December 10, 2025 • 36 mins
Can you chat with your cat? Or dialogue with your dog? Jorge talks to Christina Hunger and Federico Rossano about the global movement to teach pets to talk.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, please take a second and leave us a review
on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to the podcast.
Thanks a lot. Hey, welcome to Sign Stuff, a production
of iHeartRadio I'm More Cham and today we're answering the
question can we communicate with animals? Can you have an
actual conversation with your cat or a real dialogue with
(00:22):
your dog? And could we use AI to talk to
whales and elephants. We're going to talk to the woman
who started the worldwide movement to teach pats to talk,
and we're going to talk to an animal cognitive scientist
about what we know about animal communication. So get ready
to chat with jihuahua's and gap with gibbons as we
(00:43):
answer the question can we communicate with animals?
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Hey?
Speaker 1 (00:52):
Everyone, So I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but recently I
learned there's a worldwide movement to teach pets to talk.
Tens of thousands of people around the world are teaching
their cats and dogs and rabbits and even lizards to
use words and even put together sentences. And once you
learn what some of these animals have to say, I
think you're going to be surprised. So We're going to
(01:14):
talk to two people today. One is the woman who
started this worldwide movement, and the other is a Conicis
scientist who's been researching this phenomenon. Will start with the
founder of the movement, Christina Hunger. Miss Hunger was a
speech therapist who worked with kids when she wondered one day,
what if I helped my dog to speak. Here's my
(01:35):
interview with Christina Hunger. Well, thank you for joining us,
Miss Hunger.
Speaker 3 (01:41):
Yes, thank you for having me. My name is Christina Hunger.
I'm a speech language pathologist and I'm the founder of
Hunger for Words, which is the whole talking pet movement.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
Amazing. Can you describe what Hunger for Words and the
Talking Pet movement are?
Speaker 3 (01:55):
Yes. So, as a speech therapist, I worked with kids,
and in my jobularly, I worked with a lot of
kids who had different disabilities and disorders and couldn't actually
talk with verbal speech. They used communication devices instead, and
so that really inspired everything that I discovered that dogs
were capable of.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
What did you know about animal communication before you had
this idea?
Speaker 3 (02:18):
Very little? And I think that's why I was able
to see this from a new perspective. I knew that
dogs understood words because I had a dog growing up.
But then once I brought my puppy Stella home, I
was really observing her from this new perspective as a
speech therapist and saw how quickly she was picking up
on the words we were saying.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
I guess you mean like if you tell a dog
sit or a rollover, or would you like to go
for a walk, and they get excited, then you have
the sense that they understand you exactly.
Speaker 3 (02:48):
And so I knew that these associations were possible, but
I didn't know how much dogs were capable of understanding.
I just knew that something was there now.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
In her work as a speech therapist, because Hunger work
kids with disabilities who were non verbal or couldn't talk,
and she would often use devices that the kids would
press a button on or have a screen on to
say words. And this gave her an idea, did you
explicitly think to yourself, huh, I wonder what would happen
if I tried to teach my dog more words using
(03:20):
these devices.
Speaker 3 (03:21):
I had this very clear epiphany moment where I was
watching my puppy Stella, seeing how she was understanding words.
I was knowing you know, remembering that dog's understand words.
And I was also watching how she was already communicating.
She would bark at me to get attention. She would
pot her water dish and it was empty, and I
was like, she's doing so many things that kids do
(03:42):
right before they start talking. I was like, I was
in a speech therapy session right now, I would be saying,
they're probably going to start talking soon. So I had
this light bulb moment. If dogs understand words, they just
need a different way to say words, like, could I
make a device for Stella and teach her to say
words if she had a way to say them? And
that's where it all started.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
Now did you actually make a device or did you so?
Speaker 3 (04:06):
My first thought was could I use something that already
exists that I use with kids. Most of the devices
kids would use their fingers to tap a very small icon,
like on an iPad or a tablet, but I thought
that would be too tricky with her paw and her nose.
So then I found just some simple, recordable buttons and
then adapted them eventually and put them all together on
(04:26):
one big board for her, which was then her communication device.
So I wanted, like the easiest way to test it out.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
Whoah, you didn't think like I need an iPad the
size of a table. Her Stella just made me think
of what would happen if you give a dog a
phone and the internet? Yeah, right, look up treats all
the time.
Speaker 3 (04:45):
Yeah, really different parks that they want to go to.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
So Miss Hunger basically gave her puppy Stella a giant
keyboard had big colored buttons that, when press would say
a pre recorded word like water or walk. Okay, so
you got the system, you put it in your house
for Stella, and then what happened? How did you get started?
Speaker 2 (05:06):
So?
Speaker 3 (05:06):
I started just with a few words. At first, I
just thought like could I teach her to say a
few different words to maybe express like some needs that
she has. So I started with outside, play, water, and
then eventually I added like eat and walk. And for
about a month I did the same thing that I
would do with kids every day. I just used the
(05:28):
buttons as I was talking. So whenever I was saying outside,
I would push the button, show her which one it was,
also say it with my verbal speech, and then take
her outside. And it did not work right away. It
took a good month before she started using the buttons
and really was even interested in them.
Speaker 1 (05:45):
Wow. Initially she totally didn't even think it was a
thing to pay attention to.
Speaker 3 (05:50):
Oh yeah, for the first two weeks, she didn't even
look at them.
Speaker 1 (05:54):
So for weeks her dog Stella would just ignore the buttons.
And I think it's safe to say that anyone of
us would have just given up by now, but Miss
Hunger's unique background as a speech therapist told her to
keep trying. And then one day something happened.
Speaker 3 (06:12):
And then about three weeks and she literally just looked
at the button for the first time and then looked
up at me, and I was so excited. And then
within a week of that moment is when she started
using it for the first time.
Speaker 1 (06:23):
Whoa. It happened quickly once she had that realization of
what it was.
Speaker 3 (06:28):
So after about a month, the first word she said
was outside. And when she said outside with her button,
she went outside and went to the bathroom immediately. So
that was really exciting because it wasn't just like pressing
it to explore. So then I was wondering, you know,
is she going to use outside for everything that she
needs or what's going to happen here. But the next
(06:48):
day she started using her play button when she wanted
to play, and then I think within a week she
started using water whenever her water dish was empty.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
I imagine you got very excited.
Speaker 3 (06:58):
Oh yeah, I was really really excited when she sat
outside for the first time, But it actually wasn't until
an unexpected milestone and I started getting like really excited
and shocked. And that was just a couple of months
after that, she started using words for different purposes that
I hadn't taught her, like the same what buttons, but
(07:20):
in situations that I had never modeled. And that's when
my speech therapist s brain really started going crazy with
the potential.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
Okay, this part is important. We'll get into the signs
of using words in different contexts and something called productivity
in sentence structure later in the program. Oh what do
you mean she used buttons for different purposes?
Speaker 3 (07:41):
So, like I had always just modeled water when her
water dish was empty or when I was filling up
her water bowl. But one day I was watering my plants,
which Stella always really liked watching me do, and she
walked all the way out of the room down the
hall to her buttons and said water, and so I
was like, oh, okay, she mut sneed water. I walked
down the hall looked at her water bowl. It was
(08:02):
totally full, and she didn't take a drink of water.
She just came back and kept watching me water my plants.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
Stella wanted to kind of show off.
Speaker 3 (08:10):
Yeah, I like water. That's what she's doing.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
I know what that is exactly. There's a button for that, right.
Speaker 3 (08:16):
And it was just so much more about connection in
that moment than just saying a button or pushing a
button to get something. She was using a word just
to connect and share.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
How did people around you react?
Speaker 3 (08:29):
It was at that point where they started to be
like amazed as well, Like my friends would come over
and Stella would hit the buy button when it was
getting too late and she wanted to go to bed
and she wanted them to leave.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
No kidding, Yeah, I could use a button like that
when I have people over.
