THE Do our dogs have anything to say to the world? Many owners think so, as he indicates the “talking buttons” craze on TikTok and Instagram. Scientists, however, are less convinced. He dedicates himself to the question a long article on New York Times Camille Bromley.
Dogs that say things, thanks to “talking buttons”. Like Bunny, the talking dog
Bromley talks about his relationship with his Ellie, a German shepherd puppy so perfectly trained that she has lost her self-confidence. And also, explains Bromley, “its animality”. When she realized it, the journalist began to become curious about a viral phenomenon on social media: they are very popular on TikTok videos of dogs capable of expressing their desires by stepping on plastic buttons.
Each button, stepped on by the four-legged friend, emits a word: the dog learns the cause-effect connection and then how to use it in its own way. In some cases, with sensational results. Particularly famous among talking dogs is Bunny, 8.6 million followers on TikToka vocabulary of 105 buttons (a book about him came out in 2023, written by his “mom” Alexis Devine).
His videos are viral since the lockdown, e they seem like real human-animal conversations. Sometimes Bunny’s requests are simple: he asks for attention or a walk. Other times, however, they seem to veer towards the abstract and the disturbing, as in one case in which the dog seems to question its own reflection.
On social media the flow of videos of dogs (but also cats, pigs, horses and cows) saying things is endless. And, for every dog owner, the temptation is great: What if these buttons on the floor at home were enough to discover what’s inside the impenetrable mind of our animals?
The story of the speech therapist Christina Hunger and the dog Stella
Pioneer of “dog learning pedagogy through buttons”, speech therapist Christina Hunger: she adapted the methods she used to teach children to communicate to her dog Stella. OUTSIDE, WATER, PLAY were the first words Stella learned. Over time she even managed to put together two or three words: what a two and a half year old human being does. After a year of training, Stella said BED LATER and I WANT OUT NOW. One day, the end of daylight saving time delayed Stella’s mealtime. He asked for food and Hunger to wait. In protest, Stella went to her buttons and pressed LOVE YOU NO.
From the experience of Stella and Christina Hunger, other dog owners have begun experimenting with buttons. And, Bromley notes, the dogs who did it successfully had (and have) a few things in common. First, their owners spend a lot of time with them, watching them and pushing buttons with them. Secondly, the owners are often women and do not have children at home. Finally, dogs themselves have strong personalities. In short, there were things they wanted to communicate. In other words: in a certain privileged context, in which they are treated as family members, to be precise as children, dogs can communicate with our words.
Talking to dogs, monkeys, dolphins: is it possible?
The man tries to prove that it is possible to talk to animals at least since the Victorian era. At first, with naively anthropoformic exercises but then, from the 1960s, in an increasingly serious way. From the baby chimpanzee “Nim Chimpsky” (in honor of the semiologist Noam Chomsky) onwards, they multiplied new and ambitious experiments with primates, dolphins and parrots. Studies which, however, in retrospect, are considered negatively, and even immoral for the treatment reserved for animals.
Since 1980 it has been understood that primates, despite being our closest genetic relatives, they don’t understand humans as well as dogs (and cats), which evolved alongside humans. They were the first domesticated animals and most likely the first to hear us speak. When dogs hear human speech, their brains light up with interest. They look where we point. They recognize our facial expressions. They reflect our anxiety.
The maxi study on talking buttons
Hence the success potential of study on buttons initiated by Federico Rossano, associate professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego. It’s about the largest animal communication study ever conducted, with 10,000 dogs and cats learning to speak with buttons in nearly 50 countries around the world.
It started in 2020, when it was proposed to Rossano by the founder of FluentPetthe brand of buttons to make the pets on which Bunny “works” “fluent”. And it continues today. AND a study of citizen science based not on a sample of animals trained by researchers in the laboratory, but on thousands of animals leading their normal lives. The method is very serious and scrupulous, with cameras operating 24 hours a day, 7 days a week in some homes.
Dogs can produce two-word sentences non-randomly
Well, Rossano found that dogs, on average, recognize some common words and press some two-word phrases non-randomly, without simply imitating their owners’ presses. So they’re not just mindlessly pushing buttons.
It’s about extraordinary cognitive featswhich however are mainly based on the well-known mechanisms of associative learning, first discovered a century ago by Ivan Pavlov. Press a button; get a reward. That dogs produce original button combinations who have not been trained to press, to communicate something they otherwise could not say, it’s something else.
Rossano’s next research questions will concern multi-word sentences, the ability to talk about things that are not present and emotions. In a distant future, the scholar imagines testing episodic memory: does your dog remember the time you took him camping?
Genius dogs use more than 100 words – buttons. The normal ones 9
The most advanced investigations will be based on the best performing dogs in his study: the brilliant dogs, like Bunny. Most dogs, like most humans, are simply mediocre. Out of 10,000 dogs, Rossano estimates, around 65 use more than one hundred buttons. The average is nine.
Among ethologists, many are against button studies. Leader of the large group, Alexandra Horowitzdirector of a canine cognition laboratory at Barnard College, aka the scientific voice best known to the general public on the subject of dogs. «Dogs already do so much to fit into our lives. They have to ask us if they want to urinate. They socialize at our pace. They walk where we want, keeping them on a leash. Apparently, the interest in having dogs is due to the fact that they belong to another species. There’s something unknown about them, and that’s wonderful. Why are we inclined to force them to wear clothes and speak our language?». This is the meaning of his thought.
Rossano obviously disagrees. «It’s not that dogs lose their first language. Only, in addition, they have another way of communicating, and sometimes they choose it.” This is interesting, worth studying (maybe).
Why are we so interested in adding our language to theirs?
Perhaps, is Cromley’s conclusion, It’s our brain that needs the bond with dogs to be expressed in words to seem real. In support of the thesis, the studies of Juliane Kaminski, the comparative psychologist, discovered in dogs a muscle around the eyes that has the sole purpose of making touching “puppy faces”. If the production of oxytocin when a dog and a man look at each other applies to both species (and it is the same hormone that binds mothers to their children), “faces” have a meaning only for human beings: they make us want to take care of our furry ones.
Kaminski believes in other words that dogs have evolved into creatures we treat like children, and the buttons fuel this impulse. And he calls her “trap“: we have evolutionary created this niche for child-like dogs, so that they now fit perfectly into it. And we can no longer do without feeding it.
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