Why Animals Talk

Can we understand what our pets are saying? Most people would say: Yes, we can. We know when our dog wants to play and when our cat is hungry, and we can ask them to stop scratching the furniture. But what about other animals? What about lions, giraffes, fish? The radical premise of How Animals Talk is that all animal communication is intelligible.In this fascinating and pioneering book, Cambridge zoologist and world-leading expert in animal communication, Arik Kershenbaum, argues that rather than looking at the sounds that animals make and then trying to translate them into human language, we need to understand where their behaviour comes from in evolutionary terms. By looking at animal communication from their point of view, we can understand what they are saying.Combining Kershenbaum's own observations of animals in their natural environments around the world (from wolves to hyraxes, dolphins to chimps) with explanations from the latest science (including his own research), what we see is that actually many of their weird and confusing signals are logical, consistent and not that different from our own. By the end of the book, we get a wonderfully full picture of how communication works - in animals and in humans.