Speaker 3 (08:45):
Right, very functional.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
After about a year or so of teaching her dog,
Stella this hunger, decided this was something that couldn't just
stay in her living room, so she started a blog.
She would write about what her dog was learning and
her perspective as a speech therapist, and she posted videos
of Stella using the buns to talk. And at first
there were about five hundred people reading this blog, and at.
Speaker 3 (09:11):
That point she was using about thirty different words, combining
words together to create her own phrases short sentences, And
that's when I started this blog. One of the people
in the audience had a family member who was a
speech therapist, and she happened to share one of my
blog posts on her personal Facebook, and then this reporter
saw it and reached out and was like, this is
(09:32):
absolutely incredible. I want to write a story on it.
We did an interview and it just blew up in
a way that I never could have anticipated or been
prepared for. Like it was trending around the world. I
went from five hundred followers to five hundred thousand in
less than two weeks.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
Oh, that's incredible.
Speaker 3 (09:51):
It was insane, truly insane.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
How did you feel when this wave of attention and
people following you? How did you process that?
Speaker 3 (10:00):
It was of course very exciting. I again, never in
my wildest dreams thought it would reach that level of awareness.
I'm not going to lie. It was extremely overwhelming. Like
I was getting thousands of messages and emails. Reporters had
figured out how to look up my number, outs getting
house all the time, and like I was just a
normal speech therapist, working my normal job and just getting
(10:20):
flooded with everything, and suddenly it's like once it's out there,
there's no going back.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
All right. When we come back, we're going to talk
about this global movement that miss Hunger started that has
people teaching their cats, dogs, goats, and even horses do
use buttons to talk. And then we're going to talk
to these scientists that has taken this idea to the
next level. Stay with us, you're listening to sign stuff,
(11:01):
Welcome back. We're talking about whether animals can communicate. And
we started with the movement sparked by Christina Hunger's blog
where she wrote about teaching her dog Stella how to
use buttons to talk.
Speaker 3 (11:16):
Where where what weird?
Speaker 1 (11:19):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (11:20):
Weirds?
Speaker 1 (11:24):
The blog went viral and since then people around the
world have jumped on to teach their pets to use
the same buttons. So he started with dogs, but I
imagine people out there have tried it with other pets.
My friend does it with a cat. What are some
of the other animals. You've heard people try the song.
Speaker 3 (11:43):
I've seen people teach pigs to talk with buttons, some
farm animals, cows, goats, horses. I've actually worked with someone
who's teaching her horse and that was really cool as well.
So it's been just amazing to see that once the
idea was out there, people are just running with it
and trying it in all different areas.
Speaker 2 (12:02):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (12:03):
Which is the chattiest animal?
Speaker 3 (12:05):
I think dogs still from my knowledge at this point,
but cats have been very chatty as well.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
Dogs that live with us are more eager to talk
to us.
Speaker 3 (12:14):
Yeah, they're hearing us talk all the time. Oh, it's
just a unique bond between a human and a dog.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
What are some things you've heard of other dogs doing?
Speaker 3 (12:22):
Like one of my training clients recently had a really
cool story where her dog said hurt with a button
and then potty with a button, and she took her
to the vet the next day and she had a
bladder infection, something she would not have even known. Whow
So to be able to express with that level of
clarity something that was wrong and then get help immediately,
(12:44):
I mean, that's a game changer for the future of
pet care.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
Oh, incredible. What's the funniest thing Stella has said to you?
Speaker 3 (12:52):
The funniest and most heartbreaking when she's upset with me?
She has said this several times over the year, love
you No, no, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:07):
That blows my vine, Christina.
Speaker 2 (13:09):
I know.
Speaker 3 (13:09):
It's like I never would have thought by introducing a
love you button that I would someday be hearing love
you know sometime. But when she gets upset, still pull
that card sometimes love you know.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
Whow It makes me wonder, what did you do? Christina?
Speaker 3 (13:25):
It would just be like I didn't go to the
park or didn't say enough attention to her after she
had asked for something.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
Just made me think of my teenage daughter.
Speaker 3 (13:35):
A lot of drama plans the door shut.
Speaker 1 (13:37):
Yes, maybe I should get my teenage daughter some buttons.
All right, now, we're going to dive into the signs
of animal communication. As you might imagine, still, it was
not the first non human animal ever to be trained
to use signals to talk to humans, and so to
get a wider view what we know from animal study
(14:00):
in current research, I reached out to Professor Federico Rossano.
I can't get to scientists from the University of California,
San Diego, who specializes in communication between humans and animals.
He has several interesting projects, including the largest citizen science
study on bun pressing pets, and he's involved in efforts
(14:20):
to use AI to decode how whales and monkeys talk
to each other. But first I wanted to know the
history of scientists communicating with animals. Well, thank you, doctor
Rosanna for joining us, Thank you for having me. So
I was hoping you could start by just giving us
a broad history of when did we start getting interested
(14:41):
in communicating with animals.
Speaker 2 (14:43):
Well, it's a very interesting question because I believe we've
always been interested in communicating with animals. There are many
cultures that believe, for example, animals have souls and so
you can communicate with them. He can think about all
the fables for kids from two hundred years ago and
even more where we attribute to animals intelligence or emotions,
and so in that sense, the idea that animals might
(15:05):
have cognitive abilities and even things that they are trying
to communicate as existed for a long long time.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
According to doctor Rossano, a scientist in the last century
started to wonder to what extent animals can use language
and whether it's the thing that really makes humans different
from other animals. Now, one of the first people to
make the case that maybe humans are not that different
from other animals in terms of language was Jane Goodall.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
One of the first one was Jane Goodle that clearly
told us, look, these chance are communicating with each other,
and clearly they have gestions and they have facial expression,
they have signals that they convey to each other that
seem to be meaningful, they seem to be relevant. And
so once you start showing that actually wild animals might
have a code to communicate with each other, then opens
(15:57):
up a completely new possibility. Maybe, just like humans are
thousands of languages, maybe animals each species as at least
one code that they can use to communicate with each other.
And now the challenges can we crack this code?
Speaker 1 (16:12):
The next step side this tried was to teach animals words,
but they quickly found almost no animals had the ability
to pronounce words like humans.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
And so the next step was, well, what if we
teach them sign language. And a lot of animals and
these did learn sun language or at least quite a few words.
Speaker 1 (16:30):
And this is referring to Coco for example, was Coco
in the seventies.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
Coco was later, and Coco was in the eighties and
early nineties.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
Coco, by the way, was a famous gorilla passed away
in twenty eighteen. They were said to have a sign
language vocabulary of over a thousand words.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
There were several others. One of the most famous one
was Washow was a champ that I had learned actually
quite a lot of gestures. And one of the things
that I find most fascinating is he had learned a
lot of gestures, but one of the signs he could
never learn was why. It's like, how do you even
teach why? Like? What is it? What is it? The Youngaha? Anyway,
the interesting thing was some of these animals seem to
be able to learn a few underwards and use the
(17:11):
signs in a way that potentially was interesting. But some
scholars said, look is the equivalent of just Pavlov's dog bell.
Speaker 1 (17:22):
Okay, here we get to the first big issue in
the study of teaching animals to communicate, and that is
if you teach a dog or a cat or a
gorilla to use a bun or a hand sign that
means food, and they get a treat every time they
use it. Are they really learning language or are they
just learning that if you press that button they get food.
(17:44):
This is called stimulus response. You might have heard of
Pavlov's dogs, where they taught dogs to expect food every
time their trainer rings a bell. Well, here are the
lingering questions surrounding examples like Washo the champoor, Coco the gorilla,
or Stella the dog. Is whether you're really proving that
(18:04):
animals can use language in the same way that we
use language. And so the science shifted gears and it
tried a couple of different directions.
