Do Pet Buttons Work? The Science Behind Talking Dog Buttons

#bunnythedog #kpassionate #dogbuttons
Can dogs talk with buttons? Two years ago, I did a video on What About Bunny, the talking dog who speaks with buttons. I got hundreds of comments like "You need to watch more videos” and “One video with nothing but your educated opinion and a lot of ego.” So let’s look at more videos of Bunny the talking dog.

00:00 - Bunny the Dog
01:06 - Responding to Criticism
02:16 - What About Bunny's Thorn in Paw
03:10 - Biologist Reacts to Bunny the Dog
04:20 - Do Pet Buttons Work?
05:49 - The Self Aware Dog
07:41 - Can Dogs Understand English?
08:46 - Why Dogs Can't Talk
10:01 - What About Bunny's Existential Crisis

There are two reasons why I personally don’t see evidence of communication. One, the famous video where Bunny appears to tell her owner "ouch stranger paw" to indicate that she has a thorn in her paw is EDITED in two very key moments. The first cut is right after Bunny pressed the “ouch” button. How much time passed between “ouch” and “stranger paw”? How many other buttons were pressed? Were there any failed attempts? Was it even filmed on the same day? We don’t know. The second cut is more important, we never see the thorn being removed from Bunny's paw. We have no way of knowing if the thorn came from the paw. There’s a lot of missing context that we simply can’t ignore. It’s impossible to know if the video was cut just to remove dead air or to tell a curated story.

My second concern is the definition of the word "stranger." Here, stranger means a thorn. In other videos, stranger means a coyote or even a new smell. That’s a common thing in these videos. Definitions are fluid and change meaning in order to be “accurate”. In another video, Bunny pressed the word “bird” and that was interpreted to mean “airplane.”

“Some well-known research biases that are normally carefully avoided in formal scientific studies are not controlled for in these videos. In particular, the ‘meaning’ of ‘sentences’ produced by the dogs is often reconstructed by the owners themselves… and what is interpreted often seems to be… whatever the owner wants it to be.” -- Neuroscience News

Study after study has shown that visual, tactile, and olfactory communication is far more important to a dog than verbal communication.

There have also been studies using EEGs and MRIs to measure brain activity in dogs when they hear human words. These studies found that dogs do not have the ability to distinguish different words AND that almost 50% of what they respond to when they hear a human speak is their emotion and tone of voice.

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Music

Additional Imagery
What About Bunny
Superpower Dogs

[KPassionate]

Learn more about animal training with these videos!
[1] How and Why Zoos and Aquariums Train Their Animals
[2] Secrets of the Navy's Classified Dolphin Program
[3] How to Train Your Aggressive Dog

[talonsaurn]

this whole thing just feels like the old psychic trick of cold reading, where everything is turned to a positive response... lots of people believe those too unfortunately

[rsharpyuk]

I can hear the pitchforks being sharpened all the way from my hospital bed 😂😂

[ladyangua]

It bothers me that Bunny isn't using any "dog language" in the "stranger" video, she shows no sign of discomfort. If my dog had something stuck in her paw she would be worrying at it, trying to remove it; which would tell me something was there and I would look.

[krat]

Every time Bunny presses a button his owner immediately asks 'what [button]?' or 'why [button]?' After which she completely fills out all the blanks. People LOVE to think that animals think like them, but their thinking can be very different from ours. Not because they are stupid, but because they excell at different things. For one, dogs are not dumb enough to project their thoughts onto others, this is a human thing and can help us socially, but dogs have different solutions to the same problem. They are smart in their own right.

[DakotaHerb]

I'm getting a German Shephed puppy and he's been professionally trained for the past month to develop verbal communication skills.

Last week he texted me using the trainer's phone and told me to tip the trainer a thousand dollars.

This dog will be amazing! 😮

[shannonessig]

I'm so glad you mentioned the importance of intonation. Communication between animals and humans is based on patterns of behavior and anticipated outcomes more than the words we say. Always happy to see a KP vid in my list. Thank you!

[felinakats]

I'll never understand why some people want animals to be like humans, what ever happened to accepting animals as they are?
it's almost like they think that animals are not good enough unless they can preform unnatural behaviour.

