Can We Communicate with Animals?

Hey, please take a second and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to the podcast. Thanks a lot. Hey, welcome to Sign Stuff, a production of iHeartRadio I'm More Cham and today we're answering the question can we communicate with animals? Can you have an actual conversation with your cat or a real dialogue with your dog? And could we use AI to talk to

Hey?

Everyone, So I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but recently I learned there's a worldwide movement to teach pets to talk. Tens of thousands of people around the world are teaching their cats and dogs and rabbits and even lizards to use words and even put together sentences. And once you learn what some of these animals have to say, I think you're going to be surprised. So We're going to talk to two people today. One is the woman who started this worldwide movement, and the other is a Conicis

Yes, thank you for having me. My name is Christina Hunger. I'm a speech language pathologist and I'm the founder of Hunger for Words, which is the whole talking pet movement.

Amazing. Can you describe what Hunger for Words and the Talking Pet movement are?

Yes. So, as a speech therapist, I worked with kids, and in my jobularly, I worked with a lot of kids who had different disabilities and disorders and couldn't actually talk with verbal speech. They used communication devices instead, and so that really inspired everything that I discovered that dogs were capable of.

What did you know about animal communication before you had this idea?

Very little? And I think that's why I was able to see this from a new perspective. I knew that dogs understood words because I had a dog growing up. But then once I brought my puppy Stella home, I was really observing her from this new perspective as a speech therapist and saw how quickly she was picking up on the words we were saying.

I guess you mean like if you tell a dog sit or a rollover, or would you like to go for a walk, and they get excited, then you have the sense that they understand you exactly.

And so I knew that these associations were possible, but I didn't know how much dogs were capable of understanding. I just knew that something was there now.

In her work as a speech therapist, because Hunger work kids with disabilities who were non verbal or couldn't talk, and she would often use devices that the kids would press a button on or have a screen on to say words. And this gave her an idea, did you explicitly think to yourself, huh, I wonder what would happen if I tried to teach my dog more words using these devices.

I had this very clear epiphany moment where I was watching my puppy Stella, seeing how she was understanding words. I was knowing you know, remembering that dog's understand words. And I was also watching how she was already communicating. She would bark at me to get attention. She would pot her water dish and it was empty, and I was like, she's doing so many things that kids do right before they start talking. I was like, I was in a speech therapy session right now, I would be saying,

Now did you actually make a device or did you so?

My first thought was could I use something that already exists that I use with kids. Most of the devices kids would use their fingers to tap a very small icon, like on an iPad or a tablet, but I thought that would be too tricky with her paw and her nose. So then I found just some simple, recordable buttons and then adapted them eventually and put them all together on one big board for her, which was then her communication device. So I wanted, like the easiest way to test it out.

Whoah, you didn't think like I need an iPad the size of a table. Her Stella just made me think of what would happen if you give a dog a phone and the internet? Yeah, right, look up treats all the time.

Yeah, really different parks that they want to go to.

So Miss Hunger basically gave her puppy Stella a giant keyboard had big colored buttons that, when press would say a pre recorded word like water or walk. Okay, so you got the system, you put it in your house for Stella, and then what happened? How did you get started?

So?

I started just with a few words. At first, I just thought like could I teach her to say a few different words to maybe express like some needs that she has. So I started with outside, play, water, and then eventually I added like eat and walk. And for about a month I did the same thing that I would do with kids every day. I just used the buttons as I was talking. So whenever I was saying outside, I would push the button, show her which one it was, also say it with my verbal speech, and then take

Wow. Initially she totally didn't even think it was a thing to pay attention to.

Oh yeah, for the first two weeks, she didn't even look at them.

So for weeks her dog Stella would just ignore the buttons. And I think it's safe to say that anyone of us would have just given up by now, but Miss Hunger's unique background as a speech therapist told her to keep trying. And then one day something happened.

And then about three weeks and she literally just looked at the button for the first time and then looked up at me, and I was so excited. And then within a week of that moment is when she started using it for the first time.

Whoa. It happened quickly once she had that realization of what it was.

So after about a month, the first word she said was outside. And when she said outside with her button, she went outside and went to the bathroom immediately. So that was really exciting because it wasn't just like pressing it to explore. So then I was wondering, you know, is she going to use outside for everything that she

I imagine you got very excited.

Oh yeah, I was really really excited when she sat outside for the first time, But it actually wasn't until an unexpected milestone and I started getting like really excited and shocked. And that was just a couple of months after that, she started using words for different purposes that I hadn't taught her, like the same what buttons, but in situations that I had never modeled. And that's when my speech therapist s brain really started going crazy with the potential.

Okay, this part is important. We'll get into the signs of using words in different contexts and something called productivity in sentence structure later in the program. Oh what do you mean she used buttons for different purposes?

So, like I had always just modeled water when her water dish was empty or when I was filling up her water bowl. But one day I was watering my plants, which Stella always really liked watching me do, and she walked all the way out of the room down the hall to her buttons and said water, and so I was like, oh, okay, she mut sneed water. I walked down the hall looked at her water bowl. It was totally full, and she didn't take a drink of water.

Wow.

