nonetheless feel very comfortable creating hierarchies based on assumptions about sophistication or complexity. Sophistication and complexity for their own sake are necessarily valuable concepts neither in evolutionary terms, nor in persuasive criteria. To say that the peacock’s tail is beneficial in natural selection is as absurd as claiming that one culture is rhetorically superior to another just because it has more complex forms of communication. Sometimes clarity and simplicity are preferable to the complex and the overwrought.

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But human arrogance harms other species and harms other humans. Human encroachment on wild places alone is extinguishing as many as 100,000 species per year.27 Allow that number to sink in. One hundred thousand species. This may be the high estimate, but the low estimate is “only” 10,000 species per year that humans are directly responsible for killing off. Most humans either do not care or do not act because it seems easier and cheaper to buy products from corporate megafarms than sustainable sources. The poor are especially hard-pressed to act, because it is already a struggle to put food on the table. However, a great many of us in the West have options that we choose not to exercise because we are apathetic and wasteful. We do not see Madagascar as an investment, so we purchase products with palm oil, which encourages more monoculture; this leads to further extinction, and also to a growing inability of the Malagasy to survive without wild game to supplement their diets. If lemurs, for instance, had a say in the matter, they would tell us that the slight extra immediate cost of buying local and sustainable food is marginal when compared to the long-term costs of corporate monoculture, extinction, and deforestation. We need to recognize the animal voice, and when nonhuman animals have no voice, we need to mediate responsibly on their behalf. But how can we accomplish such a task? I want to turn next to our ability to listen to what the animal world has to say through the continuing study of animal rhetorics, even if we don’t always gain full understanding of the animal’s desire.

Recognizing Animal Voices and Agency Derrida raises an interesting objection in his work on animals when he argues that treating “the animal,” as opposed to “the human,” is an error of elision. Rather, he says, there is a multiplicity of animal life, not a single, monolithic Animal.28 Therefore, there can be no single dividing limit between man and animal, and the variety of species in nature should be treated as unique. I would add to this that treating all animals as “the Animal” restricts their agency in several ways. First, as Derrida was hinting, it puts humanity on the same level of importance as the sum of every single nonhuman animal species, all rolled into one (or, as I have argued above, it puts humans above them all). Second, and perhaps more importantly, it eliminates the individual animal in our discussions by not only compacting all individuals into their species, but all species into a

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single notion of Animal, making it easier to deny the single voice rather than hear the gallimaufry of individual voices in nature, all attempting to be noticed above the din of voices crying out to be heard. An “ecosystem of Babel,” if you will. Nonhuman animal communication has been mostly ignored in discussions of culture and is treated as discontinuous with human communication.29 This can and should be addressed in a number of ways, including being mindful of how we frame the ideas of animal rhetorics and cultures in future debates. One opportunity for mindfulness of how we may define animals out of their agency comes from Joseph Abisaid, who makes a compelling case that framing —the positive or negative “spin” we put on a given question or proposition—is greatly influential on public opinion about even highly contentious issues like animal experimentation. People’s views, he claims, are extremely malleable, depending heavily on how pro/con arguments about animal testing are framed.30 The protesting community in these cases often frames testing as a collaboration or a necessary evil for the good of all species.31 Anti-testing groups, on the other hand, frame testing as an activity that causes needless suffering, pointless cruelty for the benefit of the greedy who make money from products developed from animal experimentation.32 Framing this discussion in terms of ethics is often directly opposed to a frame of unchecked scientific progress. What we might take away from this example is (at least) twofold: we might, like those who question animal testing, wish to interrogate the question of cui bono, or who benefits, from subjugating animal cultures and communication; we might also wish to reframe the debate as one of continuity and similarity rather than difference (or différance). The differences between human and nonhuman animal have been needlessly emphasized since the ancient Greeks began recording their philosophical debates. The similarities, however, have often been intentionally swept under the rug, as it makes those who use animals as means to ends, rather than as ends in their own right, very uncomfortable to consider their intelligence, their emotions, their ability to think or feel pain, or even their ability (among several species understudy) to demonstrate cultural learning. Just as animal culture must be taken into account when studying the communication of nonhuman species, we must likewise maintain awareness of the external and internal influences of human sociality.33 This is one of the many important things we can adapt from the study of