[TheCrosshare]

I feel like there's also a "healthy" dose of confirmation bias in these, much like with ghost hunting shows. If Bunny says "water", and i go on a treasure hunt for the meaning, any sink, tap, rain, bottle of water, empty bowl, can fit that. Same as with ghost hunters hearing the word "went" from a muguffin box. They don't question the word, but instead lead it to *some* conclusion like "Yes, this spirit went to school here" or "This spirit went outside".

[sellingacoerwa]

My dog once crocheted a functioning ladder from strategically torn up blankets, shoes and toilet paper to climb to the top shelf in our kitchen where the dog treats are stored. So, personally I'm on team dog self aware

[AaaaNinja]

We are accustomed to watching videos that people don't even understand editing and the ways it can be used to manipulate a presentation, EVEN THOUGH more people than ever have access to the ability to learn how to do it.

[jasperjudd]

I would absolutely love to see a video on the African Grey named Apollo. (Aka Apollo and Frens). He’s definitely not the same as these button videos because he can ya know, actually speak, and I find it amazing how many words he has learned and his ability to use context to use what he already knows in order to identify things (like seeing a bug he’d never seen before but being able to identify it because it’s small and moves).
His owners seem really cool and are clearly trying to actually train him in a scientific way to learn the extent of African Greys intelligence. It’s super cool to me. He definitely doesn’t always get things right, but they leave that in and he gets things right more often than not

[CrankyGrandma]

Bunny and other button using animals seem to learn buttons for words important to them like food and poop. But the abstract thinking bits seem a stretch. Billy the cat is worth watching.

[chrisl]

I did not watch this video with an open mind.

Being a dog-lover (big time), & a Bunny fan, I was rather offended that she would suggest that Bunny was not really doing what she we all saw her do.

I clicked on the video with every expectation that I would strongly disagree with her argument. However, she did make some very valid & substantiated points. The major one being editing. I enjoy Bunny's videos so much and is so enthralled by her cuteness that I didn't even notice the videos were so obviously edited.

There was a famous dog named Chase, who could remember the names of thousands of toys. His owner was a psychologist, I believe. I think dog's intelligence is more akin to that.

Dog pressing a button to communicate that they want to "walk", "potty" or "scritches are proven abilities that dogs have. They can communicate that, but to be able to string words together to express a thought is rather farfetched.

That said, I will still watch Bunny videos cos she is just so darn cute.

[TheAkjody]

You explain this very well. No need for people to get ugly about your observations. I am still amazed how people can anthropomorphize with their pets. Especially dogs. I have worked with Service dogs, military dogs, hunting dogs, sled dogs and humble dachshunds. They are all capable of learning words. Right, left, stay, Seek (whatever thing) I could go on. But they are simple concepts and not structured speech.
I love the idea of outside, danger, eat, potty, hurt. But go outside play with the cat um. ya... right... Its just not how they communicate. I did get buttons. Started with eat and outside. it took a while to teach them to a dachshund. My Pyrenees learned they over the course of a few months. My older 14 year old dachshund, Nufie and pyrenees eventually learned "Pain" for joint medication.

I have another button I might use for baby (toy) or drink so I can hear when they run out of water (probably not). But I have to admit I have no need for much more. I know when scared, danger, play, love, tired, stranger all by how they bark and act, even waking me up specific sound of their bark (tone etc) to wake me up to let them outside at 5am. I have to agree with everything you said in your opinion and oversations on the videos

Honestly my dogs understand sign language much better than voice commands. I teach them commands with both at the same time from the very start.
Anyhow GREAT VIDEO AND INFORMATION (‾◡◝) (❁´◡`❁)

[John_Weiss]

It's interesting timing.
One of the language channels I subscribe to just did a video about The Clever Hans Effect.
The case of Clever Hans showed that a horse was so good at picking up subtle cues in human body language, it was able to see hints that the humans were giving it _that the humans themselves were unaware that they were making._

Someone in the comments on that video raised three dogs with buttons videos, even telling me, "You're biased. You don't know what you're talking about." My sin? Pointing out that we only have videos of the dogs being successful. We don't have the videos showing how often these dogs just pushed buttons at random. That is *Selection Bias.*

And I was assuming no editing in the videos of the animals "successfully" communicating with the buttons.