Speaker 2 (18:14):
And so in the early eighties, basically there was the
decision that this switcher should kind of be stopped. It
wasn't really helpful in anyway. Some people continued, but the
field kind of moved in three directions that I think
we're very interesting. So one was, well, what if we
actually tried to look at their natural communicative systems? Right,
So there's a famous paper from nineteen eighty on the
(18:35):
vever monkey alarm calls that basically says, hey, if you
look at vever monkeys, they have these different vocalizations that
seem to be associated to different types of predators. Like ego, leopard, snake,
and so the idea was, what if actually they have
something like words, So maybe we should look more at
the spontaneous communicative system and what they used to communicate
(18:56):
with each other instead of teaching them human language.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
That's one direction, looking at the language that animals use
on their own instead of trying to teach them a language,
and later on we'll talk about how doctor Rossano is
using AI to figure that out.
Speaker 2 (19:12):
The second direction was what if we look at animals
that can actually learn hum of vocalization and so, for example,
you can train a parrot to start reproducing the words
in that way, it's not just teaching them sign language.
But you can have animals that we know our vocal learners,
and if they can learn new sounds, maybe they can
also start putting them together in ways that might be
(19:32):
more flexible.
Speaker 3 (19:33):
Right.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
So, indeed, there was amazing research that was done on
vocalizations and teaching parrots, for example the constant of sameness
or colors and things like numbers.
Speaker 1 (19:44):
Here the most famous example is Alex, the talking great
parrot trained by doctor Irene Pepperberg that had a vocabulary
of over one hundred words I could count and name
shapes and colors. Alex lived thirty one years then pass
away in twenty oh seven. Then there's the third direction
that the science of animal communication took, and this one
(20:06):
will seem familiar.
Speaker 2 (20:08):
The third direction was, what if instead of trying to
do this training that is unclear with sign language and
what exactly do they know, we try to use something
there's a lot more automated, kind of like a touchscreen,
like almost like a keyboard that you can actually push
buttons in and then combine and create sequences. So this
had already started in the seventies, but it became particularly prominent,
(20:31):
for example with famous bernobos like Kanzi that died actually
very recently. And so the idea was, what if we
use these devices that had been used previously with long
global humans to kind of learn to communicate, for example,
that you want the start of food, or that you
want a specific object or you want to play. And
(20:51):
so the idea is they learn to associate a specific
button with the concept and then they can push it
when they want it. But then you can start combining
some those things and try to produce things that look
like scient instance, and so Canzi, for example, could use
a keyboard that has several hundred of this science. And similarly,
that was what done with dolphins, where there were dolphins
(21:13):
that actually could learn to use some symbols to request
for things. This was done with one dog in two
thousand and eight.
Speaker 1 (21:19):
Yes, this is the Pushbunton idea that's part of the
recent talking pet movement. Back then scientists even tried it
with dolphins. But here we run into the second big
issue in animal communication research, that is that often these
studies have a sample size of one.
Speaker 2 (21:37):
What happens is we're just taking usually one animal, maybe two.
We spent hours and hours and hours and hours training them,
often removing them from the natural environment, and what we
get out of this is like this one subject that
possibly is a genius, possibly is the flukes, and we
don't really know right, It's like, it's it real. Imagine
(21:58):
if like you, as a scientist, spend your entire career
just training this one animal to show that they can
do something amazing. You can see how there's skepticism, there's concerns,
and maybe you might have an interest in making sure
that the abilities are emphasized.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
It's an an equals one.
Speaker 2 (22:13):
Exactly, It's an equal one often of animals that have
been removed from the natural environment, is what you're getting
representative of what any animal in the wild could possibly
communicate about, or is it just like this one that
you spend years and years training that ends up being
able to do this.
Speaker 1 (22:31):
So that's the second issue in studying whether we can
communicate with animals, and studies where there's one scientist that
spends a long time teaching one animal to communicate, there
are lots of questions of whether this applies to all
animals in that species or whether the animal can only
speak to that one person. Although, as doctor Rosseno says,
(22:53):
a sample of n equals one is still something.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
As a scientist, it's like any equal one, it's not
an equals deal. Like if you have a flying pig,
you have a flying pig.
Speaker 4 (23:05):
I mean, it's something that we should know about, right aside,
these pigs can fly. Pigs can fly, like it's possible, right,
So it's like if all of a sudden you have
one bonobo that can start doing things and nobody else
could even imagine they could do it is worth knowing, right,
It's like we should yeah, yeah, at least investigative photo
all right.
Speaker 1 (23:24):
We'll get to the last issue, figuring out if we
can communicate with animals, and then we'll talk about the
idea of using AI to possibly translate what animals are
saying for us. Stick with us. We'll be right back,
(23:51):
and we're back. We're talking about whether we can communicate
with animals, and so far we've learned the answer is yes.
Pet owners can communicate with their dogs or cats using buns.
You can teach apes to use sign language, and you
can even teach a parrot to count and tell you
what color something is. But the answer is also sort
(24:14):
of no. We don't know for sure yet whether we
can ever truly communicate with an animal beyond simple words
or concepts. An animal's ability to use buns or sign
language could just be learned behavior like Pavlov's dogs, for example.
A famous cautionary tale in animal studies is the story
(24:36):
of Clever Haunts.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
So there's this famous horse that at the beginning of
the twentieth century was claimed to be able to do
mathematical operations, so additions and subtractions, and so the idea
was this horse became super famous and people were paying
money to go watch the horse, and so it would
be something like, okay, Hans, what is five plus two?
(25:00):
And so you hear Hans kind of knocking his hoof
from the ground, and when he gets to like five
six seven, and then it would stop and people just
you know, start clapping and being amazed. But god, but
what happened was that Hans was very good at picking
up cues from the audience in terms of when he
(25:21):
was hitting the right number. So people were all of
a sudden smiling when he was the correct answer, and
so he was kind of like slowly hitting the holes
until he got the correct one. I see you smile.
Now I'm done. Obviously he couldn't do math. He was
just picking up cues.
Speaker 1 (25:38):
It's almost a little more impressive than counting yes.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
So that's a funny thing. So clever haunts as a
term has been used in almost a derogatory way to
refer to people believe the animals can do things that
really they cannot do.
Speaker 1 (25:53):
Now, doctor Rossana has two interesting projects he's involved in.
The first is that he's the lead researcher basically the
scientific side of the Talking pet movement, doing science on
a massive scale. The second project is that he's using
AI to study how animals communicate in the wild. We'll
talk about the Talking Pet project first.
Speaker 2 (26:16):
And so this thing started because a speech language pathologist
in twenty nineteen. This went viral and then a clips online.
I'm not on social media, so I didn't even know,
but basically a colleague asked me, you know, would you
like to do this? I thought it was going to
be a lot side project, and I media realized a
lot of people thought this was a terrible idea. So
(26:37):
I had a lot of colleagues telling me, what are
you doing. Didn't you know that we stopped doing the
cameray so thirty years ago, fuckty years ago, And I
was like, yeah, because we were doing with chips. But
now there's are dogs. Well let's look into this and
let's see what happens. We now have ten thousand dogs,
and actually every week we keep getting an out of
(26:57):
twenty thirty dogs signed up and seven hunderd cat in
the study from forty seven countries, and just to give
you an idea, we get one million. Buttom presses pretty
much every month.
Speaker 1 (27:08):
Yes, there are ten thousand dogs and owners signed up.
And if you go to the University of California, San Diego,
Comparative Condition Lab website. You can sign up to potentially
be on the study too. So what have they learned
so far from these thousands of dogs and cats?
