#sd tips

There’s a huge difference between what we perceive animals to sound like and what they actually sound like. Most of us know this by now (I think the red-tailed hawk vs. bald eagle meme has been circulating for a while) but this gets a bit more subtle too.

Most eagles in film are actually using recordings from Red-tailed Hawks. Bald eagles make a cackling sound, and you can hear this notably in Brother Bear (2002).

Film horses whinny all the time. Real horses express most mild emotions with their bodies, and louder noises are only reserved for the most excited emotions. You know who whinnies almost as often as most horses in film? Stallions when they’re losing their minds about mares.

Humans are verbal creatures, so we tend to communicate with sound where animals communicate with their bodies. Most animals in media are way more vocal than they actually would be in real life.

Media often relies on restricted auditory shorthand. Growl expresses anger. High-pitched noises convey fear or excitement. Purring indicates contentment (in real life, it doesn’t always). But there are subtler noises like chuffing, grunting, and groaning that we don’t hear in fiction very often.

I find this leaves non-visual media lacking in animal body language, when there isn’t a soundtrack that needs to communicate to the audience. Consider the ways in which many animals communicate:

Spinal/muscle tension

Degree of staring or averted eye contact

Body position

Orientation (facing toward vs. away, to the side, etc.)

Movement of tails or limbs

Pheromone signals

I think we have that idea by now - there are memes circulating, and I’m glad they are. But it goes deeper than that, and it’s important to understand how much popular understanding of animals is filtered through our human lens.

Alpha animals don’t generally exist, at least not in the way we usually picture in popular culture. Yes, even wolves.

It’s important to understand that hierarchy, the kind that we name, is an interpretation of our observation. It’s often couched in the bias of the culture (in this case, western patriarchal) of the recorded observers.

Hierarchy does exist in some social animals, but it’s often much looser than a textbook interpretation.

Often, it’s more descriptive to call a breeding pair simply a “breeding pair” rather than a “dominant pair.” The term dominant comes with its own set of implications that don’t often fit its scientific definition.

In many social species, intragroup conflict tends to grow out of scarcity and inappropriate conditions. Most of the early research into wolf social behavior was done with inappropriately-housed wolves in captivity, with unrelated individuals.

We tend to use labels like ‘alpha’ and ‘dominant’ to convey permanent traits rather than impermanent states. A breeding stallion may be part of a herd, but that may not and often does not last until the end of his life.

Most animals seek to avoid conflict at all costs. It’s life-threatening, takes a lot of bodily resources, and is always risky. In ideal environments, most territorial disputes are resolved with minor injuries at worst. We’re not skilled in observing subtle body language, so we often miss animal conflicts with subtle resolutions.

When you’re creating media, you’re always filtering narrative through your own lens. That’s great - essential, even! But this tends to get tangled up when we try to overlap “realism” in behaviors of non-human species.