 Do Animals Use Codes and Ciphers? |
| Do Animals Use Codes and Ciphers? |
Have you ever heard of a coyote howling at the moon? Or a dog barking? Maybe about the whistling of dolphins? All these sounds are codes of communication.
How? Do you notice how dogs use a series of barks? Sometimes they do one short yelp or bark. Dolphins can do one long whistle or one short choppy whistle. Yes, these are codes because they understand what they are saying, but we do not understand what they are really saying.
You could do an experiment yourself with a pet at home. Before, read about verbal codes and ciphers. Well, languages (other countries and ours) are verbal codes and ciphers. We don’t understand what they are saying. We also don’t understand why our pets are saying when they bark, meow, growl, etc. These sounds are part of their own language and also their own code.
To do the experiment, follow these instructions.
Materials 1. notebook 2. dog or cat 3. pencil or pen
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Procedure First, plan ahead for a day that you are not going to school. You need to be staying at home all day. Every two hours go and see what your dog or cat is doing. Stay for 15 minutes each time. If your pet makes a sound, record what kind of sound it was. At the end of the day, look at the way your pet acted at each of these different times. Notice any patterns? |
Results Usually your pet will do these things at almost exactly the same time every day. For example: Say that at 2:30 your dog was sleeping. Well, at 2:30 every day your pet most likely does the same thing.
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