Speaker 2 (27:26):
One other thing I love is you can see what
buttons are pressed the mass and if you are a dog,
what do you think is the button they press the
moss freak, food free, and then it's outside and then
it's play. And so you're like, yeah, does it sound
like a dog? Yeah, that seems very reasonable. My favorite
thing is we're now looking at the cat data. One
(27:47):
of the top five buttons for cats is.
Speaker 4 (27:50):
No, I'm not gonna do it anyway.
Speaker 2 (27:56):
But the idea is, you know, once you have thousands
of these animals and try to do a bunch of things.
Speaker 1 (28:02):
Okay, here are some of the things doctor Rossanna has
learned about what cats and dogs communicate. The first is
that apparently dogs do care about you.
Speaker 2 (28:13):
And what I've learned by looking at what they communicate about,
in addition to food, water, playings on, is that these
are social animals, and social animals often ask about where
are the people that used to be in the house
And I'm not currently in the house, somebody is gone,
where is that? When the cat dies, they keep asking
about where is the cat? And when you are out
(28:36):
of the house, they might ask about you. And so
they think about you, and they think about the ones
around you, and they think about the other animals they
live with. And it's kind of obvious and yet mind
blowing to be reminded that, like maybe the same way
in which you care for them, they care for you too,
And it isn't that nice to know?
Speaker 1 (28:55):
So you're seeing this in the data that this is
not a fluid that one does did it? Three dogs?
Did it?
Speaker 2 (29:01):
No? I mean you see it in the data. You
see that many of them ask about humans that are
not at them, including the experimentals, Like the experimental will
be there that will give them treats and stuff, and
then they will ask later it's like where is the
treat to human? What is the treat to you? And
they also communicate a lot about how they're feeling, being
(29:22):
scared or being frustrated, or being dealing with something that
is bothering them. And especially you know when some of
the animals they live with ee and you see them
asking when they're sick. So we have examples of some
of them saying they're concerned about some other animals, maybe
because they're limping or they seem to be sluggish and
(29:42):
so on. And I think the idea is these are animals,
they have some level of empathy and they care about others.
Speaker 1 (29:51):
The other interesting thing doctor Rossano and his team have
found is related to the last issue in the animal communication,
and that is whether animals can use words in new ways.
This is a concept called productivity. You might be able
to teach an animal that certain buns or signs mean
certain concepts, but a true test of whether animals can
(30:13):
really understand language is whether they can mix words to
name something they've never seen before. And apparently some dogs
can't do this.
Speaker 2 (30:23):
We have one of the dogs started using the combination
water bone water bond and the owner was like, I
don't know what you're asking for, until they realized that
water bone was ice, and so they start giving them ice.
And once they introduce the bottom ice, they stopped pushing
the combination water bone because now they have the water
for it.
Speaker 1 (30:41):
Right, So dogs can put together words to make new meanings,
does that mean they understand language?
Speaker 2 (30:49):
So the issue is there's a lot of anecdotal reports
and I've seen clips of course of animals using these
things in a way that seem to be contextually appropriate
and conveying productivity. But as a scientist, ideally you want
to test it. The issue when you see clips and
so on is that you never know if it was like, oh,
did you actually train this? Was there some other way
(31:11):
in which you recreated this scenario and now you filmed it.
Whatever you see on TikTok on YouTube these days, you're like,
was it really spontaneous or was it made up? So
the idea is to design studies in which you try
to elicit those kind of responses, right, So that's what
we're trying to do.
Speaker 1 (31:27):
As the anecdotes are not enough to show that they
can do things.
Speaker 2 (31:31):
Anecdotes are informative. If you have all the details of
those anecdotes, they show that it might be possible.
Speaker 1 (31:39):
I think you're trying to tell me I shouldn't believe
everything I see on YouTube.
Speaker 2 (31:42):
Correct. Well, I mean it is a very important problem
for us, and I think anecdotal reports are helpful. Please
stand them along. But do not think that just because hey,
one time my dog did this, then it has been
proven scientifically that that's the truth.
Speaker 1 (32:00):
Okay, The last topic we're going to talk about is
using AI to understand what animals are saying when they
talk to each other. Can we decipher their natural communication language?
Speaker 2 (32:12):
Yes. So there's at least two big projects that are
big collaborations across several scientists that are interested in decoding
animal communication. One is the Species Project. It started with
dolphins and whales and so on, and that has now
expanded to other species. Another project is called Project SETTI
(32:32):
specifically started with the goal of understanding whales songs.
Speaker 1 (32:36):
And so what are we learning with all these different
AI understanding language projects.
Speaker 2 (32:42):
Some of the things, for example, we're learning is that
a lot of animals seem to add signals that would
be similar to names, like a way of kind of
referring to this specific individual in the group. And that
is very interesting. Right, So we didn't know that animals
might have names for each other, and so this is
an interesting phenomenon being documented now for dolphins and for elephants.
Speaker 1 (33:03):
Dolphins and elephants have names for each other.
Speaker 2 (33:05):
It's a little symptom, fine, but yes, right.
Speaker 1 (33:09):
The last question I asked our experts was why communicate
with animals?
Speaker 3 (33:14):
Ooh, I think it's incredible that we can actually hear
how our animals are experiencing the environment we share with them.
We can have such a better understanding of what they're
thinking about, what their needs are, how we can care
for them, and ultimately, I think it'll help us treat
our animals a lot better and learn what they've been
(33:35):
trying to say all these years.
Speaker 1 (33:37):
Yeah, I guess it's a different thing if something is
actually talking to you, even.
Speaker 3 (33:41):
If people aren't teaching their own pets in their homes,
just the knowledge that it's possible for a dog to
use words and create sentences, it's like, Okay, this is
a very complex creature that is living in my home.
I think it can give a really good appreciation of
how smarts our pets are and how much deserve.
Speaker 1 (34:01):
How do we learn more about what you do and
how to teach our pets how to use this system.
Speaker 3 (34:06):
So my very first book, How Sell Learned to Talk,
is the whole story of the idea that I had
all the way through this communication breakthrough and then the
world learning about it. Then my second book, Your Dog
Can Talk, is the step by step training guide, and
then you can find our buttons hunger for words, talking
pet buttons and any major retailer Amazon, Showy, pet Co
(34:27):
and get started with your own pet.
Speaker 1 (34:30):
Does it also work with teenage daughters?
Speaker 3 (34:33):
I have seen some applications in the Home for humans
very fun. So whoever needs the buttons, go ahead and
set it up. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (34:41):
I bet the most popular button would be the mute button.
Yeah really, well, thank you so much for joining us,
MS Hunger.
Speaker 3 (34:47):
Yeah, thanks for having me. It is blast.
Speaker 2 (34:50):
We know that, for example, a dog can smell things
much better than we can. We know that certain animals
can hear things that we cannot hear. We know that
others can see things that we cannot see. There's so
many abilities that are part of the natural kingdom the
humans do not quite well. Imagine you're like looking at
the world in which there's an infinite amount of possibility
(35:12):
in terms of what animals can do. What if they
could tell you? Just imagine how different our sense of
being in this world would be.
Speaker 1 (35:21):
So if we could communicate with them, they could tell us.
Speaker 2 (35:24):
That's the dream, right? What does an elephant know? What
does the dog know? What does a lion know? What
does a whale know that we don't know?
Speaker 1 (35:31):
Not? Just what can we learn about them, but what
can we learn from them?
Speaker 2 (35:35):
What can we learn from them? And how does that
change es? And so that's my dream.
Speaker 1 (35:41):
All right. We hope you enjoyed that. Please tell your
dog or cat that I said hi. Thanks for joining us,
See you next time. You've been listening to Science Stuff.
Production of iHeartRadio, written and produced by me or Yhm,
edited by Rose Seguda, Executive producer Jerry Rowland, and audio
(36:04):
engineer and mixer Kasey Peckram. And you can follow me
on social media. Just search for PhD Comics and the
name of your favorite platform. Be sure to subscribe to
Sign Stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you get your podcasts, and please tell your friends we'll
be back next Wednesday with another episode.
