Playing Scrabble with Turtles

Rosemary Lombard has maintained a private turtle lab for nearly half a century, first in Bloomington Indiana, then in Chicago, then Milwaukee, later in the Bay Area, and now in Hillsboro, Oregon. To my knowledge, only she and I have ever played Scrabble with a turtle—in my case, an Eastern box turtle named Diode.

I've encountered many skeptics who have severe reservations about this claim. I've also met many more who are more than just skeptical; they've rejected these claims from the get-go. These critics commit the logical fallacy of assuming without argument that my empirical statements about turtles can't possibly be true. I count only one scientist and inventor, John Dick, formerly of the Jet Propulsion Lab, who has both seen the evidence and been convinced of the probability that Rosemary's turtles have humanoid abilities.

Scrabble-playing isn't the only skill her turtles exhibit. With her aid, they, like Asian elephants with their mahouts, can draw pictures of themselves, then bow before the camera; they can search a dictionary; they can spell their names on a computer; and above all, they can "read-write," using a large homemade word-board to which they guide Rose and nose out the words, letters, and phrases to tell her whatever is on their minds. And I have exchanged a large tranche of emails with them.

Evidence of these skills is shown on my recent 6-minute YouTube documentary entitled "Rosemary's Turtle Draws" as well in the longer doc, "Rosemary's Turtles."

This will be a controversial book. As a work that shows that turtles are the most competent animals in the use of human language (as far as we know), it will be attacked by many experts in the field of animal intelligence. But the readership will include pet owners, zoo personnel, and the general reading public. Those who have pet turtles will be especially interested. 

Armed with a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, I taught comparative religion at Wichita State University until taking very early retirement from my tenured position to become an independent writer. I've published nine novels and counting, as well as a pair of nonfiction books and a passel of articles in my academic specialties.
 
As for the book, it contains the following:

 
I. The story of Ms. Lombard and her mentorship of turtles;

II. A short history of relevant sciences (biology, geology, cladistics, etc.), from Aristotle to the pre-Darwinians to Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace, his co-discoverer of evolution, to Gregor Mendel, Ernst Mayr, to Donald Griffin and Frans de Waal.

III. My email correspondence with the turtles (the longest part of the book);

IV. An Argument for Existence of Turtle Talk; and  

V. A coda on the philosopher Vinciane Desprete, a Belgian woman with a bellicose mind who wrote What Would Animals Say if We Asked the Right Questions?