Hey, welcome to Sign Stuff, a production of iHeartRadio. I'm Hoore Cham and in this short bonus episode, we're answering the question can a cat talk to a dog? This is a companion piece to our recent full episode about animal communication. If you haven't listened to that one, be sure to check it out. But in this mini episode, I catch up to my friend and science fiction author
Mary Robinette Kowal. Mary Robinette was actually the first guest we ever had on the program for the episode to our Pets Lie to us, and I thought it'd be great to check in with her since she's the one who told us about the whole movement to teach pets to talk. She's taught both her cat and her dog to use a communication device, and so in this conversation, we'll finally find out what happens when a dog and a cat speak the same language.
Joy.
Hey, Mary Robinette, how are you. I'm good.
Good to see you again.
Yeah, it's so great to hear from you again, my first guest ever. That's right, I feel so fancy And now you're back.
I am happy to be back. You've done some pretty cool episodes so far about different animals that I've been excited to listen to.
Oh yeah, what did you think?
Yeah, the one about animal's perceptions of death. I was like, pretty cool and parts of kind of intense.
Yes, that's been one of my favorite episodes to do. Well, it's great to catch up with you. The last time we talked, you asked this whether pets lie because you had taught your cat to talk through the system, and so I just wanted to learn a little bit more about the origins of this with you. So when did you first hear about this idea that you could maybe teach your cat to talk? Sure?
So I was researching a novel. I wanted to look into animal language acquisition and trying to get a sense of what sort of vocabularies were plausible for an animal to have, And in doing so, I stumbled across a couple of different talking animal all accounts, one of which was Christina Hunger and I saw it and initially was very skeptical. But the more videos I watched, I started watching what about Bunny and There's a sheep a doodle and Billy speaks who was the first cat that was
doing this? And realized, oh, it doesn't actually matter if it's a language, it is definitely communication.
Okay, So give me some examples of communication moments would that have been significant or interesting?
I'll tell you the first one that made me go, oh, this is the thing that's really happening. I think she had only like five buttons or so at this point, and she pressed open and I opened the door to the apartment and she said open, and like, Elsie, the door's open. Open, Open, Elsie, the door is open. And then she says open help, and I'm like, okay, well
that's new. So I stood up and she walked away from the button board to the bedroom door, which was closed, and I opened the door and she be lined for her water and started drinking, and I thought, this is amazing. And then after she finished drinking the water, she walked back to the and she said open love you.
Right.
What?
Yeah?
I don't know how to read that any other way than that she was thanking me with the tools that she had available.
Wow. Can you please teach my teenage kids this fIF courtesy?
Maybe just get your teenager some buttons?
Yeah, that might be better. Yeah, you said you also had an example where you're like, what's going on? Right?
So this is the one that I offer to people as this is why you should do this with your pets. So Elsie has a knee injury. We don't know what happened. She sits with her leg sticking out to the side, but the vets have checked it out and it's all been fine and doesn't seem to cause her any problems. And a couple of months ago, Elsie started saying various
combinations of leg and ouch. And because the system logs her button presses automatically for me, I could see that leg was not a word that she used very often at all. She'd only used it two other times this year, and not with the word ouch. Like I've seen her say ouch and have a hair bowl or ouch when her feelings are hurt, but like an ouch that was new and so I feel a little alarmist. But I contact the vet and I'm like, she has no new symptoms,
but she's saying this, so maybe she tweaked it. So I make an appointment. The vet does a physical examination, so she said, let's do imaging since she's reporting this, And the imaging turned up an ACL injury and severe arthritis WOOA, which we would not have spotted, so then it gets even more like bonkers. The vet gives us pain medication and I give it to Elsie that night, and about twenty minutes after that, she goes to her
button board and she says thank you. And I had to give her the medicine for a couple of nights running, and every night after she got the medicine, she would go to the board and she would say thank you. So at this point Elsie now has the word medicine on the board and she would ask for medication about once a week. Wow, which meant that instead of having to medicate her every day, she was opting in to get medication on the days that her leg was bothering her more.