Hey, please take a second and leave us a review
on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to the podcast.
Thanks a lot. Hey, welcome to Sign Stuff, a production
of iHeartRadio I'm More Cham and today we're answering the
question can we communicate with animals? Can you have an
actual conversation with your cat or a real dialogue with
(00:22):
your dog? And could we use AI to talk to
whales and elephants. We're going to talk to the woman
who started the worldwide movement to teach pats to talk,
and we're going to talk to an animal cognitive scientist
about what we know about animal communication. So get ready
to chat with jihuahua's and gap with gibbons as we
(00:43):
answer the question can we communicate with animals?
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Hey?
Speaker 1 (00:52):
Everyone, So I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but recently I
learned there's a worldwide movement to teach pets to talk.
Tens of thousands of people around the world are teaching
their cats and dogs and rabbits and even lizards to
use words and even put together sentences. And once you
learn what some of these animals have to say, I
think you're going to be surprised. So We're going to
(01:14):
talk to two people today. One is the woman who
started this worldwide movement, and the other is a Conicis
scientist who's been researching this phenomenon. Will start with the
founder of the movement, Christina Hunger. Miss Hunger was a
speech therapist who worked with kids when she wondered one day,
what if I helped my dog to speak. Here's my
(01:35):
interview with Christina Hunger. Well, thank you for joining us,
Miss Hunger.
Speaker 3 (01:41):
Yes, thank you for having me. My name is Christina Hunger.
I'm a speech language pathologist and I'm the founder of
Hunger for Words, which is the whole talking pet movement.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
Amazing. Can you describe what Hunger for Words and the
Talking Pet movement are?
Speaker 3 (01:55):
Yes. So, as a speech therapist, I worked with kids,
and in my jobularly, I worked with a lot of
kids who had different disabilities and disorders and couldn't actually
talk with verbal speech. They used communication devices instead, and
so that really inspired everything that I discovered that dogs
were capable of.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
What did you know about animal communication before you had
this idea?
Speaker 3 (02:18):
Very little? And I think that's why I was able
to see this from a new perspective. I knew that
dogs understood words because I had a dog growing up.
But then once I brought my puppy Stella home, I
was really observing her from this new perspective as a
speech therapist and saw how quickly she was picking up
on the words we were saying.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
I guess you mean like if you tell a dog
sit or a rollover, or would you like to go
for a walk, and they get excited, then you have
the sense that they understand you exactly.
Speaker 3 (02:48):
And so I knew that these associations were possible, but
I didn't know how much dogs were capable of understanding.
I just knew that something was there now.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
In her work as a speech therapist, because Hunger work
kids with disabilities who were non verbal or couldn't talk,
and she would often use devices that the kids would
press a button on or have a screen on to
say words. And this gave her an idea, did you
explicitly think to yourself, huh, I wonder what would happen
if I tried to teach my dog more words using
(03:20):
these devices.
Speaker 3 (03:21):
I had this very clear epiphany moment where I was
watching my puppy Stella, seeing how she was understanding words.
I was knowing you know, remembering that dog's understand words.
And I was also watching how she was already communicating.
She would bark at me to get attention. She would
pot her water dish and it was empty, and I
was like, she's doing so many things that kids do
(03:42):
right before they start talking. I was like, I was
in a speech therapy session right now, I would be saying,
they're probably going to start talking soon. So I had
this light bulb moment. If dogs understand words, they just
need a different way to say words, like, could I
make a device for Stella and teach her to say
words if she had a way to say them? And
that's where it all started.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
Now did you actually make a device or did you so?
Speaker 3 (04:06):
My first thought was could I use something that already
exists that I use with kids. Most of the devices
kids would use their fingers to tap a very small icon,
like on an iPad or a tablet, but I thought
that would be too tricky with her paw and her nose.
So then I found just some simple, recordable buttons and
then adapted them eventually and put them all together on
(04:26):
one big board for her, which was then her communication device.
So I wanted, like the easiest way to test it out.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
Whoah, you didn't think like I need an iPad the
size of a table. Her Stella just made me think
of what would happen if you give a dog a
phone and the internet? Yeah, right, look up treats all
the time.
Speaker 3 (04:45):
Yeah, really different parks that they want to go to.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
So Miss Hunger basically gave her puppy Stella a giant
keyboard had big colored buttons that, when press would say
a pre recorded word like water or walk. Okay, so
you got the system, you put it in your house
for Stella, and then what happened? How did you get started?
Speaker 2 (05:06):
So?
Speaker 3 (05:06):
I started just with a few words. At first, I
just thought like could I teach her to say a
few different words to maybe express like some needs that
she has. So I started with outside, play, water, and
then eventually I added like eat and walk. And for
about a month I did the same thing that I
would do with kids every day. I just used the
(05:28):
buttons as I was talking. So whenever I was saying outside,
I would push the button, show her which one it was,
also say it with my verbal speech, and then take
her outside. And it did not work right away. It
took a good month before she started using the buttons
and really was even interested in them.
Speaker 1 (05:45):
Wow. Initially she totally didn't even think it was a
thing to pay attention to.
Speaker 3 (05:50):
Oh yeah, for the first two weeks, she didn't even
look at them.
Speaker 1 (05:54):
So for weeks her dog Stella would just ignore the buttons.
And I think it's safe to say that anyone of
us would have just given up by now, but Miss
Hunger's unique background as a speech therapist told her to
keep trying. And then one day something happened.
Speaker 3 (06:12):
And then about three weeks and she literally just looked
at the button for the first time and then looked
up at me, and I was so excited. And then
within a week of that moment is when she started
using it for the first time.
Speaker 1 (06:23):
Whoa. It happened quickly once she had that realization of
what it was.
Speaker 3 (06:28):
So after about a month, the first word she said
was outside. And when she said outside with her button,
she went outside and went to the bathroom immediately. So
that was really exciting because it wasn't just like pressing
it to explore. So then I was wondering, you know,
is she going to use outside for everything that she
needs or what's going to happen here. But the next
(06:48):
day she started using her play button when she wanted
to play, and then I think within a week she
started using water whenever her water dish was empty.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
I imagine you got very excited.
Speaker 3 (06:58):
Oh yeah, I was really really excited when she sat
outside for the first time, But it actually wasn't until
an unexpected milestone and I started getting like really excited
and shocked. And that was just a couple of months
after that, she started using words for different purposes that
I hadn't taught her, like the same what buttons, but
(07:20):
in situations that I had never modeled. And that's when
my speech therapist s brain really started going crazy with
the potential.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
Okay, this part is important. We'll get into the signs
of using words in different contexts and something called productivity
in sentence structure later in the program. Oh what do
you mean she used buttons for different purposes?
Speaker 3 (07:41):
So, like I had always just modeled water when her
water dish was empty or when I was filling up
her water bowl. But one day I was watering my plants,
which Stella always really liked watching me do, and she
walked all the way out of the room down the
hall to her buttons and said water, and so I
was like, oh, okay, she mut sneed water. I walked
down the hall looked at her water bowl. It was
(08:02):
totally full, and she didn't take a drink of water.
She just came back and kept watching me water my plants.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
Stella wanted to kind of show off.
Speaker 3 (08:10):
Yeah, I like water. That's what she's doing.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
I know what that is exactly. There's a button for that, right.
Speaker 3 (08:16):
And it was just so much more about connection in
that moment than just saying a button or pushing a
button to get something. She was using a word just
to connect and share.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
How did people around you react?
Speaker 3 (08:29):
It was at that point where they started to be
like amazed as well, Like my friends would come over
and Stella would hit the buy button when it was
getting too late and she wanted to go to bed
and she wanted them to leave.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
No kidding, Yeah, I could use a button like that
when I have people over.
