Christina Hunger

Christina Hunger is a real-life Dr. Dolittle, said Reed Tucker in the New York Post. Over the past three years, the young speech pathologist has trained her dog to communicate in English using a series of pawsize buttons that each play a pre-recorded word. Hunger’s new book, How Stella Learned to Talk, recounts the process and offers advice on how readers can do the same. “Outside” was Stella’s first word, followed closely by “water” and “play.” Today, Stella makes use of nearly 50 words or phrases, displaying a facility that has attracted a large Instagram following. She might, when being taken outside by Christina’s boyfriend, stop to assemble a complex thought: “Christina, come, play, love you.” Hunger learns from the experiment every day. “Dogs are thinking a lot,” she says. “They have opinions and are wanting to share them.”

Stella’s accomplishments “raise questions about how we define speech,” said Nora Krug in The Washington Post. Some skeptics have questioned whether Stella has simply learned to press buttons that she knows will earn her rewards. But Hunger has never fed Stella treats during the training. She also rejects the idea that some harm is done by teaching a dog to communicate in a way that is unnatural. “Using the words is just one of the ways for her to express herself,” she says. Stella may also be on her way to greater feats, given that dogs, by some estimates, can understand upward of 1,000 words. Still, Stella will probably never understand that her story has already been published. “She has seen the book, as an object. But she’s a dog,” Hunger says. “She has no concept about the content.”