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other animals—we must not take human signals out of their context and attempt to isolate them without good cause. By context, I do not necessarily mean what rhetoricians normally speak of as the rhetorical situation: the historical and interpersonal setting of a persuasive act. I mean more than that. We need to bring our focus beyond that of antiseptic stylistics (which are of course important in the abstract), toward an embodied conception of rhetorical acts within discourse ecologies. Words are not uttered without a face and hands and shoulders and sparkling eyes to signal that we are telling a joke, flirting, threatening one another. If the last couple of decades of internet use has taught rhetoricians anything, it is that words without context are apt to produce tone-deaf responses. Communication and environment are inextricably bound—on the level of the gene, the individual, the species, and the relations between species of plant and animal. As Wendy Wheeler argues, [an] environmental niche is always also a semiotic niche. Every environment is, at the same time, and necessarily, rich in ‘information’: sounds, odours, movements, colours, electric fields, waves of any kind, chemical signals, touch.... On this view, life is primarily semiotics.34

Thus, while it can be useful to focus on one small aspect of communication, we must also take into account the entire system in which persuasion takes place and finds its influence—that is to say, the world. It is too easy to ignore our limitations; complex information presented by senses we do not trust or monitor all that well, such as chemical cues and pheromones, is often neglected, and therefore remains largely under-theorized in analyzing communication and behavior.35 Many material rhetoricians have begun a project of expansion from rhetoric as the purely rational—as if we were all idealists, unaware of our bodies and our environments—to a more world bound view of persuasion as an interaction between a body and its environment. This opens up our field to investigations that encompass more than the individual or the cultural, to include considerations of a much vaster rhetorical universe of objects, species, genes, and dark matter. That animals should be included in the material world, as persuasive entities, seems so stunningly obvious as to be almost unworthy of mention. Unworthy, that is, if we had already expanded the scope of rhetorical scholarship to include that which is nonhuman.

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Expanding the Scope: Micro and Macro Levels Considering the previous sections, then, it is perhaps the most important task of scholarship on animal rhetorics to expand the scope of our field beyond the human, just as previous generations sought to expand our focus beyond the strictly male, the European-descended, and the privileged or literate subjects of study to which the history of rhetoric had been confined for so long. Diane Davis laments the fact that communication scholars have reacted so poorly to Darwin’s revelation of our shared ancestry and that “its panicked deflection continues to ground contemporary theories of rhetoric.”36 Instead of deflecting and reducing, our subject should be expansive and inclusive, and several rhetoricians have suggested ways we could extend our inquiries into other domains. Celeste Condit acknowledges that humans are deeply concerned with communication, both internal and external, ranging from the microscopic to the environmental. The other codes that are most obviously pertinent for humans are those of the human body – its DNA, proteins, hormones, and their patterned accretion through time – and those of our ecoscape – the codes that generate and are generated by the birds and insects and microbes that create the living flow that allows us to be.37

This raises an interesting point: we are not only the creators of communication, but we are also its product. Whether or not we credit the gene as the unit of selection, it is the transfer of pieces of selves that perform that ultimate act of identification: reproduction. That some species can even do this without communication, merely cloning themselves as we would sheep, suggests there are alternatives to persuading another to mate—at least for some species. Condit’s claim that we should look outside (and inside!) ourselves mirrors that of Walter Ong, a few decades earlier. He recognized that “thought itself operates out of genetic as well as intellectual history. It has neurophysiological support or grounding,” which we should investigate to understand our own internal languages.38 Slowly, neuroscientists are doing just that, but largely without the involvement of rhetoricians. Ong himself proposed a field of study he called “noobiology,” or a biology of mind, which he defined as “the study of the biological underpinning