Speaker 3 (08:45):
Right, very functional.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
After about a year or so of teaching her dog,
Stella this hunger, decided this was something that couldn't just
stay in her living room, so she started a blog.
She would write about what her dog was learning and
her perspective as a speech therapist, and she posted videos
of Stella using the buns to talk. And at first
there were about five hundred people reading this blog, and at.
Speaker 3 (09:11):
That point she was using about thirty different words, combining
words together to create her own phrases short sentences, And
that's when I started this blog. One of the people
in the audience had a family member who was a
speech therapist, and she happened to share one of my
blog posts on her personal Facebook, and then this reporter
saw it and reached out and was like, this is
(09:32):
absolutely incredible. I want to write a story on it.
We did an interview and it just blew up in
a way that I never could have anticipated or been
prepared for. Like it was trending around the world. I
went from five hundred followers to five hundred thousand in
less than two weeks.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
Oh, that's incredible.
Speaker 3 (09:51):
It was insane, truly insane.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
How did you feel when this wave of attention and
people following you? How did you process that?
Speaker 3 (10:00):
It was of course very exciting. I again, never in
my wildest dreams thought it would reach that level of awareness.
I'm not going to lie. It was extremely overwhelming. Like
I was getting thousands of messages and emails. Reporters had
figured out how to look up my number, outs getting
house all the time, and like I was just a
normal speech therapist, working my normal job and just getting
(10:20):
flooded with everything, and suddenly it's like once it's out there,
there's no going back.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
All right. When we come back, we're going to talk
about this global movement that miss Hunger started that has
people teaching their cats, dogs, goats, and even horses do
use buttons to talk. And then we're going to talk
to these scientists that has taken this idea to the
next level. Stay with us, you're listening to sign stuff,
(11:01):
Welcome back. We're talking about whether animals can communicate. And
we started with the movement sparked by Christina Hunger's blog
where she wrote about teaching her dog Stella how to
use buttons to talk.
Speaker 3 (11:16):
Where where what weird?
Speaker 1 (11:19):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (11:20):
Weirds?
Speaker 1 (11:24):
The blog went viral and since then people around the
world have jumped on to teach their pets to use
the same buttons. So he started with dogs, but I
imagine people out there have tried it with other pets.
My friend does it with a cat. What are some
of the other animals. You've heard people try the song.
Speaker 3 (11:43):
I've seen people teach pigs to talk with buttons, some
farm animals, cows, goats, horses. I've actually worked with someone
who's teaching her horse and that was really cool as well.
So it's been just amazing to see that once the
idea was out there, people are just running with it
and trying it in all different areas.
Speaker 2 (12:02):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (12:03):
Which is the chattiest animal?
Speaker 3 (12:05):
I think dogs still from my knowledge at this point,
but cats have been very chatty as well.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
Dogs that live with us are more eager to talk
to us.
Speaker 3 (12:14):
Yeah, they're hearing us talk all the time. Oh, it's
just a unique bond between a human and a dog.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
What are some things you've heard of other dogs doing?
Speaker 3 (12:22):
Like one of my training clients recently had a really
cool story where her dog said hurt with a button
and then potty with a button, and she took her
to the vet the next day and she had a
bladder infection, something she would not have even known. Whow
So to be able to express with that level of
clarity something that was wrong and then get help immediately,
(12:44):
I mean, that's a game changer for the future of
pet care.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
Oh, incredible. What's the funniest thing Stella has said to you?
Speaker 3 (12:52):
The funniest and most heartbreaking when she's upset with me?
She has said this several times over the year, love
you No, no, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:07):
That blows my vine, Christina.
Speaker 2 (13:09):
I know.
Speaker 3 (13:09):
It's like I never would have thought by introducing a
love you button that I would someday be hearing love
you know sometime. But when she gets upset, still pull
that card sometimes love you know.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
Whow It makes me wonder, what did you do? Christina?
Speaker 3 (13:25):
It would just be like I didn't go to the
park or didn't say enough attention to her after she
had asked for something.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
Just made me think of my teenage daughter.
Speaker 3 (13:35):
A lot of drama plans the door shut.
Speaker 1 (13:37):
Yes, maybe I should get my teenage daughter some buttons.
All right, now, we're going to dive into the signs
of animal communication. As you might imagine, still, it was
not the first non human animal ever to be trained
to use signals to talk to humans, and so to
get a wider view what we know from animal study
(14:00):
in current research, I reached out to Professor Federico Rossano.
I can't get to scientists from the University of California,
San Diego, who specializes in communication between humans and animals.
He has several interesting projects, including the largest citizen science
study on bun pressing pets, and he's involved in efforts
(14:20):
to use AI to decode how whales and monkeys talk
to each other. But first I wanted to know the
history of scientists communicating with animals. Well, thank you, doctor
Rosanna for joining us, Thank you for having me. So
I was hoping you could start by just giving us
a broad history of when did we start getting interested
(14:41):
in communicating with animals.
Speaker 2 (14:43):
Well, it's a very interesting question because I believe we've
always been interested in communicating with animals. There are many
cultures that believe, for example, animals have souls and so
you can communicate with them. He can think about all
the fables for kids from two hundred years ago and
even more where we attribute to animals intelligence or emotions,
and so in that sense, the idea that animals might
(15:05):
have cognitive abilities and even things that they are trying
to communicate as existed for a long long time.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
According to doctor Rossano, a scientist in the last century
started to wonder to what extent animals can use language
and whether it's the thing that really makes humans different
from other animals. Now, one of the first people to
make the case that maybe humans are not that different
from other animals in terms of language was Jane Goodall.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
One of the first one was Jane Goodle that clearly
told us, look, these chance are communicating with each other,
and clearly they have gestions and they have facial expression,
they have signals that they convey to each other that
seem to be meaningful, they seem to be relevant. And
so once you start showing that actually wild animals might
have a code to communicate with each other, then opens
(15:57):
up a completely new possibility. Maybe, just like humans are
thousands of languages, maybe animals each species as at least
one code that they can use to communicate with each other.
And now the challenges can we crack this code?
Speaker 1 (16:12):
The next step side this tried was to teach animals words,
but they quickly found almost no animals had the ability
to pronounce words like humans.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
And so the next step was, well, what if we
teach them sign language. And a lot of animals and
these did learn sun language or at least quite a few words.
Speaker 1 (16:30):
And this is referring to Coco for example, was Coco
in the seventies.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
Coco was later, and Coco was in the eighties and
early nineties.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
Coco, by the way, was a famous gorilla passed away
in twenty eighteen. They were said to have a sign
language vocabulary of over a thousand words.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
There were several others. One of the most famous one
was Washow was a champ that I had learned actually
quite a lot of gestures. And one of the things
that I find most fascinating is he had learned a
lot of gestures, but one of the signs he could
never learn was why. It's like, how do you even
teach why? Like? What is it? What is it? The Youngaha? Anyway,
the interesting thing was some of these animals seem to
be able to learn a few underwards and use the
(17:11):
signs in a way that potentially was interesting. But some
scholars said, look is the equivalent of just Pavlov's dog bell.
Speaker 1 (17:22):
Okay, here we get to the first big issue in
the study of teaching animals to communicate, and that is
if you teach a dog or a cat or a
gorilla to use a bun or a hand sign that
means food, and they get a treat every time they
use it. Are they really learning language or are they
just learning that if you press that button they get food.
(17:44):
This is called stimulus response. You might have heard of
Pavlov's dogs, where they taught dogs to expect food every
time their trainer rings a bell. Well, here are the
lingering questions surrounding examples like Washo the champoor, Coco the gorilla,
or Stella the dog. Is whether you're really proving that
(18:04):
animals can use language in the same way that we
use language. And so the science shifted gears and it
tried a couple of different directions.
