Interesting Shares

The title is misleading.

Prof Clive Wynne, the director of the Canine Science Collaboratory at Arizona State University, who was not involved in the work, described the new study as a “nothing burger”, noting that the main finding was that dogs responded to certain verbal cues.

“There is nothing remarkable about that,” he said, adding that the team only studied responses to three familiar words – and the dogs were only successful on two of them.

Wynne said the fact that the dogs had been trained to press buttons played no role in the current study, while the research did not shed new light on what dogs understood when certain words were spoken.

So we'll need to wait for the rest of the research to conclude anything.

I've seen lots of dogs do this to communicate. It's amazing and cute. Dogs are very talkative.

On one hand: it's a learned behavior and is not all that remarkable when we've been doing basically the same thing for hundreds of years with less sophisticated technology. The only thing new here is the soundboard itself.

On the other: isn't our language also learned behavior? Dog might not have deep insights into literature, and might not even understand adjectives, but they certainly can know nouns and verbs and understand them enough to follow basic instructions.

I communicate with animals with my words and hands.

Cats too