CAN PETS TALK?
Online videos of animals communicating with words are going viral. Videos show cats and dogs pressing buttons on a soundboard while their owners reply to them. The pets have a range of buttons they can press to play an audio recording of human speech. Each button plays a different word and requires owners to train their pet to associate the sounds with their meanings. One dog owner who has achieved a great deal of success with this is Alexis Devine, a user on the social media platform Tik Tok. She asks her dog Bunny questions, who responds with buttons. While these won’t be full sentences, the combination of words makes it clear what the sheepadoodle is asking for, such as “more, food, now”. There’s even a video showing Bunny looking in the mirror before running to the buttons and pressing “who’s this”. After seeing the videos, scientists at the Comparative Cognition Lab at the University of California, San Diego have begun research, studying dogs, cats and horses to learn more about the capabilities of our pets’ brains.