Speaker 2 (18:14):
And so in the early eighties, basically there was the
decision that this switcher should kind of be stopped. It
wasn't really helpful in anyway. Some people continued, but the
field kind of moved in three directions that I think
we're very interesting. So one was, well, what if we
actually tried to look at their natural communicative systems? Right,
So there's a famous paper from nineteen eighty on the
(18:35):
vever monkey alarm calls that basically says, hey, if you
look at vever monkeys, they have these different vocalizations that
seem to be associated to different types of predators. Like ego, leopard, snake,
and so the idea was, what if actually they have
something like words, So maybe we should look more at
the spontaneous communicative system and what they used to communicate
(18:56):
with each other instead of teaching them human language.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
That's one direction, looking at the language that animals use
on their own instead of trying to teach them a language,
and later on we'll talk about how doctor Rossano is
using AI to figure that out.
Speaker 2 (19:12):
The second direction was what if we look at animals
that can actually learn hum of vocalization and so, for example,
you can train a parrot to start reproducing the words
in that way, it's not just teaching them sign language.
But you can have animals that we know our vocal learners,
and if they can learn new sounds, maybe they can
also start putting them together in ways that might be
(19:32):
more flexible.
Speaker 3 (19:33):
Right.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
So, indeed, there was amazing research that was done on
vocalizations and teaching parrots, for example the constant of sameness
or colors and things like numbers.
Speaker 1 (19:44):
Here the most famous example is Alex, the talking great
parrot trained by doctor Irene Pepperberg that had a vocabulary
of over one hundred words I could count and name
shapes and colors. Alex lived thirty one years then pass
away in twenty oh seven. Then there's the third direction
that the science of animal communication took, and this one
(20:06):
will seem familiar.
Speaker 2 (20:08):
The third direction was, what if instead of trying to
do this training that is unclear with sign language and
what exactly do they know, we try to use something
there's a lot more automated, kind of like a touchscreen,
like almost like a keyboard that you can actually push
buttons in and then combine and create sequences. So this
had already started in the seventies, but it became particularly prominent,
(20:31):
for example with famous bernobos like Kanzi that died actually
very recently. And so the idea was, what if we
use these devices that had been used previously with long
global humans to kind of learn to communicate, for example,
that you want the start of food, or that you
want a specific object or you want to play. And
(20:51):
so the idea is they learn to associate a specific
button with the concept and then they can push it
when they want it. But then you can start combining
some those things and try to produce things that look
like scient instance, and so Canzi, for example, could use
a keyboard that has several hundred of this science. And similarly,
that was what done with dolphins, where there were dolphins
(21:13):
that actually could learn to use some symbols to request
for things. This was done with one dog in two
thousand and eight.
Speaker 1 (21:19):
Yes, this is the Pushbunton idea that's part of the
recent talking pet movement. Back then scientists even tried it
with dolphins. But here we run into the second big
issue in animal communication research, that is that often these
studies have a sample size of one.
Speaker 2 (21:37):
What happens is we're just taking usually one animal, maybe two.
We spent hours and hours and hours and hours training them,
often removing them from the natural environment, and what we
get out of this is like this one subject that
possibly is a genius, possibly is the flukes, and we
don't really know right, It's like, it's it real. Imagine
(21:58):
if like you, as a scientist, spend your entire career
just training this one animal to show that they can
do something amazing. You can see how there's skepticism, there's concerns,
and maybe you might have an interest in making sure
that the abilities are emphasized.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
It's an an equals one.
Speaker 2 (22:13):
Exactly, It's an equal one often of animals that have
been removed from the natural environment, is what you're getting
representative of what any animal in the wild could possibly
communicate about, or is it just like this one that
you spend years and years training that ends up being
able to do this.
Speaker 1 (22:31):
So that's the second issue in studying whether we can
communicate with animals, and studies where there's one scientist that
spends a long time teaching one animal to communicate, there
are lots of questions of whether this applies to all
animals in that species or whether the animal can only
speak to that one person. Although, as doctor Rosseno says,
(22:53):
a sample of n equals one is still something.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
As a scientist, it's like any equal one, it's not
an equals deal. Like if you have a flying pig,
you have a flying pig.
Speaker 4 (23:05):
I mean, it's something that we should know about, right aside,
these pigs can fly. Pigs can fly, like it's possible, right,
So it's like if all of a sudden you have
one bonobo that can start doing things and nobody else
could even imagine they could do it is worth knowing, right,
It's like we should yeah, yeah, at least investigative photo
all right.
Speaker 1 (23:24):
We'll get to the last issue, figuring out if we
can communicate with animals, and then we'll talk about the
idea of using AI to possibly translate what animals are
saying for us. Stick with us. We'll be right back,
(23:51):
and we're back. We're talking about whether we can communicate
with animals, and so far we've learned the answer is yes.
Pet owners can communicate with their dogs or cats using buns.
You can teach apes to use sign language, and you
can even teach a parrot to count and tell you
what color something is. But the answer is also sort
(24:14):
of no. We don't know for sure yet whether we
can ever truly communicate with an animal beyond simple words
or concepts. An animal's ability to use buns or sign
language could just be learned behavior like Pavlov's dogs, for example.
A famous cautionary tale in animal studies is the story
(24:36):
of Clever Haunts.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
So there's this famous horse that at the beginning of
the twentieth century was claimed to be able to do
mathematical operations, so additions and subtractions, and so the idea
was this horse became super famous and people were paying
money to go watch the horse, and so it would
be something like, okay, Hans, what is five plus two?
(25:00):
And so you hear Hans kind of knocking his hoof
from the ground, and when he gets to like five
six seven, and then it would stop and people just
you know, start clapping and being amazed. But god, but
what happened was that Hans was very good at picking
up cues from the audience in terms of when he
(25:21):
was hitting the right number. So people were all of
a sudden smiling when he was the correct answer, and
so he was kind of like slowly hitting the holes
until he got the correct one. I see you smile.
Now I'm done. Obviously he couldn't do math. He was
just picking up cues.
Speaker 1 (25:38):
It's almost a little more impressive than counting yes.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
So that's a funny thing. So clever haunts as a
term has been used in almost a derogatory way to
refer to people believe the animals can do things that
really they cannot do.
Speaker 1 (25:53):
Now, doctor Rossana has two interesting projects he's involved in.
The first is that he's the lead researcher basically the
scientific side of the Talking pet movement, doing science on
a massive scale. The second project is that he's using
AI to study how animals communicate in the wild. We'll
talk about the Talking Pet project first.
Speaker 2 (26:16):
And so this thing started because a speech language pathologist
in twenty nineteen. This went viral and then a clips online.
I'm not on social media, so I didn't even know,
but basically a colleague asked me, you know, would you
like to do this? I thought it was going to
be a lot side project, and I media realized a
lot of people thought this was a terrible idea. So
(26:37):
I had a lot of colleagues telling me, what are
you doing. Didn't you know that we stopped doing the
cameray so thirty years ago, fuckty years ago, And I
was like, yeah, because we were doing with chips. But
now there's are dogs. Well let's look into this and
let's see what happens. We now have ten thousand dogs,
and actually every week we keep getting an out of
(26:57):
twenty thirty dogs signed up and seven hunderd cat in
the study from forty seven countries, and just to give
you an idea, we get one million. Buttom presses pretty
much every month.
Speaker 1 (27:08):
Yes, there are ten thousand dogs and owners signed up.
And if you go to the University of California, San Diego,
Comparative Condition Lab website. You can sign up to potentially
be on the study too. So what have they learned
so far from these thousands of dogs and cats?
Speaker 2 (27:26):
One other thing I love is you can see what
buttons are pressed the mass and if you are a dog,
what do you think is the button they press the
moss freak, food free, and then it's outside and then
it's play. And so you're like, yeah, does it sound
like a dog? Yeah, that seems very reasonable. My favorite
thing is we're now looking at the cat data. One
(27:47):
of the top five buttons for cats is.