But in a response back to the attack I got, I stated that I'm a physicist by training, and "in the 'hard' sciences, it is drilled into us that you _do not_ collect data to prove your hypothesis, you collect data _to try and _*_DISPROVE_*_ yourself._ You pull out a hammer and try and break your model. And when the hammer breaks instead, you get a different hammer and keep doing this until you run out of hammers.
"I would find this thing with pets and buttons credible if there were a series of videos going, 'So I've tried to show that my dog is tapping these buttons for any reason other than trying to communicate with me, and every alternative reason has proven wrong. Am I missing something? Am I imagining it? Or is this for really using these buttons to talk to me?"

[DerdOnner]

It‘s mindblowing that people would rather put their trust and belief in a heavily edited video about a talking dog, than consider scientific facts and reasoning. No wonder conspiracy theories are on the rise 😂

[Happytravellerkimmy]

We couldn't even spell out walk for our dog. We had to resort to using words like "mosy" and "saunter", e.g. "let us now commence to promenade". He was too smart.

[valstarkgraf]

I wish these buttons would go away. As an AuDHD human, I am very sensitive to the weird wants and whims of NT communication requirements on ND humans, full stop. For CENTURIES, NT humans have linked "intelligence" to "speech" and have tortured (and still torture) ND humans who have autism and other neurodiversities related to being nonverbal. There is still a lot of stigma even now around the idea that "being intelligent" requires speech communication in a way that is recognizable as speech by other humans, and anything else is subject to being classed as disordered and needs to be fixed.

This nonsense is a different side of THAT same coin.

I have actually worked with and trained a variety of animals. The things about training an animal that ALWAYS needs to be taken into consideration are: 1.) how that animal effectively communicates with members of their own species, and 2.) if that animal has forms of communication it evolved to exclusively communicate with humans.

I've worked extensively with guinea pigs, but have also lived and worked with both cats and dogs. All three of those species have very specific forms of auditory communication they ONLY use to communicate with humans (this has been studied and documented). They do it because it works, and because they've learned that we do not have the sensory perception to pick up on subtle clues to convey things in a "normal" way for how they communicate with each other.

Guinea pigs have a "WHERE IS MY FAMILY, I AM HERE!" baby call similar to a sea otter meep, and FOR THE EXACT SAME REASON (because they are a prey species not wanting to draw attention to themselves and attract predators) they shut up as they get older. The exception being guinea pigs and sea otters raised in human care. Guinea pigs raised in human care will keep the alarm call to respond to a crinkled plastic bag or the opening of a fridge. Joey seems to have learned to weaponize his meep scream not to alert to his geographic position in the open ocean, but to express some displeasure or desire he wants humans to address. You even illustrate the probable way he learned that in the audio of some of your videos with baby Tazzy where you are talking to her when she squeaks at you.

"Humans respond to this noise." Lesson learned.

Then consider Quatse, who was mom-trained to shut up by the time she came into human care at almost the age when she would've been on her own. Quatse makes the lower volume otter noises typical of otters, but lost the meep scream long before she came into human care. She was not trained to need it, she was trained away from it by her otter mother (I've seen the same thing in guinea pigs not raised with a lot of human contact as babies).

What frustrates me about buttons is, as stated, the fluidity of interpretation based on errorless confirmation bias of the owner. It is actually possible to teach word association learning with buttons or visual words, but that is not what is happening here. If she were interested in actually teaching the words, the correct methodology is to reward for correct, ignore for incorrect...NOT interpret whatever she wants to interpret.

But -- hot take -- because dogs are SO visual, she might have better luck actually training bunny to visually recognize words. I don't know if dogs can do this, but they have proven certain birds can.

Forcing animals to learn to communicate on human terms in ways humans view as valid language (whether it is or not) instead of taking time to TRULY pay attention to the subtle non-verbal sensory communications that non-human species use with each other and learn from THAT really just smacks of human arrogance.

[maikibordercollie]

Fascinating. You present your perspective so well, communicating so clearly. I've had border collies for most of my life. (They're pretty smart as you probably know.) One of my dogs, 20 years ago, knew 400 different words, and we have video evidence of her fetching different objects on command. While border collies are masters at UNDERSTANDING our human language, I've always felt it was my job to understand their language and the way they communicate what they want to "say." So I've never wanted to venture into the world of those buttons. My current dog knows around 200 tricks, and will respond to both verbal and physical cues for those behaviours. But, exactly like you say in the video, I had to be careful not to use words that sound too similar. Maiki knows cues in three different languages, so that there's no change of her confusing hug and tug, or mixing up abajo and abrazo.