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of human mental or intellectual activity.”39 This was to be an interdisciplinary pursuit that would inform our views of human persuasion. In his own research, he used agonism as a window into the biological underpinnings of human persuasion and coercion, linking the internal self to the external other, especially in times of conflict in this case. In studies of persuasion, only recently have neurorhetorics taken up Ong’s suggested research trajectory.40 Thomas Rickert extends Ong’s approach through his conception of ambient rhetoric, which seems heavily indebted to both actor-network theory and Umwelt theory (though Rickert does not emphasize these influences in his text). In addition to the internal–external nexus, Rickert takes a cue from George Kennedy in valuing the rhetorically constructive interactions of organism and environment (this debt he does repeatedly acknowledge): “In claiming that rhetoric serves an evolutionary function,” writes Rickert, “Kennedy opens the door for ambience, since evolutionary theory describes the transformations that occur in species as they fit themselves into the world just as the world fits them into itself.”41 This is a process he calls attunement, which is not a one-way “tuning” of an organism to meet environmental need; rather, it is the sum effects of animals adapting to environments that are being continually altered by animals. Humans are not the only animals whose efforts shape nature in significant ways. We need only consider how beaver dams completely shift water levels or even alter the courses of rivers, influencing countless species in the process. The mere act of existence implies a constant communication of two-way data between an individual and its environment, which includes not only conspecifics, but also individuals from other species that may be attempting to “read” the actions of the individual, in order to anticipate and manipulate its behavior. All of this points to a significant problem that is only recently becoming central to rhetorical theory. Scholars have in the past eliminated materiality by treating rhetoric as a text, privileging discursive constructions of reality, when in fact discourse is only one small element thereof.42 Debra Hawhee rightly claims that rhetoric should be more closely tied to bodies, not merely isolated elements of language and cognition.43 To extend this idea further, not only can the body be the text, but the body can exist outside the text, at varying levels of association.

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Rickert suggests the “incorporation of the material world as integral to human action and interaction, including the rhetorical acts” in our theorizing activities.44 This expansionist program could help place rhetorical theory back in its environmental context by combining what we have learned from the reductivist critique of such isolated elements as style and invention, enabling a “big picture” view of theory and practice. Much as we cannot study animal behavior merely in a lab—without additional observation in a natural setting—isolating elements of persuasive practice, such as tropes and commonplaces, removes any environmental influence from the art of rhetoric, rendering it an orphan procedure that is technical but not techne. Natasha Seegert’s recent work on coyote rhetorics in downtown Chicago leads her to the conclusion that the formal and the rational are not necessary conditions for the study of rhetoric and in fact can be limiting: the coyote weaves back and forth across the terrain, their paths a reminder that rhetoric is never linear or complete but instead encounters abysses that defy meaning. When exploring the trails of the wily coyote, one cannot do so by following the strictly disciplined paths, including the linear lines of the written text, that limit the types of bodies capable of producing rhetoric. Rather, critics need to explore other pathways through which speech and rhetoric is produced.45

There is a famous biological principle that sums up nicely the point that animal behaviors, such as rhetoric and communication, are often irrational, messy businesses that can rarely be subjected to clinical controls. It is commonly referred to as the Harvard Law and holds: under the most rigorously controlled conditions of pressure, temperature, volume, humidity, and other variables, any experimental organism will do precisely what it damn well pleases. Rhetoric, removed from its material and environmental constraints, does similarly whatever it damn well pleases. If culture alone shaped persuasive behavior, it could be anything. But culture is bound to place, and place contains all sorts of other creatures beyond the human. Moreover, all of these other creatures and material conditions interact continuously, shaping and constraining rhetorical situations. While it is useful, from time to time, to isolate elements of rhetorical practice under laboratory-like conditions, we must then take what we have learned and

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test it in the context of actual living beings navigating the world around them. Seegert comes to a similar conclusion in her study, going so far as to define rhetoric as “the relational force of signals interacting with the world.”46 This way of defining rhetorical energy, rhetorical practice, is another way scholars have recently attempted to broaden the rhetorician’s concerns, which are traditionally bound to the written word and oral speechmaking. While rhetoric arose from oral cultures as a formal discipline, it has for millennia also considered the written word part of its purview, and it must continue to expand to include all perceptual information we use to influence others.47 If the study of animal rhetorics can help us to expand the scope of our field, as others have suggested we should, then that alone would be a worthwhile effort. However, if we think beyond the benefits to our discipline alone, this program of study can do much more. It will take great effort to stem the tide of anthropocentrism and exceptionalist thinking. Humans are very much in love with themselves, and we have long traditions of reassuring ourselves that we are special. However, the creation and maintenance of hierarchy is not only misinformed, it is dangerous to all forms of life. Instead of making a sharp distinction between human and nonhuman animals, it would be better to more fully understand our nonhuman animal subjects before relegating them unjustly to a category of “lesser creations.” This is why the study of animal rhetorics (from various disciplinary perspectives) can help us to avoid the trap of human exceptionalism, which leads us down the slippery slope of hierarchy creation and potentially to violent action against other groups. By seeing that animals communicate differently, we can appreciate the great variety of persuasive techniques found in nature without imposing value or inviting bias. If we are not goaded into hierarchy, our minds are open to the importance of others—be they humans, animals, or both.