Speaker 4 (27:50):
No, I'm not gonna do it anyway.
Speaker 2 (27:56):
But the idea is, you know, once you have thousands
of these animals and try to do a bunch of things.
Speaker 1 (28:02):
Okay, here are some of the things doctor Rossanna has
learned about what cats and dogs communicate. The first is
that apparently dogs do care about you.
Speaker 2 (28:13):
And what I've learned by looking at what they communicate about,
in addition to food, water, playings on, is that these
are social animals, and social animals often ask about where
are the people that used to be in the house
And I'm not currently in the house, somebody is gone,
where is that? When the cat dies, they keep asking
about where is the cat? And when you are out
(28:36):
of the house, they might ask about you. And so
they think about you, and they think about the ones
around you, and they think about the other animals they
live with. And it's kind of obvious and yet mind
blowing to be reminded that, like maybe the same way
in which you care for them, they care for you too,
And it isn't that nice to know?
Speaker 1 (28:55):
So you're seeing this in the data that this is
not a fluid that one does did it? Three dogs?
Did it?
Speaker 2 (29:01):
No? I mean you see it in the data. You
see that many of them ask about humans that are
not at them, including the experimentals, Like the experimental will
be there that will give them treats and stuff, and
then they will ask later it's like where is the
treat to human? What is the treat to you? And
they also communicate a lot about how they're feeling, being
(29:22):
scared or being frustrated, or being dealing with something that
is bothering them. And especially you know when some of
the animals they live with ee and you see them
asking when they're sick. So we have examples of some
of them saying they're concerned about some other animals, maybe
because they're limping or they seem to be sluggish and
(29:42):
so on. And I think the idea is these are animals,
they have some level of empathy and they care about others.
Speaker 1 (29:51):
The other interesting thing doctor Rossano and his team have
found is related to the last issue in the animal communication,
and that is whether animals can use words in new ways.
This is a concept called productivity. You might be able
to teach an animal that certain buns or signs mean
certain concepts, but a true test of whether animals can
(30:13):
really understand language is whether they can mix words to
name something they've never seen before. And apparently some dogs
can't do this.
Speaker 2 (30:23):
We have one of the dogs started using the combination
water bone water bond and the owner was like, I
don't know what you're asking for, until they realized that
water bone was ice, and so they start giving them ice.
And once they introduce the bottom ice, they stopped pushing
the combination water bone because now they have the water
for it.
Speaker 1 (30:41):
Right, So dogs can put together words to make new meanings,
does that mean they understand language?
Speaker 2 (30:49):
So the issue is there's a lot of anecdotal reports
and I've seen clips of course of animals using these
things in a way that seem to be contextually appropriate
and conveying productivity. But as a scientist, ideally you want
to test it. The issue when you see clips and
so on is that you never know if it was like, oh,
did you actually train this? Was there some other way
(31:11):
in which you recreated this scenario and now you filmed it.
Whatever you see on TikTok on YouTube these days, you're like,
was it really spontaneous or was it made up? So
the idea is to design studies in which you try
to elicit those kind of responses, right, So that's what
we're trying to do.
Speaker 1 (31:27):
As the anecdotes are not enough to show that they
can do things.
Speaker 2 (31:31):
Anecdotes are informative. If you have all the details of
those anecdotes, they show that it might be possible.
Speaker 1 (31:39):
I think you're trying to tell me I shouldn't believe
everything I see on YouTube.
Speaker 2 (31:42):
Correct. Well, I mean it is a very important problem
for us, and I think anecdotal reports are helpful. Please
stand them along. But do not think that just because hey,
one time my dog did this, then it has been
proven scientifically that that's the truth.
Speaker 1 (32:00):
Okay, The last topic we're going to talk about is
using AI to understand what animals are saying when they
talk to each other. Can we decipher their natural communication language?
Speaker 2 (32:12):
Yes. So there's at least two big projects that are
big collaborations across several scientists that are interested in decoding
animal communication. One is the Species Project. It started with
dolphins and whales and so on, and that has now
expanded to other species. Another project is called Project SETTI
(32:32):
specifically started with the goal of understanding whales songs.
Speaker 1 (32:36):
And so what are we learning with all these different
AI understanding language projects.
Speaker 2 (32:42):
Some of the things, for example, we're learning is that
a lot of animals seem to add signals that would
be similar to names, like a way of kind of
referring to this specific individual in the group. And that
is very interesting. Right, So we didn't know that animals
might have names for each other, and so this is
an interesting phenomenon being documented now for dolphins and for elephants.
Speaker 1 (33:03):
Dolphins and elephants have names for each other.
Speaker 2 (33:05):
It's a little symptom, fine, but yes, right.
Speaker 1 (33:09):
The last question I asked our experts was why communicate
with animals?
Speaker 3 (33:14):
Ooh, I think it's incredible that we can actually hear
how our animals are experiencing the environment we share with them.
We can have such a better understanding of what they're
thinking about, what their needs are, how we can care
for them, and ultimately, I think it'll help us treat
our animals a lot better and learn what they've been
(33:35):
trying to say all these years.
Speaker 1 (33:37):
Yeah, I guess it's a different thing if something is
actually talking to you, even.
Speaker 3 (33:41):
If people aren't teaching their own pets in their homes,
just the knowledge that it's possible for a dog to
use words and create sentences, it's like, Okay, this is
a very complex creature that is living in my home.
I think it can give a really good appreciation of
how smarts our pets are and how much deserve.
Speaker 1 (34:01):
How do we learn more about what you do and
how to teach our pets how to use this system.
Speaker 3 (34:06):
So my very first book, How Sell Learned to Talk,
is the whole story of the idea that I had
all the way through this communication breakthrough and then the
world learning about it. Then my second book, Your Dog
Can Talk, is the step by step training guide, and
then you can find our buttons hunger for words, talking
pet buttons and any major retailer Amazon, Showy, pet Co
(34:27):
and get started with your own pet.
Speaker 1 (34:30):
Does it also work with teenage daughters?
Speaker 3 (34:33):
I have seen some applications in the Home for humans
very fun. So whoever needs the buttons, go ahead and
set it up. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (34:41):
I bet the most popular button would be the mute button.
Yeah really, well, thank you so much for joining us,
MS Hunger.
Speaker 3 (34:47):
Yeah, thanks for having me. It is blast.
Speaker 2 (34:50):
We know that, for example, a dog can smell things
much better than we can. We know that certain animals
can hear things that we cannot hear. We know that
others can see things that we cannot see. There's so
many abilities that are part of the natural kingdom the
humans do not quite well. Imagine you're like looking at
the world in which there's an infinite amount of possibility
(35:12):
in terms of what animals can do. What if they
could tell you? Just imagine how different our sense of
being in this world would be.
Speaker 1 (35:21):
So if we could communicate with them, they could tell us.
Speaker 2 (35:24):
That's the dream, right? What does an elephant know? What
does the dog know? What does a lion know? What
does a whale know that we don't know?
Speaker 1 (35:31):
Not? Just what can we learn about them, but what
can we learn from them?
Speaker 2 (35:35):
What can we learn from them? And how does that
change es? And so that's my dream.
Speaker 1 (35:41):
All right. We hope you enjoyed that. Please tell your
dog or cat that I said hi. Thanks for joining us,
See you next time. You've been listening to Science Stuff.
Production of iHeartRadio, written and produced by me or Yhm,
edited by Rose Seguda, Executive producer Jerry Rowland, and audio
(36:04):
engineer and mixer Kasey Peckram. And you can follow me
on social media. Just search for PhD Comics and the
name of your favorite platform. Be sure to subscribe to
Sign Stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you get your podcasts, and please tell your friends we'll
be back next Wednesday with another episode.
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