The Truth: Conversing with Orcas

“Even if a lion could speak, we could not understand him,” said Ludwig Wittgenstein, which Gilles Deleuze warned us about. In order to be able to talk to great apes, they were taught the American deaf-mute language (ASL) as prisoners - with success. The attempts of the American baboon researchers Shirley Strum and Barbara Smuts, who conversely learned the language of free-living baboons by joining their hordes for years, were even more successful.

Shirley Strum came to the conclusion (in: “Life among Baboons” 1990) that there is a constant attempt in the hordes to make social coexistence bearable. And because baboons have far fewer resources than we do (status symbols, clothing, tools, etc.), they are essentially social professionals and do it "really nicely" - not least because "unlike humans, none of them have the ability to control the most important basics of life. Each baboon had its own food, its own water, its own place in the shade and made sure that its basic life needs were covered. Aggression could be used as a means of pressure, but it represented a tied tiger. Grooming, Closeness to one another, social goodwill and cooperation were the only assets that could be used as a means of exchange and pressure against another baboon.”

Charles Darwin had postulated in 1838: “He who understands the baboon would contribute more to metaphysics than Locke.” Barbara Smuts wrote about “her” baboons (in: “Sex and Friendship in Baboons” 1985), whose horde she also joined for several years: “At the beginning of my research, the baboons and I did not agree in any way.” She first had to at least roughly understand baboon communication: “Only by getting to know each other could both baboons and humans do their work.”

However, Smuts was no longer interested in her doctoral supervisor's question: “Are baboons social creatures?”, but she asked herself: “Is this human being social?” When she was finally able to answer this somewhat positively with regard to “her” 123-strong horde of monkeys and her research progressed accordingly, she came to the conclusion that non-linguistic communication, in which bodies “closely exchange looks and greetings”, is superior to linguistic communication in terms of honesty and truth.

Today things are made easier - too easy: Frankfurt neurologist Felix Effenberger wanted to use AI to decode the “language of animals”. “A first chatbot for zebra finches in cages is already working quite well,” claimed Die Zeit 2025.

The neurobiologist Sebastian Markert, on the other hand, said in an interview in the same year: "These AI systems are actually zombies. They do things that we would expect from humans and therefore appear human. But they are not. To be honest, I would rather talk to orcas."

The US biologist John Lilly had already tried it with their smaller relatives, the dolphins: first he collected their acoustic utterances, then he hired an English teacher for a man named Peter, who just wanted to fuck her. Also a kind of communication, but she only ever satisfied him with her hand.

A US psychologist wanted to talk to an African gray parrot named Alex. And because it is particularly easy to teach this species of parrot words from human language, two language teachers under the direction of psychologist Irene Pepperberg taught him 200 words that he could say over 31 years and a vocabulary of around 500 words that he could understand.

In her report “Alex and I” (2009), she mentions, among other things, a word of refusal from Alex, who had first tried to “say” it in the usual way among parrots: screeching, biting or, “when he no longer felt like answering the questions of a language trainer, ignoring the person in question”, turning his back on him, grooming himself extensively... Most of the time he got away with it, his trainers understood him.

But then he unintentionally heard the word no, “and soon he was using that term to tell us, ‘No, I don’t like that!’ And no meant no.” In a dialogue with his language coach Kandia Morton it sounded like this: "K: Alex, what is that? [holding up a square piece of wood] - A: No! - K: Yes. What is that? - A: Four corners of wood [indistinct, but correct] - K: Four. Say it more beautifully! - A: No! - K: Yes! - A: Three. Paper [completely wrong] - K: Alex. Four, say four. - A: No. - K: Come on yes. – A: No.”

Nietzsche said: “All saying no belongs to the poor.” The American historian Jason Hribal published a text in 2003 entitled: “Animals are part of the working class”. This was followed in 2007: "Animals, forms of resistance and class. Writing the history of animals from below" and in 2010: "Fear of a planet of animals. The hidden history of animal rebellion".

Similar to Hribal, the Canadian sociologist Sarat Colling is also interested in animals in resistance. In 2018 she published a text entitled “Animal Agency, Resistance and Escape” and in 2020 the book “Animal Resistance in the Global Capitalist Era”.

This research, which is considered “animal studies”, is particularly widespread in the USA - and is associated with a whole series of magazines, documentaries and videos, although the anarchists were probably the first to, inspired by Kropotkin's work “Mutual Help in the Animal and Human World” (1900), focus on farmed and wild animals and their fates or collaborations.

The anarchist Jaroslav Hasek is also such a source of inspiration. In 1910 he announced: "I have changed politically. I am now with the animals," that was when he became editor-in-chief of the magazine World of Animals. As far as their vocalizations are concerned, Konrad Lorenz should also be mentioned, who spoke the language of jackdaws and geese. Helmut Höge