Notes 1. George A. Kennedy, Comparative Rhetoric: An Historical and CrossCultural Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). 2. In the past, I have attempted to identify a “quantum of rhetoric,” or a smallest working piece of communication that we can call persuasive. Obviously more of a thought experiment than a feasible project, the results are discussed in my first book: Alex C. Parrish, Adaptive

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3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12.

13. 14.

15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

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Rhetoric: Evolution, Culture, and the Art of Persuasion, Routledge Studies in Rhetoric and Communication (New York: Routledge, 2013). Thomas J. Rickert, Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013). T. Milstein, “Greening communication,” in Greening the Academy: Ecopedagogy Through the Liberal Arts, ed. S.D. Fassbinder, A.J. Nocella, and R. Kahn (Sense Publishers, 2012), 162. Debra Hawhee, “Toward a Bestial Rhetoric,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 44, no. 1 (2011): 85–86. Jacques Derrida and Marie-Louise Mallet, The Animal That Therefore I Am (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 40. Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 16. Kenneth Burke, Dramatism and Development, Heinz Werner lectures (Barre, MA: Clark University Press, 1972), 22. Debra Hawhee, “Kenneth Burke’s Jungle Book,” Minnesota Review (2009): 173. Bruno Latour, Aramis, or, The Love of Technology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). Susan Hafen, “Listening with the Third Eye: A Phenomenological Ethnography of Animal Communicators,” in Perspectives on HumanAnimal Communication: Internatural Communication, ed. Emily Plec (New York: Routledge, 2013), 188. Louise Hutchings Westling, The Logos of the Living World: Merleau-Ponty, Animals, and Language (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 104. Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). Gregory Bateson, “Problems in Cetacean and Other Mammalian Communication,” in Readings in Zoosemiotics, ed. Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli, and Aleksei Turovski (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011), 304. David Grimm, “Is a Dolphin a Person?,” Science 327 (2010). Dominique Lestel, “The Biosemiotics and Phylogenesis of Culture,” in Readings in Zoosemiotics, ed. Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli, and Aleksei Turovski (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011), 379. Randy Harris, “The Rhetoric of Science Meets the Science of Rhetoric,” POROI 9, no. 1 (2013): 2. E. Addessi et al., “Preference Transitivity and Symbolic Representation in Capuchin Monkeys (Cebus apella),” PloS One 3, no. 6 (2008). Burke, Language as Symbolic: 3–4. Stephanie L. King and Vincent M. Janik, “Bottlenose Dolphins Can Use Learned Vocal Labels to Address Each Other,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110, no. 32 (2013).

