Our Better Nature: Make Way for Critter Lit

According to French mathematician Émile Borel, If a monkey could bang on a typewriter forever (give or take a few hours), eventually it would replicate all of Shakespeare’s works. My issue with Borel’s probability theorem is that when a monkey is bored, it screeches and throws its poop around, which would surely gum-up the typewriter and bring the poor simian’s writing career to a screeching halt.

I’m sure a frustrated writer or two has pounded their keyboards, but we’re the only animal that purposefully pokes them. For now, at least. Because we’ve recently found that a number of species, including some primates and birds, can learn to read. Well, not like we can, but it’s still impressive.

While this ability is found in a minority of animals, all creatures great and small share information among their peers as well as with other species through auditory, visual, chemical, and other cues.

Depending where in the country you live, spring has either just sprung or soon will, heralded by a flurry of feathered migrants back from their winter digs and eager to nestle in with a mate for the breeding season. Birdsong, which by the way has been proven to makes us feel happier, is at its peak right now, whether it’s the “cheerily, cheer-up” of American robins, the chicken-like cackle of bald eagles, or the ethereal melody of hermit thrushes.

A hermit thrush singing (Uploaded to YouTube by Wild Bird and Nature Videos by McElroy Productions)

Exactly what they’re saying is another matter, as we’re still learning to decode birds’ complex language. In addition to males’ songs used to claim territory and attract mates, birds have calls to warn of danger, for parents and offspring to stay in contact – even for navigation help. We just learned that our native songbirds “chat” with other flocks they encounter during migration to give and get directions.

Whistling goes beyond the avian world, as it’s also how dolphins communicate. They “name” themselves through a particular sequence of whistles, and within a pod of up to 30 members, dolphins know every individual by their unique set of whistles. There are endless ways animals convey meaning through sound, from the warning slap of a beaver’s tail on water to a humpback whale’s song that can travel up to 10,000 miles.

Dolphins May Call Each Other by Name (Uploaded to YouTube by Newsy Weird Stuff)

Body language plays a role as well. A honey bee’s intricate “waggle dance” is basically an agricultural map in dance form that lays out the precise location, quality, and quantity of nectar-bearing flowers it saw on its foray.

A honey bee doing the waggle dance (Uploaded to YouTube by The BeeGroup @ VT)

Speaking of tail-wagging, dogs flag their happiness with a wag. With skunks it’s the reverse: When a skunk turns and shows you its tail, it’s time to turn tail and run to avoid getting sprayed. And though I’ve never encountered one, the squid-like cuttlefish signals for mates through rapid, flickering changes in its skin patterns and colors.

A cuttlefish changing colors (Uploaded to YouTube by jacektravel1)

Some critical messages can’t be heard or seen. When a relationship feels compatible, people talk about chemistry, which is apt in the poetic and literal senses. Like most animals, we give off trace amounts of chemicals called pheromones that signal things like sexual interest or lack thereof. And certain honey bee tasks, like the production of new queens and the drones (males) to mate with them, is pheromone-driven. Tip: Their alarm pheromone is banana-scented, so never eat one near a beehive. You’re welcome.

My kids introduced me to Wallace and Gromit, a series of hilarious claymation films about an inventor and his non-verbal dog, Gromit, who is often shown reading a newspaper. Alas, dogs don’t read, but some clearly understand the meaning of words, with one in particular able find and retrieve about a thousand different items that were out of sight, based on verbal command alone. And a study published in January 2026 found some highly intelligent dogs tested on par with 18-month-old toddlers in their capacity to learn new words simply through context.

Dog Understands 1022 Words! (Uploaded to YouTube by BBC Earth)

The claim that some animals can read is based partly on work done on bonobos In Iowa at the Ape Cognition and Conservation Initiative, where researchers taught bonobos to communicate with lexigrams, symbols that stand for everything from objects to abstract ideas. The bonobos understood meaning well enough to create new “words” from known lexigrams, like when one used symbols for water and gorilla together to describe a beaver.

Kanzi the bonobo using the lexigram system

In addition, a researcher at Boston’s Northeastern University taught a cockatoo to peck icons on a tablet to communicate. Like bonobos, it was able to combine symbols creatively to indicate new things. And biologists in New Zealand who taught pigeons to recognize written words found that the birds could tell actual words from similar nonsensical ones. Even chickens can be literate. In a Canadian documentary on chickens, trainers showed that the birds could be taught to recognize letters of the alphabet in a fairly short time.

Cockatoo Ellie reading practice (Uploaded to YouTube by Jen C)

Telling symbols apart may not sound impressive, but many ancient cultures like the Maya, Aztecs, Hittites and Minoans used pictorial writing to express ideas. Perhaps the best-known are the Egyptians, who used a picture-writing called hieroglyphs. Though not considered a language, hieroglyphs got the point across. Maybe it’s like texting with emojis, except you had to chisel them into stone. Probably cut down on regrets.

We know that reading is one of the keys to becoming a good writer. While it’s a long shot, perhaps Émile Borel’s hypothetical monkey will have a chance to write its own story after all, ushering in a new animal-authored writing genre. Move over, Chick Lit and Grit Lit – make way for “Critter Lit.”