As she's able to communicate it when she needed it.
When she needs it, So being able to do as needed medication for an animal is a complete game changer.
Yeah. Okay, that's Mary Ruminant's cat Elsie. Now here's where I asked her what happened when she also taught her dog Guppy to dog using the buttons.
So it's called augmentative interspecies communication, and mostly the inner species is human to animal, but there is some cross species animal communication. I have seen her and Guppy talk to each other with the buttons, and it doesn't happen often, but one of them will initiate play by spressing the button.
Play meaning your cat, now talk to your dog via those buttons?
Correct?
Do you have a bun for? Like, uh, what's up? Dog?
Kind of? Elsie has one hundred and thirty words, Guppy, who's a smart dog. It's just very simple girl. And so she's got eighteen words and basically thinks they all mean either friend or outside.
She plaited kind of at eighteen words.
She could go farther, but the things that she wants to communicate are just less complicated.
That's incredible. Well, I'll ask you how you're processing all of this, but if you don't mind what happened with the companion animal here, I'm asking Mary Robinette about another cat he had called Helix.
So Helix was sick for a very long time. I think he was probably sick from the moment he came to us. We only had him for about two years. He had good days and bad days, and we tried everything. So we had to have him put down, and it was a very very difficult decision. We didn't have Elsie watch, but we did bring her in after he was gone to talk about the fact that his ouch was all done and that he was dead. And so that night, Elsie,
she was walking around the apartment. She smelled the spot where we had had him, and then she went over to his favorite chair, she smelled his bed, and then she went to the button board and she said concerned, and then she did the most plaintive mew and I was just it was it was heartbreaking.
Wow.
Four months later, she was wandering around the apartment and just spontaneously, out of nowhere, she went to the board and said, let's go Helix play.
Oh, like she was trying to call him.
And so I don't remember the entire sequence, but I remember the one time when I was attempting to talk to her about the fact that he was gone. And after we talked, I had left the room, gone into the bedroom, and she goes over to her button board and says something like, I don't understand sad ouch, and I'm just like I saw the footage later and I just like, I'm just sobbing.
On her own. She pressed it.
Yeah, and so like she continues to talk about him. He died in twenty twenty three, and she will occasionally still just bring him up critical. Yeah, it feels like I am in a fantasy novel or science fiction novel, like somehow I got the D and D talk to animals spell, I can do that now?
Wow? Yeah, tell me more about that. This is way more than you were expecting.
So much more so, Like I'm a science fiction writer, right, I am having conversations with a non human intelligence on a daily basis in my home. Oh and that's the other thing that I was not expecting. Across species, they will use whatever their word is, whatever button you've put down for excrement, the learners will use it as a curse word. No what And so you give her the word litter box and she will press that.
That means poop, that means crap.
It means this is some bullshit. Yeah from doom scrolling. You know, I get things like device all done? Oh really, litterbox?
Yeah? Well, how did it feel to have your cat called bullshit on you?
I mean, she's usually right on the side.
She keeps you honest.
She does keep me honest.
So what have you learned about how CAD views the world?
There's a word called umveldt, which is the lins through which someone experiences the world.
Uh huh.
And the idea is that every creature has a different kind linsseet than humans. Do you know, like the mantis from that have like all of these color ranges that we can't see. Cats, they can see the same colors that we can, but they have fifty times the synth receptors that we do. And so talking to her, watching the way she interacts the world with the things that are important to her are just completely different than the
way I experience the world. I have so much more understanding and appreciation for the fact that she has an interior life.
Amazing, well awesome. Thanks for sharing all these stories, Mary Roman It, I really appreciate it.
Yeah, I am extremely happy to I'm always happy to talk about my Dinna cat.
Be here to t out the full episode on animal communication. Thanks for joining us, See you next time you've been listening to science stuff. Production of iHeartRadio written and produced by me or Hm predited by Rose Seguda, executive producer Jerry Rowland, and audio engineer and mixer Kasey Peckram And you can follow me on social media to search for
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