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21. Peter Suedfeld and Mark Schaller, “Authoritarianism and the Holocaust: Some Cognitive and Affective Implications,” in Understanding Genocide (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 22. Jenell Johnson, “Disability, Animals, and the Rhetorical Boundaries of Personhood,” JAC: A Journal of Rhetoric, Culture & Politics 32, no. 1/2 (2012): 374. 23. Burke, Language as Symbolic: 16. 24. Susannah Bunny LeBaron, “Difference Without Hierarchy: Narrative Paradigms and Critical Animal Studies, a Meditation on Communication,” in Perspectives on Human-Animal Communication: Internatural Communication, ed. Emily Plec (New York: Routledge, 2013), 259. 25. Paul Shepard, The Others: How the Animals Made Us Human (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1996). 26. Tony E. Adams, “Animals as Media: Speaking Through/With Nonhuman Beings,” in Perspectives on Human-Animal Communication: Internatural Communication, ed. Emily Plec (New York: Routledge, 2013), 27. 27. Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin, The Sixth Extinction: Biodiversity and Its Survival (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson,1995), 6. 28. Derrida and Mallet, The Animal That Therefore I Am: 40. 29. Lestel, “The Biosemiotics and Phylogenesis of Culture,” 380. 30. Joseph Abisaid, “Framing Primate Testing: How Supporters and Opponents Construct Meaning and Shape the Debate,” in Perspectives on Human-Animal Communication: Internatural Communication, ed. Emily Plec (New York: Routledge, 2013), 54. 31. Ibid., 64. 32. Ibid., 66. 33. W. Wheeler, The Whole Creature: Complexity, Biosemiotics and the Evolution of Culture (Lawrence & Wishart, 2006), 12. 34. Ibid., 126. 35. Jesus Rivas and Gordon M. Burghardt, “Crotalomorphism: A Metaphor for Understanding Anthropomorphism by Omission,” in The Cognitive Animal: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives on Animal Cognition, ed. Marc Bekoff, Colin Allen, and Gordon M. Burghardt (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 14. 36. Diane Davis, “Creaturely Rhetorics,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 44, no. 1 (2011): 88. 37. Celeste M. Condit, “Contemporary Rhetorical Criticism: Diverse Bodies Learning New Languages,” 2006, 371. 38. Walter J. Ong, Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 11. 39. Ibid., 27–28. 40. Jordynn Jack and L. Gregory Appelbaum, “This Is Your Brain on Rhetoric: Research Directions for Neurorhetorics,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 40, no. 5 (2010).

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41. Rickert, Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being: xviii. 42. Deborah Cox Callister, “Beached Whales: Tracing the Rhetorical Force of Extraordinary Material Articulations,” in Perspectives on Human-Animal Communication: Internatural Communication, ed. Emily Plec (New York: Routledge, 2013), 35–36. 43. Debra Hawhee, “Language as Sensuous Action: Sir Richard Paget, Kenneth Burke, and Gesture-Speech Theory,” The Quarterly Journal of Speech 92, no. 4 (2006): 331–33. 44. Rickert, Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being: xii. 45. Natasha Seegert, “Play of Sniffication: Coyotes Sing in the Margins,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 47, no. 2 (2014): 161. 46. Ibid., 163. 47. Walter J. Ong, Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971), 13.

References Abisaid, Joseph. 2013. Framing Primate Testing: How Supporters and Opponents Construct Meaning and Shape the Debate. In Perspectives on HumanAnimal Communication: Internatural Communication, ed. Emily Plec, 54–76. New York: Routledge. Adams, Tony E. “Animals as Media: Speaking through/with Nonhuman Beings.” In Perspectives on Human-Animal Communication: Internatural Communication, edited by Emily Plec. 17–34: New York: Routledge, 2013. Addessi, E., A. Mancini, L. Crescimbene, C. Padoa-Schioppa, and E. Visalberghi. “Preference Transitivity and Symbolic Representation in Capuchin Monkeys (Cebus Apella).” [In eng]. PloS One 3, no. 6 (2008): e2414. Bateson, Gregory. “Problems in Cetacean and Other Mammalian Communication.” In Readings in Zoosemiotics, edited by Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli and Aleksei Turovski. 303–12. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011. Burke, Kenneth. Dramatism and Development. Heinz Werner Lectures. Barre, MA: Clark University Press, 1972. ———. Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966. Callister, Deborah Cox. “Beached Whales: Tracing the Rhetorical Force of Extraordinary Material Articulations.” In Perspectives on Human-Animal Communication: Internatural Communication, edited by Emily Plec. 35–53: New York: Routledge, 2013. Condit, Celeste M. “Contemporary Rhetorical Criticism: Diverse Bodies Learning New Languages.” 2006, 368.

