Host: Animals communicate with each other in all kinds of ways, but they also communicate with us. So what are they saying? And could we learn to listen better? Naturalist and journalist Amelia Thomas is the author of What Sheep Think About the Weather: How to Listen to What Animals Are Trying to Say. She joins us in our studios. How are you doing?

Amelia Thomas: I'm good. Thank you. How are you?

Host: I'm doing well. Great to have you in our studios. Could you start by giving us a little background on how you ended up on a farm in Nova Scotia, farming in your blood?

Amelia Thomas: My family, for generations, like hundreds of years, were farmers. And then my dad was the first one who said, "I don't want to live on a farm. I want to live in the suburbs." So I sort of grew up this suburban child who desperately wanted to be a farmer. And so I sort of brought home as many animals as I could from everywhere that I found them. My poor parents, you know, pigeons that I found or, you know, stray cats and rabbits and guinea pigs, anything I was sort of allowed to bring in. And then and I'm a journalist. So we worked sort of all over the world. I've worked in lots of different places. And finally a couple of years ago, I managed to settle down and buy a farm. So it was a bit dilapidated. But yeah, now we have our.

Host: Own and that farm is in.

Amelia Thomas: It's in Nova Scotia.

Host: Why Nova Scotia?

Amelia Thomas: Nova Scotia really reminds me of the kind of farming communities that my grandparents lived in, you know, in Wales in the 1970s. And 80s reminds me of that. It's still very old fashioned, strong community.

Host: All right. One of the things that you talk about in those early chapters is about those animals that you had mentioned, sort of on the farm, the dog, the piglets, and sort of how they're trying to communicate to you. When did you first notice that they were trying to talk to you?

Amelia Thomas: So I think anyone who's had a pet knows these moments where you're like, what are you trying to say, you know, or you have moments where you really do know what your animal is trying to say. I had a moment the day we moved into the farm. Everything went wrong. The piglets were escaping, the horses were screaming at each other. There was a hummingbird like dive bombing me when I was sitting on our front doorstep. And I thought, okay, you know, this is a question that's bothered me for a long time. I'm going to spend a year, first year on the farm, and I'm going to really dig into what these animals are all trying to say to me that I might not be noticing.

Host: Now, noticing that they're trying to tell you something is one thing, but how did you actually teach yourself to understand what they were saying?

Amelia Thomas: So the first thing that I thought would be useful, because it's such a big subject was sort of to break it up. So I was like, okay, there are scientists who are working on, on that topic. There are animal trainers in all different spheres. And then there's sort of the people who fall into a bit more of an intuitive category, like trackers and then animal communicators. So there's sort of that world as well. So I thought, I'm going to go from science to animal communication at the other end of the spectrum and talk to as many people as I can, and listen to animals themselves in as many different ways as I can, and sort of just and then practice things on my own little sort of experimental animals at home.

Host: All right. Well, you mentioned you talked to a number of artists. I want to dig into some of the things that you learned from them. I'm going to start with one that I didn't think would be in the realm of animals that you would kind of consider, but cockroaches and fruit flies, something that you mentioned quite early, not exactly on many people's favourite lists, but what did you learn about them?

Amelia Thomas: It's actually the stuff that I learned was pretty mind blowing. I took took to people who are working with these animals that, you know, these tiny little creatures that we think of as identical and learnt that actually they have individuality. So I talked to a neuroscientist from Oxford University who said that even if you clone fruit flies, they act differently to each other, and you would expect that their behaviour would be identical, right? Because they seem to be identical. But their brain wiring means that they act slightly differently from each other. So they have individuality. They have many things in common with us, which I didn't realize.

Host: Like what?

Amelia Thomas: Like they have memories. You they remember bad things, good things and act accordingly. They get dopamine rushes. So like we do, you know, when we're feeling something good, they dislike bitter tastes like sweet things. Some prefer things to others. So some will fly like two ascent, whereas others will fly away. Some will choose to sort of always go left if they're put in a maze and some will go right and that sort of over, you can put them in different situations and they'll still act according to their kind of rudimentary personalities and cockroaches. Yeah. This cockroach researcher that I spoke to in Japan said the same thing about cockroaches. So that was really stunning, was even these tiny creatures have things in common with us.

Host: Let's go to Montreal, because that's where you learned about some chimpanzees that were at a sanctuary there. What did they teach you?

Amelia Thomas: That's right. So the there were a series of experiments in the 1960s and 70s, where researchers tried to find out. And those have since shifted. We don't really do that anymore. But they were trying to find out if you could teach animals a human language. So they took a group of chimps from babyhood and taught them American Sign Language, and they just wanted to know, can a chimp not sort of just ape like a word, but can they can they use those words, you know, in situations, in string them together? And that's what they found that they actually could. And they can. Not only that, but probably the most amazing thing I found out about the chimps is that they can make up words in American Sign Language for things they don't have a word for.

Host: Like what?

Amelia Thomas: Like. So like Fanta would be like Coke. That is orange. Or Thanksgiving turkey, they called it. One of the chimps called it bird meat because they didn't have a word for turkey. So they've since stopped doing that because the scientists sort of, as they realize how complex and involved and emotional the chimps inner worlds were, through this understanding of language, they decided to stop with those experiments. So those chimps are now retired in a sanctuary just outside of Montreal. And I went to meet them, saw this firsthand. They even signed to themselves when they're reading as if they're like talking out loud.

Host: Oh, very interesting. It's amazing. Yeah. Let's talk about your piglets. This is at your farm in Nova Scotia. What did you learn from them?