Stella wanted to kind of show off.

Yeah, I like water. That's what she's doing.

I know what that is exactly. There's a button for that, right.

And it was just so much more about connection in that moment than just saying a button or pushing a button to get something. She was using a word just to connect and share.

How did people around you react?

It was at that point where they started to be like amazed as well, Like my friends would come over and Stella would hit the buy button when it was getting too late and she wanted to go to bed and she wanted them to leave.

No kidding, Yeah, I could use a button like that when I have people over.

Right, very functional.

After about a year or so of teaching her dog, Stella this hunger, decided this was something that couldn't just stay in her living room, so she started a blog. She would write about what her dog was learning and her perspective as a speech therapist, and she posted videos of Stella using the buns to talk. And at first there were about five hundred people reading this blog, and at.

That point she was using about thirty different words, combining words together to create her own phrases short sentences, And that's when I started this blog. One of the people in the audience had a family member who was a speech therapist, and she happened to share one of my blog posts on her personal Facebook, and then this reporter saw it and reached out and was like, this is absolutely incredible. I want to write a story on it.

Oh, that's incredible.

It was insane, truly insane.

How did you feel when this wave of attention and people following you? How did you process that?

It was of course very exciting. I again, never in my wildest dreams thought it would reach that level of awareness. I'm not going to lie. It was extremely overwhelming. Like I was getting thousands of messages and emails. Reporters had figured out how to look up my number, outs getting house all the time, and like I was just a normal speech therapist, working my normal job and just getting flooded with everything, and suddenly it's like once it's out there, there's no going back.

All right. When we come back, we're going to talk about this global movement that miss Hunger started that has people teaching their cats, dogs, goats, and even horses do use buttons to talk. And then we're going to talk to these scientists that has taken this idea to the next level. Stay with us, you're listening to sign stuff,

Where where what weird?

Yeah?

Weirds?

The blog went viral and since then people around the world have jumped on to teach their pets to use the same buttons. So he started with dogs, but I imagine people out there have tried it with other pets. My friend does it with a cat. What are some of the other animals. You've heard people try the song.

I've seen people teach pigs to talk with buttons, some farm animals, cows, goats, horses. I've actually worked with someone who's teaching her horse and that was really cool as well. So it's been just amazing to see that once the idea was out there, people are just running with it and trying it in all different areas.

Wow.

Which is the chattiest animal?

I think dogs still from my knowledge at this point, but cats have been very chatty as well.

Dogs that live with us are more eager to talk to us.

Yeah, they're hearing us talk all the time. Oh, it's just a unique bond between a human and a dog.

What are some things you've heard of other dogs doing?

Like one of my training clients recently had a really cool story where her dog said hurt with a button and then potty with a button, and she took her to the vet the next day and she had a bladder infection, something she would not have even known. Whow So to be able to express with that level of clarity something that was wrong and then get help immediately, I mean, that's a game changer for the future of pet care.

Oh, incredible. What's the funniest thing Stella has said to you?

The funniest and most heartbreaking when she's upset with me? She has said this several times over the year, love you No, no, Yeah.

That blows my vine, Christina.

I know.

It's like I never would have thought by introducing a love you button that I would someday be hearing love you know sometime. But when she gets upset, still pull that card sometimes love you know.

Whow It makes me wonder, what did you do? Christina?

It would just be like I didn't go to the park or didn't say enough attention to her after she had asked for something.

Just made me think of my teenage daughter.

A lot of drama plans the door shut.

Yes, maybe I should get my teenage daughter some buttons. All right, now, we're going to dive into the signs of animal communication. As you might imagine, still, it was not the first non human animal ever to be trained to use signals to talk to humans, and so to get a wider view what we know from animal study in current research, I reached out to Professor Federico Rossano.

Well, it's a very interesting question because I believe we've always been interested in communicating with animals. There are many cultures that believe, for example, animals have souls and so

According to doctor Rossano, a scientist in the last century started to wonder to what extent animals can use language and whether it's the thing that really makes humans different from other animals. Now, one of the first people to make the case that maybe humans are not that different from other animals in terms of language was Jane Goodall.

One of the first one was Jane Goodle that clearly told us, look, these chance are communicating with each other, and clearly they have gestions and they have facial expression, they have signals that they convey to each other that seem to be meaningful, they seem to be relevant. And so once you start showing that actually wild animals might have a code to communicate with each other, then opens

The next step side this tried was to teach animals words, but they quickly found almost no animals had the ability to pronounce words like humans.

And so the next step was, well, what if we teach them sign language. And a lot of animals and these did learn sun language or at least quite a few words.

And this is referring to Coco for example, was Coco in the seventies.

Coco was later, and Coco was in the eighties and early nineties.

Coco, by the way, was a famous gorilla passed away in twenty eighteen. They were said to have a sign language vocabulary of over a thousand words.