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Davis, Diane. 2011. Creaturely Rhetorics. Philosophy & Rhetoric 44 (1): 88–94. Derrida, Jacques, and Marie-Louise. Mallet. 2008. The Animal That Therefore I Am. New York: Fordham University Press. Grimm, David. 2010. Is a Dolphin a Person? Science 327: 1070–1071. Hafen, Susan. 2013. Listening with the Third Eye: A Phenomenological Ethnography of Animal Communicators. In Perspectives on Human-Animal Communication: Internatural Communication, ed. Emily Plec, 185–206. New York: Routledge. Harris, Randy. “The Rhetoric of Science Meets the Science of Rhetoric.” POROI 9, no. 1 (2013): Article 8. Hawhee, Debra. “Kenneth Burke’s Jungle Book.” Minnesota Review (2009): 171–82. ———. “Language as Sensuous Action: Sir Richard Paget, Kenneth Burke, and Gesture-Speech Theory.” The Quarterly Journal of Speech 92, no. 4 (2006): 331–54. ———. “Toward a Bestial Rhetoric.” Philosophy & Rhetoric 44, no. 1 (2011): 81–87. Jack, Jordynn, and L. Gregory Appelbaum. “This Is Your Brain on Rhetoric: Research Directions for Neurorhetorics.” [In English]. Rhetoric Society Quarterly 40, no. 5 (2010): 411–37. Johnson, Jenell. “Disability, Animals, and the Rhetorical Boundaries of Personhood.” JAC: A Journal of Rhetoric, Culture & Politics 32, no. 1/2 (2012): 372–82. Kennedy, George A., and Comparative Rhetoric. 1998. An Historical and CrossCultural Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press. King, Stephanie L., and Vincent M. Janik. “Bottlenose Dolphins Can Use Learned Vocal Labels to Address Each Other.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110, no. 32 (August 6, 2013): 13216–21. Latour, Bruno. 1996. Aramis, or, the Love of Technology [in English]. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Leakey, Richard, and Roger Lewin. The Sixth Extinction: Biodiversity and Its Survival. London Weidenfeld and Nicolson,1995. LeBaron, Susannah Bunny. “Difference without Hierarchy: Narrative Paradigms and Critical Animal Studies, a Meditation on Communication.” In Perspectives on Human-Animal Communication: Internatural Communication, edited by Emily Plec. 245–63. New York: Routledge, 2013. Lestel, Dominique. “The Biosemiotics and Phylogenesis of Culture.” In Readings in Zoosemiotics, edited by Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli and Aleksei Turovski. 377–410. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011. Milstein, T. “Greening Communication.” In Greening the Academy: Ecopedagogy Through the Liberal Arts, edited by S. D. Fassbinder, A. J. Nocella and R. Kahn. Sense Publishers, 2012.

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Ong, Walter J. 1981. Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ———. Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971. Parrish, Alex C. Adaptive Rhetoric: Evolution, Culture, and the Art of Persuasion. Routledge Studies in Rhetoric and Communication. New York: Routledge, 2013. Rickert, Thomas J., and Ambient Rhetoric. 2013. The Attunements of Rhetorical Being. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Rivas, Jesus, and Gordon M. Burghardt. 2002. Crotalomorphism: A Metaphor for Understanding Anthropomorphism by Omission. In The Cognitive Animal: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives on Animal Cognition, ed. Marc Bekoff, Colin Allen, and Gordon M. Burghardt, 9–18. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Seegert, Natasha. 2014. Play of Sniffication: Coyotes Sing in the Margins. Philosophy and Rhetoric 47 (2): 158–178. Shepard, Paul. 1996. The Others: How the Animals Made Us Human. Washington, DC: Island Press. Suedfeld, Peter, and Mark Schaller. 2002. Authoritarianism and the Holocaust: Some Cognitive and Affective Implications. In Understanding Genocide. New York: Oxford University Press. Westling, Louise Hutchings. The Logos of the Living World: Merleau-Ponty, Animals, and Language. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014. Wheeler, W. The Whole Creature: Complexity, Biosemiotics and the Evolution of Culture. Lawrence & Wishart, 2006. Whitehead, Hal, and Luke Rendell. 2015. The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Index

