Can Animals Tell Stories?

A personal experience with my brother's dog

I recently listened to an interview with the ever-illuminating David Deutsch on The Lunar Society podcast hosted by Dwarkesh Patel.  I did have some disagreements with Deutsch, including his claim (around the 31 minute mark) that “[animals] can’t tell a story.”

My counterexample:  

When I was in college, my brother got a dog that my sister named Nagra.  My favorite pets have been fish (even within a single fish species, there’s a surprising range of personality!), rather than cats or dogs, so I almost never interacted with Nagra. 

One day I was the only one in the house with Nagra.  Nagra started barking, so I figured she wanted to go out.  I went to the laundry room, opened the back door and she went through, but before I could close the door she turned around and came back in.  This happened a couple of times.  Did Nagra want to go out or not?  

Then Nagra went across the room and sat, panting, by her food bowl.  OK, maybe she didn’t want to go out after all.  I started to leave the laundry room but Nagra started barking and headed toward the back door.  Hunh!

I went to the back door again and opened it.  Instead of going through, Nagra went back to her food bowl, picked up one pellet and then went back through the door … and came right back in.  She went to her food bowl, still holding the pellet, then headed back through the door again.  She had to repeat this sequence a couple more times for me to figure it out:  she wanted me to bring her bowl outside.  I put her bowl outside, Nagra contentedly ran out the door and into the backyard, and I was finally able to shut the door.  

Nagra must have thought I was pretty stupid to take so long to figure out what she wanted!

When I told my brother what had happened, he said he’d never put Nagra’s food bowl outside.  (I asked him again recently while writing this up and he said that even after this episode, he never put her bowl outside.)

This isn’t an airtight dunk on Deutsch, but I firmly believe Nagra told me a (simple) story, one which required at least one creative inspiration (representing the bowl, which she couldn’t carry — at least not without dumping her food — by a single pellet).

Nearly forty years after my experience, aspects of the canine behavior I observed entered the scientific literature:  “Cross-species referential signalling events in domestic dogs (Canis familiaris)” (Hannah K. Worsley & Sean J. O’Hara, Animal Cognition April 30 2018; 21: 457–465). 

I haven’t seen the videos Worlsey & O’Hara processed, but Nagra’s story seems richer than anything described in their article.  Something for future systematic investigation? Feel free to add your own anecdote(s) in the comments!

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Selected further reading:

Popular reporting on the Worsley & O’Hara article:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/dog-referential-signaling-gestures

https://www.treehugger.com/signals-dogs-use-tell-us-what-they-want-4854636

• The authors [Worsley & O’Hara] note: “Our results also revealed that dogs call upon a portfolio of referential gestures to indicate a single reward,” which demonstrates, they say, that dogs can elaborate on their initial gesture when an appropriate response from the recipient has not been elicited.

"Gestural communication of the gorilla (Gorilla gorilla): repertoire, intentionality and possible origins" (Emilie Genty, Thomas Breuer, Catherine Hobaiter, Richard W. Byrnbe, Animal Cognition May 2009; 12(3): 527-46).

• “Even monkeys, with much less cortical control of manual action, have been found able to invent gestures and local cultural traditions have been described [...] … We can only conclude that gorillas fail to ‘see the point’ of inventing new gestures to refer to novel situations:  a limitation on imagination, rather than communication.”  [My emphasis in bold.]

So far, I’ve traced the term ‘referential signaling’ back to “Essay on Contemporary Issues in Ethology: Variation among Mammalian Alarm Call Systems and the Problem of Meaning in Animal Signals” (Joseph M. Macedonia & Christopher S. Evans, Ethology January-December 1993; 93(3): 177-197).