A short time ago, I could have walked past a prairie-dog colony and heard little more than barking and squeaking.

I would have thought I knew what I was looking at.

Prairie dogs.

Small animals that dig holes in the ground, stand upright beside their burrows, and bark when something frightens them.

What more is there to know?

I am beginning to discover how dangerous that question can be.

How many times have I looked at something God made, given it a name, placed it in a category—and stopped looking?

Psalm 150:2 — “Praise him for his mighty acts: praise him according to his excellent greatness.”

For decades, Dr. Con Slobodchikoff and his colleagues studied the communication of prairie dogs.

What they found should make us look again.

Prairie dogs are often considered pests because their burrowing can conflict with agricultural and land-use interests. They are also susceptible to plague. Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes plague, circulates among wild rodents and their fleas in parts of the western United States.

It would be very easy to see only that.

A pest.

An animal digging holes in a pasture.

But look closer.

Genesis 1:26 — “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth…”

Prairie dogs make alarm calls when danger approaches.

That by itself is not surprising. Many animals make sounds when frightened.

For many years, it was reasonable to suppose that such calls were essentially expressions of alarm:

Danger!

Run!

But Slobodchikoff began listening more carefully.

When a hawk appeared, the prairie dogs produced one kind of call.

When a coyote appeared, another.

A domestic dog produced another pattern.

A human produced still another.

Perhaps they were simply different degrees of fear.

That is a testable question.

So the sounds were recorded.

And when the recordings were analyzed, the differences were not merely something Slobodchikoff thought he heard.

They could be measured.

The acoustic structures differed in ways associated with what the prairie dogs were seeing.

Now we have something more than an impression.

We have an observation.

But there was another question.

Did those differences mean anything to the prairie dogs themselves?

There was a way to test that too.

Record the alarm calls.

Remove the predator.

Then play the calls back.

The prairie dogs responded differently depending upon which predator-associated call they heard.

Think about what just happened.

A prairie dog sees a predator.

It makes a sound.

Another prairie dog hears that sound and responds.

Now remove the predator.

Play only the recorded sound.

The other prairie dogs still respond according to the call they hear.

Something has passed from one animal to another.

Information.

And the experiments did not stop there.

Researchers found measurable acoustic differences associated not merely with broad predator categories but also with characteristics of what the animals were seeing.

That raises an extraordinary question.

What happens when a prairie dog sees something unfamiliar?

Something that does not fit neatly into its ordinary world?

Researchers presented prairie dogs with geometric shapes—a circle, a triangle, and a square—moving across the colony at the same height and speed.

Imagine seeing that experiment for the first time.

A geometric shape moves across a prairie-dog colony.

The animals look at it.

They call.

And when those calls are recorded and analyzed, measurable differences appear.

The results were not equally strong for every shape. Statistical analysis distinguished the triangle-associated calls from the circle-associated calls particularly well, while the distinction between the square and circle was less clear. In another experiment using two squares of different sizes, calls associated with the large and small squares could be distinguished with high accuracy.

I want to be careful here.

The experiment does not prove that a prairie dog has a word for “triangle.”

It does not prove that prairie dogs possess language in the human sense.

It does not tell us what is happening inside the mind of a prairie dog.

So what did the prairie dog just do?

I don’t know.

And that may be the most interesting answer of all.

Because there are things we do know.

There was an observable stimulus.

There was a recorded vocalization.

There were measurable acoustic differences.

There were repeatable behavioral responses.

And playback experiments showed that predator-associated calls could produce different responses even when the predator itself was no longer present.

Those are observations.

What we call them afterward—language, proto-language, communication, information encoding, or something else—is partly a matter of definition and interpretation.

But changing the name does not change what was observed.

That is becoming increasingly important to me.

If something can be observed, I want to observe it.

If it can be measured, I want to measure it.

If an experiment can be repeated, I want to repeat it.

And when the evidence does not justify a conclusion, I want to be willing to say:

I don’t know.

But I don’t want an assumption about what an animal cannot do to prevent me from seeing what it actually does.

There is wonder in that.

A short time ago, I might have heard a prairie dog bark and thought nothing more about it.

Now I wonder.

What information passed between those animals?

What does one prairie dog know about what another prairie dog has seen?

How much of the living world have I dismissed because I thought I already understood it?

How many times have I looked without really seeing?

I am finding myself asking the same kinds of questions as I look at slime mold and other living things.

What else have I overlooked?

What abilities has God placed within His creatures that I have simply assumed were not there?

I intend to keep looking.

Exodus 20:9 — “Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work.”

There is something wonderful about being able to say, “I don’t know,” and then doing the work to find out.

God has opened my eyes to things I once did not see.

I find myself looking at the living world differently now—not because I have all the answers, but because I am beginning to understand how many questions I never thought to ask.

And perhaps the same can be true for you.

There is something far greater than prairie dogs, microbes, plants, slime molds, or any of the other wonders of creation.

Seek the Lord while He may be found.

Plead with Christ for mercy. Ask, and seek with an honest heart, for He knows you better than you know yourself.

We do not know the span of our days.

We are born, we live, and we die. Scripture tells us that because of sin there is judgment.

But it does not have to end there.

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son…”

And perhaps, once our eyes begin to open, we will look again at something we have seen a thousand times and realize:

I never really saw it before.

And ask:

What Hath God Wrought?

Sources

Acoustical Society of America — research presentation on prairie-dog communication

Animal Cognition — research on information encoded in Gunnison’s prairie-dog alarm calls

Applied Animal Behaviour Science — playback experiments examining prairie-dog responses to predator-associated calls

WellBeing International Studies Repository — research examining acoustic structures and responses to geometric stimuli

MIT Press — Cognition and Communication in Prairie Dogs

Northern Arizona University — Slobodchikoff research materials

Radiolab — “Wild Talk”

Animal Behaviour — research on prairie-dog alarm communication