A Adaptive rhetoric, 9, 284, 315, 318 Animal behavior, 32, 36, 43, 44, 47, 48, 115, 143, 275, 276, 313, 339 Animal communication, 11–13, 22, 24, 25, 31, 32, 34, 37–40, 43, 47, 49, 52, 56–58, 70, 71, 104, 106, 130, 146, 277, 282, 289, 308, 329, 331, 333, 335 Animal oppression, 267 Animal rhetoric, 7–10, 14, 22–24, 32, 41, 44, 50, 54, 55, 57–59, 88, 193, 267, 280, 287, 290, 299, 313, 315, 318, 333–335, 337, 340 Animal rights, 289, 319 Animal studies (AS), 13, 22, 32, 51, 52, 56, 58, 143, 150, 164, 192, 276, 288, 301, 314, 317, 325, 328 Animal welfare, 13

Anthropocentrism, 14, 37, 193, 313, 327, 328, 330, 340

B Biocultural theory, 9, 21, 23, 31, 51, 54 Biology and rhetoric, 3, 146, 325, 326, 328, 337, 339 Biomimicry, 239, 249 Biosemiotics, 3, 26, 44, 48, 50, 57, 67, 168, 267, 275, 329

C Critical animal studies (CAS), 275, 288

D Deception, 2, 10, 68, 69, 74, 77–83, 86–88, 91, 193, 274 Disability rhetoric, 192

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. C. Parrish, The Sensory Modes of Animal Rhetorics, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76712-9

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INDEX

E Echolocation, 8, 12, 140, 193, 216, 217, 233–236, 238, 239, 241–253, 255, 256, 319 Electroreception, 12, 205, 210–218, 220–224, 319 Evolution of communication, 274 Evolution of language, 13 G Gustatory rhetoric, 134, 159, 161, 165, 179 H Hierarchy, 21, 37–40, 46, 54, 58, 59, 67, 75, 104, 175, 268–270, 272–274, 279, 284, 290, 300, 312, 327, 331–333, 340 History of rhetoric, 13, 15, 115, 175, 176, 180, 284, 337 Human exceptionalism, 4, 13, 25, 267, 275, 284, 288, 314, 326, 328, 340 M Manipulation, 2, 13, 67–69, 73, 74, 78, 83, 86–88, 104, 106, 180, 277, 286 Media theory, 3, 240 Mediation, 13, 26, 103, 146, 192, 290, 316–318 N New materialism, 58, 267, 283 Nonhuman communication, 43 O Object-oriented ontology (OOO), 284

Olfactory rhetoric, 11, 157, 160, 162, 165, 168, 180

P Persuasion, 8–11, 13, 19, 21, 23, 25, 27, 31–34, 41, 50–54, 56, 58, 59, 68, 69, 82, 84, 102, 104, 105, 109, 117, 125, 133, 135, 136, 140, 143, 146, 151, 159, 169, 175, 195, 198, 204, 233, 250, 267–270, 279, 284–286, 305, 325, 326, 329, 336, 338

R Rhetorical practice, 7, 21, 24, 27, 34, 40, 54, 59, 69, 74, 112, 180, 328, 339, 340 Rhetorical theory, 3, 14, 32, 33, 50, 52, 53, 58, 59, 67, 69, 80, 105, 108, 111, 113, 115, 130, 137, 143, 168, 193, 256, 284, 317, 325, 326, 331, 338, 339 Rhetoric and evolution, 3, 8, 21–23, 27, 54, 176, 331, 338 Rhetoric and psychology, 10 Rhetoric of science and technology, 8

S Semiotics, 32, 44, 48, 52, 57, 71, 78, 85, 116, 121 Sensation, 106, 116, 118, 127, 128, 133, 134, 138, 140, 149–151, 179, 202, 205, 246, 249, 253 Senses, the, 4, 11, 71, 78, 82, 88, 106, 114, 115, 127–129, 135, 139, 140, 146–148, 167–169, 173, 176, 177, 180, 189, 213, 216, 217, 222, 234, 273, 331 Sensorium, the, 55, 59, 115, 140 Symbolic communication, 236, 330

INDEX

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T Tactile/haptic rhetoric, 130–135 Thermoception, 11, 189, 197, 216

V Visual rhetoric, 102, 106, 111–115, 121, 190

U Umwelten, 3, 6, 47, 117, 129, 140, 237, 318

Z Zoosemiotics, 26, 32, 43, 44, 47, 48