Dog communicating through a custom sound board.

Hi @Tuulikki. I follow a cat on instragram (billispeaks) that has learned to use the board. Of course her favorite word is “mad” 😆.

If cats had twitter, they'd be going on about how they got their stupid humans to believe they were seriously trying to communicate with them with the board. Really, they are just messing with their heads for the fun of it. Nothing gets em running like MAD!
I take it back 😽 that Billie knows a thing or two. You have to love them... As for my two kitties, Bob and Ruby....not so sure :whistle:
 
There are other ways we communicate, but the key message is paying attention to finding how to communicate with each other.
she uses her tail a lot , which is typical for cats. They also have more vocalisations than dogs, and only meow to communicate with humans. They do not meow in the wild.

It’s fascinating that domestic animals may be trying all the time to communicate with us. Paying attention and trying to learn their language is really a wonderful experience and activity.
I think I am just not paying enough attention. I think I will observe my kitties more and see what they are up to. You have one smart cat @gottathink. One thing my kitties do - I wish they wouldn't - is to bring live prey in for me to admire or eat, I am not sure which. They drop it on the carpet and watch me for a little while to see what my reaction is. If it is live mouse I will try to catch it and put it outside (well away from the house) or if it is a live bird and I think it stands a chance of survival, I will take it to my local wildlife hospital. I am very adept at catching mice these days. Fascinating creatures...cats 🐱🐭🐦😻
 
I get a lot of voles and lizards placed on the doormat, occasionally a small snake. They are dead, but not mutilated. My dog used to bring decapitated squirrels. That was just weird to see.
 
I think I am just not paying enough attention. I think I will observe my kitties more and see what they are up to. You have one smart cat @gottathink. One thing my kitties do - I wish they wouldn't - is to bring live prey in for me to admire or eat, I am not sure which. They drop it on the carpet and watch me for a little while to see what my reaction is. If it is live mouse I will try to catch it and put it outside (well away from the house) or if it is a live bird and I think it stands a chance of survival, I will take it to my local wildlife hospital. I am very adept at catching mice these days. Fascinating creatures...cats 🐱🐭🐦😻
Oh yes they are for sure.
I don’t think my cat is particularly smart or unique. I just think it is because I have engaged with her. Taking time and putting effort into learning her language. Then she seems to know I want to understand her and looks for ways to communicate with me. For example, she wakes us up in the morning by rattling my beads on the mirror. If I sleep in she will rattle the blinds as she knows when I get up I open them. She does this even after my husband has gotten up to feed her. She decides that it’s time for me to get up. She has been really good for me, elevating me out of depressive habits.
She figured these communications out all on her own. So if your cats are aware that you are paying attention perhaps they will start to find ways to express themselves.

Also be prepared for rejection. Cats will tell you when they don’t want attention and to go away leave them alone. Don’t take it personally, they just need their own space and celebrate that they communicate this.
 
Wow cool! Us humans are getting better at figuring this out. These communication tools and systems are bringing communication with the animals into our consciousness.
Wonder where it will go to?
Humans learning to commune with other species makes life worth living.
For me it makes being human a worthwhile experience. An expansion of the conscious experience/experiment.
This totally is an antidote for all my nihilistic depressive inclinations. It’s like music and art and the thrill of problem solving.
 
Another adorable communicating doggie :-)


Imagine being told to shut up by your dog! It really makes a lot of sense though. Since they have much more sensitive hearing more noises would be uncomfortable to them.


Apparently cats and horses are also taking part in a project to study cognition in animals through teaching them to communicate through the buttons.

After Devine’s videos started picking up traction in early spring, Federico Rossano, director of the Comparative Cognition Lab at UC San Diego, started discussing them with people in his department. They began planning a project to study Bunny and other dogs like her who are learning to use the buttons. They hope to determine scientifically whether non-humans can really use something like language to communicate. There are now over 700 participants, including dogs, cats, and even horses, and Rossano says the growing number is almost certainly due to Bunny’s popularity drawing people in.
[snip]
When Bunny presses “Settle, Sound, Ouch,” she might be using a novel string of known words to tell someone to quiet down, or she might be pressing a random series of buttons while confirmation bias on our part does the rest of the work. Even Devine says that she thinks Bunny’s “speech” is primarily operant conditioning, where Bunny has made an association between pressing a button and something happening. A true understanding of language goes beyond simple associations, and involves pulling unique combinations of words together into narratives.

Bunny and her cohort are part of a long legacy of the search for human-like communication and cognition in animals. There are famous non-human primate examples like Kanzi, the bonobo who has memorized hundreds of symbols on a special keyboard. There are also dogs like Chaser, who could remember the names of over 1,000 objects. The researchers at UC San Diego are less interested in how many symbols or words Bunny can memorize, and more in how her vocabulary might lend to meaningful communication with humans.

The project mentioned above is outlined here: They can talk
 
Imagine being told to shut up by your dog! It really makes a lot of sense though. Since they have much more sensitive hearing more noises would be uncomfortable to them.
The dog said "Ball Ball Ball settle sound ouch". As I understood, the dog meant to stop throwing the ball repeatedly onto the wooden floor because it gives him an uncomfortable sound (and it sounds kind of clicky too). He didn't mean "stop talking", IMHO. If he meant "shut up and throw my ball!" then the "ouch" makes less sense to me.
 
Here's a new one that's kind of funny because it touches on a breed generalisation - a labrador asks for a bath when she has just had one :lol:

The owner also addresses differences in perception - how she can introduce a word but the dog has a different idea of meaning to what she intended.

 
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