Amelia Thomas: So these two little piglets, they're pet piglets. They came from the same litter of pigs. And so again, you know, pigs are another animal that people sort of think of as not maybe having as much individuality as our dogs and cats, not having as much to say. They're very different personalities. I spent quite a long time hanging out with them, trying to kind of construct a Pictionary. Of their, of their sounds. So, you know, the little, little kind of grunts and squeaks and weeps and all the weird little noises that they make and what they meant. And I kind of came to the conclusion that pigs have pretty complicated inner lives too. So yeah, they were really interesting to watch.

Host: How are the pigs doing now?

Amelia Thomas: They are doing great. They are. Yeah. They're, you know, one's very bossy to her sister. They love lying in the sunshine. They love like paddling in the pool in the summer. They're fantastic animals.

Host: Okay. Yeah. Let's change tunes a little bit. Let's go into the water because you did a visit to an aquarium in New England. Talk to us about the octopus. What did you learn about them?

Amelia Thomas: So I went to visit a giant Pacific octopus whose name was Sedna. You know, we are hundreds of millions of years apart in terms of evolutionary history from an octopus. The last time we inhabited the same body was a flatworm. So that's a very long time ago. So I thought, you know, can we communicate or listen to an animal that has nothing in common with us at all? And an octopus rescuer had told me, yes, you can. If you lock eyes with an octopus. It's really profound. So I spent some time with Sedna and yeah, found these things out that I was clumsy and human and humans liked to touch. And so I sort of went in to touch her and she was like, absolutely not. So it was really interesting that you can have this bond and this feeling of like deep communication without words, without any. We don't share the same limbs. We don't look the same. We don't experience the world the same. And yet you can experience the world together in a moment.

Host: Quite beautiful. Let's talk about animal communicators that you had mentioned. What exactly do animal communicators do?

Amelia Thomas: So animal communicators, it's an interesting subject, a really big subject, and I knew nothing about it except for this idea of psychics.

Host: Right. I imagine you're quite sceptical of them as well.

Amelia Thomas: Yes, I was what I found out is that, well, one of the animal communicators explained to me that, you know how like if you enter a room or somebody comes in, let's say someone comes in from work and before you've spoken to them, you kind of just have a feeling of.

Host: How their day was.

Amelia Thomas: Yeah. Whether they're in a good mood, a bad mood. And we sometimes have that with our pets too. I think we can tell without them doing anything that they need to go out or they're hungry. So they said it's like honing in on that, like really like working on that kind of sensory perception. So it was really interesting. It was not something I'd ever experienced before. Definitely a lot less skeptical now, you know, and I kind of came to it with a journalistic sort of open mind, trying to be really open minded about it. And yeah, you know, I think there's some interesting crossovers with science too. So I thought that was very interesting that they're actually not at the far ends of the spectrum that I assumed they would be when I started the book.

Host: Talk to us about why it's important for us to listen to animals and what we lose when we don't. And there was this line in your book that you say, you know, animals are biology, but they also have biography. And I think that will stick with me in terms of, you know, looking at individual animals as an individual, but what do we lose and what do we gain?

Amelia Thomas: Yeah. So the naturalist Jonathan Balcombe said that that, you know, they don't just have biology, they also have biographies. Well, you know, we tend to often commodify animals in today's society. You know, with factory farming, we often don't really have a relationship to many animals except for our pets in our house. So if you listen better to the natural world, there's a there's a sounds cape ecologist called Bernie Krause who says, you can hear extinction better often than you can see it. So listening to the natural world can give us clues as to the health of an environment. Ecosystem.

Amelia Thomas: Obviously, there are also at home. There are benefits for our pets and for us in listening, you know, our health goes up. You know, if we have good relationships with our pets, they also benefit too. And I think that listening better to the natural world and to everything around us makes us, first of all, feel less disconnected. You know, we are part of nature. We're not it's not we're not this Descartes sort of Cartesian idea of us and them anymore. We are part. We're all us and we're all in this together. So, you know, in terms of the environment, ecologically benefits for farmed animals, listening benefits everybody.

Host: As we were talking right before this interview, I'd mentioned, you know, I have a dog and I have a cat. And lots of our viewers who are watching and listening right now have pets, and they probably are trying to figure out how can they better communicate and better listen to their pets. Any words of advice?

Amelia Thomas: I think there's two things that you can do, and one is just noticing like spending time with your pets, not asking them to do anything. You know, with our dogs, we're often telling them to do this or that, just noticing the little things because often like a dog will look at something before it gives you a more overt signal of what it wants. So, you know, that's one thing is noticing. And I think also trying to see things from their kind of world view, their perspective, like dogs see sort of see the world first. So if you can kind of try and put yourself in their paws a little bit, obviously we can't completely because we aren't a dog or a cat, but we can try and kind of come towards them a little bit more. For example, like with cats, cats like to, you know, do that kind of slow blink to say that they trust you.

Host: When my cat blinks, I know I'm like, this is a beautiful moment we are sharing right now. Yes.

Amelia Thomas: Right. So that's this lovely communication that's very, you know, that people in our busy lives and we're in a rush might not pause long enough just to notice these little things and these moments where your pet is actually sort of coming towards you and trying to tell you something that you might miss if you're in a hurry.

Host: Amelia, this was fantastic. Thank you so much. I think this will inspire a number of pet owners and animal lovers to take a moment and pause and listen.

Amelia Thomas: Thank you very much for having me.