Groundbreaking story of the world’s first talking dog

HOW STELLA LEARNED TO TALK

SOMETIMES truth is stranger than fiction and in this amazing, revolutionary but true story, speechlanguage pathologist Christina Hunger offers a surprising guide of how to teach your dog to talk.

Hunger taught her dog, Stella, to communicate, using simple paw-sized buttons associated with different words.

When she first came home with her puppy it didn’t take Hunger long to start drawing connections between her job and her new pet.

During the day, she worked with toddlers who had delayed language development and used augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) devices to help them communicate.

At night, she wondered: If dogs can understand words we say to them, shouldn’t they be able to say words to us? Can dogs use AAC to communicate with humans?

Christina decided to put her theory to the test with her dog.

Using a paw-sized button, she programmed with her voice to say the word “outside” when clicked, whenever she took Stella out of the house. A few years later, Stella now has a bank of more than 30 word buttons, and uses them daily, either singly or combined, to create nearcomplete sentences.

Part memoir and part how-to guide, it chronicles the journey Christina and Stella have taken together, from the day they met, to the day Stella “spoke” her first word, and the other breakthroughs they’ve had since. It offers techniques Christina used to teach Stella, broken down into simple stages and actionable steps that any dog owner can use to start communication with their beloved pets.

This incredible book is filled with conversations that Stella and Christina have had. It also includes highly detailed information that only a professional speech-language pathologist could know, making it an indispensable guide to get you and your doggie on a path to communication.