I don’t go looking for bizarre claims about animal language. They come to me. And I’m noticing a definite pattern for these articles.
Part 1: Make some overstated or outrageous claim about animal language.
The claim: Cows have accents.
Cows have regional accents, a group of British farmers claims, and phonetics experts say the idea is not as far-fetched as it sounds.
The phonetic expert explains:
“You find distinct chirping accents in the same species around the country. This could also be true of cows,” Wells said on the group’s Web site.
Birds I can understand. There is a clear advantage in mimicry, and there’s abundant evidence that this actually happens. (For example, check out this amazing YouTube video of the lyrebird.)
But cows?
Part 2: Have someone explain why this is happening, without verifying that the phenomenon is for real.
“I spend a lot of time with my Friesians and they definitely ‘moo’ with a Somerset drawl,” he said, referring to the breed of dairy cow he owns.
He’s picked it down to the accent. And ‘ow is this ‘appening?
“I think it works the same as with dogs – the closer a farmer’s bond is with his animals, the easier it is for them to pick up his accent.”
Not just from each other. From the farmer.
Hey, if you think it’s impossible for a cow to pick up its owner’s accent, check this list of what cows say in other languages. Totally different there! Proof positive! It’s not just perception — the cows actually sound different because of the local lingo.
The problem with this explanation is that we don’t know if the cow accent thing is really happening, and therefore there’s nothing to explain yet. First, you get the farmers to hear tapes of cows and see if they can identify the dialect. I’m willing to bet that they couldn’t do it better than random chance. Or get the moos on a spectrograph and see if the computer can detect any similarities. And if that checks out, then it’s explanation time. Not until.
Part 3: Back away from all the claims at the very end of the article.
He added that more scientific research was needed to prove what was just an anecdotal theory at this stage.
But it’s too late for that. The news people have already gone nuts, and now I’ll get people coming up to me, one every couple of weeks for the next few years, telling me about cow accents. Nova Magazine will run articles about our spirit siblings the cows, and how to communicate with them. (Although if it stops people eating them, I won’t mind so much.)
If this is for real, I’d be pretty interested. But what’s more likely — that cows are picking up accents from humans and other cows, or that farmers are projecting their accents onto the cows? Because if I’ve noticed one thing about language and animals, it’s that people project like crazy. We think apes and birds understand us. We think computers understand us. We think the sky understands us. So why not cows?
Bring on the double-blind test, and then we’ll have something to talk about. And then it’ll be interesting. Really.
25 August 2006 at 12:46 am
I saw that article about the cows! There was something about it in yesterday’s West Australian I think. Obviously the guy who talks to his Somerset cows hasn’t got a lot else to do.
Was it this blog that I read something about glass as a liquid and how someone had proved it wasn’t? Or somewhere else?
25 August 2006 at 1:03 am
Aha! It was your blog with the stuff about glass – “Make haste to unknow” I think.
I was reading a book last night, an actual physical one that was written after 2003 with actual print saying that glass is an extremely viscuous liquid. Stuff about old cathedral windows etc with glass thick down the bottom. I remember getting an answer from Straight Dope about it at one point which disproved all of that, saying that it was more likely glass in old windows is thicker down the bottom because they made irregular glass in those days anyway (not perfectly flat) and it was better, structurally, to put the thick end at the bottom. Therefore it’s not a liquid.
But! I read in a book that it is.
All the studies we have to read in Psych are only relevant if they’re in print and best off if they’re peer-reviewed. Should I believe the book (in print, and read by a heck of a lot of people) or the email and blog?
If you’re interested, the book is “A Short History of Nearly Everything” by Bill Bryson, who also wrote “Down Under”, “Lost Continent”, “Notes from a Small Island” and others.
Who do I trust more?
26 August 2006 at 3:29 am
Daniel says: Nova Magazine will run articles about our spirit siblings the cows, and how to communicate with them. (Although if it stops people eating them, I won’t mind so much.)
Are you a vegetarian? 🙂
26 August 2006 at 6:13 am
faerie: Yes.
ash: Go for the theory that best fits the data.
In this case, the ‘glass as liquid’ theory explains why we find thick glass at the bottom of old windows, but it does a terrible job of explaining why sometimes we find that the glass is thicker at the top.
The other theory, the ‘they just installed it that way’ theory, neatly explains both points of data.
26 August 2006 at 3:36 pm
bengali cows say ‘hamba’ haha