> Certainly they communicate; but they do not have access to our rich verbal symbols with which we can convey anything imaginable. I mean, this whale seems to

> Certainly they communicate; but they do not have access to our rich verbal symbols with which we can convey anything imaginable. I mean, this whale seems to be doing about the same thing I do with my cats. I don't really see how you can derive any directionality here about how 'rich' their communication is from that. It's likely cats are intrigued and also baffled by what we're 'saying' when we do this. That's not to say I think cats have as rich of communication as we do, just that we can't even manage to make much sense of other species' vocal communication, let alone mimic any meaning present in it, even when we are pretty sure it is actually simpler than ours. From that it seems way overly confident to state that all failure on our part to recognize depth is because of a lack of it.