Every day, a personality invites herself into the world of Élodie Suigo. Today, the British biologist, filmmaker and writer, Tom Mustill. He has just published with Albin Michel: “How to speak whale. The incredible future of animal communication”.
Tom Mustill is a biologist, filmmaker and writer. He has directed documentaries, often in collaboration with Greta Thunberg and David Attenborough, which have won him dozens of international awards. His job is to meet scientists, language specialists to try to unravel the mystery of interspecies communication. The starting point is an unlikely encounter with a humpback whale. One day when he was kayaking with a friend, gone whale watching, it almost cost them their lives. They almost got run over, they almost died, but she avoided them, left them alone. This scene was filmed and broadcast around the world changing his life and his outlook on the latter. Since that day, he has undertaken to come into contact with the whales. He has just published with Albin Michel: How to speak whale. The incredible future of animal communication.
franceinfo: For you, is this connection the future?
Tom Mustill: I think we are coming to a new age where we have the curiosity to investigate interspecies communication with technologies that will allow us to find patterns, transcend our human limitations, and be able to communicate with animals.
In cetaceans, this is what we discover in this work which is really very rich, sounds play a fundamental role. It is thanks to them that they orient themselves in the depths. They communicate like this and yet they have no visible ears. Is that what sets us apart?
“Animal sounds can travel 700 kilometers. No one can see 700 kilometers away.”
Tom Mustillat franceinfo
For air creatures like us who look based on vision, the way we describe the world translates to do you know what I mean? Well, dolphins, cetaceans can interpret the echoes of the sounds they make to “truly see” the echo, to see the landscape around them.
You have been searching for years to understand animal language. We talk about animal language, but obviously it’s rejected by scientists again because there are no spoken words. This is why Roger Payne speaks of “talking whale”. What is “talking whale”?
Scientists and linguists who rejected the idea that animals could have a language because they had no words, I would answer them: but as you know? From primary studies already done, we know that dolphins have unique sounds. They have signatures, just like an individual. Roger Payne, he discovered that more than 50 years ago, was able to collect the songs because they are arranged like human songs. There’s no other word in our language but “chant” or “song” to describe it. And when he plays them, you fall in love with them enough to want to know more about who these animals are and protect them.
It also calls a lot of things into question, especially Descartes, who has always proved to us that man acts as something that thinks, unlike animals. And there, everything is in question.
Yes. And you can understand why Descartes thought that at the time because he was in the mind and in the ears of a man. He couldn’t hear the animal conversations. René Descartes lived at a time when it was believed that man was the center of the universe and it was necessary to justify our actions towards other animals by saying that we could do things to them because they were not like us. We are rational beings, we reason and the proof of our reason is that we speak to each other, this indicates that we are above, separate from the animal world.
It’s a challenge to think that maybe animals are rational. It’s a challenge to think that maybe they’re talking. I think we are going to go through a period of philosophical questioning. We will have to re-examine our place in the world and that is what is exciting. Because when it was discovered that the Earth was not the center of the universe, that the sun did not revolve around the Earth, a lot of people were angry. That’s not what they were told to believe, but today does it make you angry to find out that the sun doesn’t revolve around the earth and the earth isn’t the center of the world ? No. It allows us to understand our place in the world.
You are a dad today. Do you have the feeling that the more we will dig into this link with whales, the more we will dig into the language of whales, therefore whale speaking, and the more we will pay attention to these species which are on the verge of extinction? Do you believe it?
“When we learn that whales can sing, we want to learn more because we see the song we recognize in ourselves and it gives us the opportunity to extend our empathy towards other species. “
Tom Mustillat franceinfo
The reason I do it is because I have seen human beings. They don’t work because of logic or based on information. We are emotionally connected and we see things that we recognize as the other. We want to be with them. It works with other human beings, but it also works with animals.