My dog used to get really worked up and bite me when she wanted something, so I started teaching to answer my questions. So, when she wants something, she sits in front of me and I start asking: What do you want? Food? <pause> Water? <pause> Poop? When I reach the word, she bumps on me with the front paws.
Words are a human construct - language. Dogs don't naturally have words or language - there's no bark that conveys a static meaning. They do correlate noises, like whines, barks, growls, with things they have experience with, and are clever enough to string complex and abstract concepts together. That level of reasoning and communication is not language, however.
What the buttons demonstrate is that dogs are capable of learning and using language. Complex concepts, like fire being hot and dangerous, yet needed to keep the house warm, so start the fire before the walk (a recent Bunny episode.)
This goes beyond Cesar Milan being the dog whisperer and into something novel. For the first time, we have dogs and other animals demonstrating that they can learn words and rules of grammar, connecting sequences of words together to form a specific meaning. That means a dog can say "go walk later" "ouch paw" and so forth, and bring about some sort of reaction from their human that would have been impossible without buttons. In the study they've been doing, dogs have demonstrated the capacity for humor, combining the semantics of different words to create new words, assigning nicknames, and stringing together upwards of 5 words to express a coherent idea.
This should cause us all to stop and question whether our perception of animals needs changing. To all appearances, any mammal, or animal with functionality comparable to a neocortex, is capable of using language. Cows, pigs, horses, dogs, cats, rabbits, and all sorts of other animals have learned to use these button systems. Birds and primates have long been known to use sign language, able to understand spoken words and respond with fairly intelligent and complex language of their own. Bears, lions, dolphins, orcas, and whales are likely to be among the most intelligent and linguistically facile creatures aside from humans.
Perhaps the neural structure imposed by learning language results in a significant shift in capacity. When you consider feral humans, and the extreme difficulties they have with language acquisition, and then think on Helen Keller's description of language and communication resulting in her becoming conscious and aware, maybe teaching language to these animals is inducing a real change in consciousness, providing them the foundations of a life and experience with which we can directly empathize.
Courts recently ruled against elephants being people - well, we should take a hard look at what "people" really means. Mysticism and religious traditions aren't sufficient in a world inhabited by science. Humans aren't people "because God said so" or "the holy book says all other animals are lesser."
We are where we are because our brains, mouths, hands, and eyes give us an advantage in controlling our environments. Left feral, we're often no more capable or extraordinary than other primates. Given culture, education, and language, and humanity becomes some significantly more powerful and impactful in the world. Giving dogs language probably isn't going to result in dogs writing blogs, or horses filing legal briefs, but humans could establish a culture that lifts them up, empowers them, and provides a set of tools by which dogs (and other animals) are able to express more agency and have a much more potent impact on the world.
For example, imagine a standardized education for dogs, in which a set of 100 words are taught to them as puppies, consistently modeled. This would mean that almost any dog you encounter would have a shared means of communication - for dogcatchers, that'd be a pretty good deal. It'd also mean "yes, good friend. come treat." or similar phrases might be used to put a dog at ease. Most dog attacks happen because you have a terrified animal in an unpredictable situation, and all the dog knows is how to react with fear and aggression. Layering communication into that definitely wouldn't solve everything, but hey, it'd be a lot better than nothing.
I can't wait for Cesar or a comparably talented trainer to grab on to the dog button trend; there's a subtle but deep difference between being greeted by a flurry of wiggles and joyful bouncing, and all the wiggles and bouncing with "Dad hi love you play" or "Mom friend human".
What blew my mind was when one of the first dogs to use buttons was confronted with her "beach" button being broken. She started using the phrase "outside-water" to compensate for being unable to say "beach".
This is like when Alex the parrot was confronted with an apple for the first time and called it a "banerry", using the names of fruits he knew (banana and cherry). The ability not just to use words, but form original linguistic constructs in response to novel situations, is something we humans long thought was our domain alone, but it turns out we share it with far more birds and beasts than we realize even today.
"What blew my mind was when one of the first dogs to use buttons was confronted with her "beach" button being broken. She started using the phrase "outside-water" to compensate for being unable to say "beach"."
This is actually something that the skeptics should address when they claim that all that button pushing is just simple conditioning.
Spontaneously creating a logically sound approximation for a broken button doesn't sound like conditioning at all.
I don't think I would want to design such a study, but at a minimum arguments would have to be made ahead of time for meaningful pairings "outside-water" == "beach", all button presses would have to be recorded, and then a statistical conclusion could be reached.
> I mean, some people are perfectly fine with labeling other people NPCs.
Indeed. So whatever such a study concludes is unlikely to change people's ideas about dogs much.
This is actually a study being run - https://www.theycantalk.org/research
They are recording button presses and sequences in both controlled and open situations, and have already observed a consistent capacity to chain multiple buttons together in naming a thing, and have found patterns in the names dogs come up with (I think they're also doing cat studies.)
My own dog has used "outside water good before" to tell me about going potty outside, but over time, outside water has come to mean rain.
There needs to be an acknowledgement that conditioning does happen, and that animals who don't learn language can still recognize words as signals without having any deeper understanding. With buttons, animals are brought to understand the words through contextual use and modeling of the word - emotions and time and abstractions are taught that take the word beyond mere signaling and conditioning.
If you go back and review reports about Clever Hans, what you find is an overwhelming bias and a perverse incentive to deny any and all "cleverness" the horse may have had in favor of maintaining humanity's sole domain of complex and abstract thought. Clever Hans could likely accomplish simple arithmetic. Nearly everyone who "debunked" the claims at the time was hopelessly biased and tangled up with their own worldviews. Horses are brilliant. I've met horses that are smarter than many people I know. (I've also met horses that were sociopathic asshats without any redeeming personality traits, but that's a story for a different thread.) If dogs can learn complex, abstract language and simple counting with a brain the size of a ping pong ball or a peach, a horse brain 4-8 times larger is going to be much more capable and facile.
I think this type of research that takes an unbiased and rational approach to animal cognition will lead to better outcomes for everyone. There's a lot that veterinarians and biologists are taught with roots deep in religious myths and cultural tropes, so it's left a large and mostly untapped field of discovery available for a new generation.
You'd need differentiation between coherently patterned noises and a mechanism to pass them between generations. We've been watching dogs for more than 50,000 years, and nobody has ever been able to identify words, or even word-like meanings in the noises dogs make. Dogs don't have language - coherent patterned noises - or culture, outside of what humans carry forward through generations on dogs' behalf.
This isn't to say their vocalizations and body language don't have meaning - they have rich and varied meanings, and that's how experienced trainers and dog owners can observe and interpret dog behavior at a high level of competence. They're just not using language - meaningfully coherent words and grammars.
That's the whole point of the buttons - you can teach them to use words and simple rules of grammar, and get amazing interactions like Bunny talking about "night talk" dreams, or laughing at "play poop" fart situations, dogs planning their eat, walk, settle schedules, and so on. Buttons elevate the level of communication and relationship with the animal, and grants them agency that they otherwise wouldn't have.
As far as non-human language goes, there may be languages developed and learned by pods of whales, orcas, and dolphins. There could even be really old languages, passed down through oral traditions, and scientists are currently researching with AI to see if we can crack cetacean or delphinidae communication. It could also be they have sophisticated "vibes" based communication without highly specific assigned meanings to every vocalization like humans, or some mysterious mixture of unexpected features that's a little alien to the way we think. We know they have culture, and appear to have discrete words and grammar, so this research is really exciting.
Or to put it another way, buttons demonstrate dogs being multilingual across species...