Of course, while we can’t speak any other animal’s language, animals of every species understand each other very well. Some also use our language to play tricks on us.

A friend has a rescued parrot who can copy almost any sound and then use his knowledge creatively. As my friend runs to answer the phone, there will be a knock at the back door, then, immediately, the front doorbell will ring. “Can you get that, dear?” her husband will call. Of course, the bird is responsible for the entire commotion, including her husband’s voice!

PETA once took in two abused parrots. The birds listened carefully to our conversations and, in the first afternoon, mastered eight different laughs and greetings.

Every day at about 3 p.m., nearby factory workers would walk by on their way home. Just before 3 p.m., the birds would move over to the window and wait. When their first victim walked by, two stories below, they would start their game.

“Hello!” one would call softly.
The victim would look around but see no one.
“Hello!” the bird would call a bit louder. Again, the man was baffled.
“Hello! Hello!” both birds would scream in unison.
Looking up, the man would see the parrots and inevitably say, “Oh, hello, there!” back.
The parrots immediately fell silent, one examining his foot, the other looking away.

“Hello! Hello!” the victim would say. The parrots refused to acknowledge his existence.

Giving up, the man would move on. The birds would abandon all sham activity and laugh at him—then resume their wait for the next sucker.

Most animals have throat and vocal chord structures that make human speech impossible. But that doesn’t prevent communication. Dolphins signal each other using high-speed clicks, octopuses and cuttlefish use fantastic waves of color and patterns, bees perform elaborate dances and rhinos use breathing patterns—all in order to “talk.”

Rats and dogs giggle in play, elephants rumble at frequencies too low for us to hear and prairie dogs, like monkeys, have different sounds for different people as well as for other natural enemies. At Northern Arizona University, rodents’ sounds are converted into sonograms and entered into a computer in order to correlate them to events. More than 50 words have been identified so far.

Animals not only joke and play, they can tell lies!
When a baby chimpanzee in a sign-language study broke a toy, the student watching quietly from behind a two-way mirror entered the room.
“Who broke the toy?” she asked the responsible infant.
“He did!” the baby signed back, pointing to his innocent friend!

Adapted from You Can Save the Animals by Ingrid E. Newkirk, available from PETAMall.com.