Published on Gizmodo, May 25, 2020:
Humans and other animals are quite alike—we all just speak different languages. For humans, it’s about the spoken word. With animals, the language may have nothing to do with the auditory sense. It could be gorgeous, like Caribbean reef squid that communicate through color patterns. Other times it’s tactile, like the way that slugs leave a slime trail with different chemicals in it to communicate something.
The latter is the subject of Eva Meijer’s exhaustively researched book, Animal Languages, about how nonhuman animals communicate and just how much humans misunderstand them. Meijer’s book seeks to undo misconceptions that animals are lesser than their human counterparts, and in doing so she seeks a new world where animals and humans are living harmoniously.
Meijer, who was born in Hoorn, about 45 kilometers north of Amsterdam, and now lives just outside of the city with her two dogs Olli and Doris, caught up with Gizmodo to talk about her book, which has been translated from Dutch into 17 other (human) languages. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Read the interview on Gizmodo: https://gizmodo.com/how-animals-communicate-1843561520