There were several others. One of the most famous one was Washow was a champ that I had learned actually quite a lot of gestures. And one of the things that I find most fascinating is he had learned a lot of gestures, but one of the signs he could never learn was why. It's like, how do you even teach why? Like? What is it? What is it? The Youngaha? Anyway, the interesting thing was some of these animals seem to be able to learn a few underwards and use the

Okay, here we get to the first big issue in the study of teaching animals to communicate, and that is if you teach a dog or a cat or a gorilla to use a bun or a hand sign that means food, and they get a treat every time they use it. Are they really learning language or are they just learning that if you press that button they get food. This is called stimulus response. You might have heard of Pavlov's dogs, where they taught dogs to expect food every

And so in the early eighties, basically there was the decision that this switcher should kind of be stopped. It wasn't really helpful in anyway. Some people continued, but the field kind of moved in three directions that I think we're very interesting. So one was, well, what if we

That's one direction, looking at the language that animals use on their own instead of trying to teach them a language, and later on we'll talk about how doctor Rossano is using AI to figure that out.

The second direction was what if we look at animals that can actually learn hum of vocalization and so, for example, you can train a parrot to start reproducing the words in that way, it's not just teaching them sign language. But you can have animals that we know our vocal learners, and if they can learn new sounds, maybe they can also start putting them together in ways that might be more flexible.

Right.

So, indeed, there was amazing research that was done on vocalizations and teaching parrots, for example the constant of sameness or colors and things like numbers.

Here the most famous example is Alex, the talking great parrot trained by doctor Irene Pepperberg that had a vocabulary of over one hundred words I could count and name shapes and colors. Alex lived thirty one years then pass away in twenty oh seven. Then there's the third direction that the science of animal communication took, and this one will seem familiar.

The third direction was, what if instead of trying to do this training that is unclear with sign language and what exactly do they know, we try to use something there's a lot more automated, kind of like a touchscreen, like almost like a keyboard that you can actually push buttons in and then combine and create sequences. So this had already started in the seventies, but it became particularly prominent, for example with famous bernobos like Kanzi that died actually

Yes, this is the Pushbunton idea that's part of the recent talking pet movement. Back then scientists even tried it with dolphins. But here we run into the second big issue in animal communication research, that is that often these studies have a sample size of one.

What happens is we're just taking usually one animal, maybe two. We spent hours and hours and hours and hours training them, often removing them from the natural environment, and what we get out of this is like this one subject that possibly is a genius, possibly is the flukes, and we don't really know right, It's like, it's it real. Imagine if like you, as a scientist, spend your entire career just training this one animal to show that they can

It's an an equals one.

Exactly, It's an equal one often of animals that have been removed from the natural environment, is what you're getting representative of what any animal in the wild could possibly communicate about, or is it just like this one that you spend years and years training that ends up being able to do this.

So that's the second issue in studying whether we can communicate with animals, and studies where there's one scientist that spends a long time teaching one animal to communicate, there are lots of questions of whether this applies to all animals in that species or whether the animal can only speak to that one person. Although, as doctor Rosseno says, a sample of n equals one is still something.

As a scientist, it's like any equal one, it's not an equals deal. Like if you have a flying pig, you have a flying pig.

I mean, it's something that we should know about, right aside, these pigs can fly. Pigs can fly, like it's possible, right, So it's like if all of a sudden you have one bonobo that can start doing things and nobody else could even imagine they could do it is worth knowing, right, It's like we should yeah, yeah, at least investigative photo all right.

We'll get to the last issue, figuring out if we can communicate with animals, and then we'll talk about the idea of using AI to possibly translate what animals are saying for us. Stick with us. We'll be right back, and we're back. We're talking about whether we can communicate with animals, and so far we've learned the answer is yes. Pet owners can communicate with their dogs or cats using buns. You can teach apes to use sign language, and you can even teach a parrot to count and tell you

So there's this famous horse that at the beginning of the twentieth century was claimed to be able to do mathematical operations, so additions and subtractions, and so the idea was this horse became super famous and people were paying money to go watch the horse, and so it would be something like, okay, Hans, what is five plus two? And so you hear Hans kind of knocking his hoof from the ground, and when he gets to like five six seven, and then it would stop and people just

It's almost a little more impressive than counting yes.

So that's a funny thing. So clever haunts as a term has been used in almost a derogatory way to refer to people believe the animals can do things that really they cannot do.

Now, doctor Rossana has two interesting projects he's involved in. The first is that he's the lead researcher basically the scientific side of the Talking pet movement, doing science on a massive scale. The second project is that he's using AI to study how animals communicate in the wild. We'll talk about the Talking Pet project first.

And so this thing started because a speech language pathologist in twenty nineteen. This went viral and then a clips online. I'm not on social media, so I didn't even know, but basically a colleague asked me, you know, would you like to do this? I thought it was going to be a lot side project, and I media realized a lot of people thought this was a terrible idea. So I had a lot of colleagues telling me, what are

Yes, there are ten thousand dogs and owners signed up. And if you go to the University of California, San Diego, Comparative Condition Lab website. You can sign up to potentially be on the study too. So what have they learned so far from these thousands of dogs and cats?

One other thing I love is you can see what buttons are pressed the mass and if you are a dog, what do you think is the button they press the moss freak, food free, and then it's outside and then it's play. And so you're like, yeah, does it sound like a dog? Yeah, that seems very reasonable. My favorite thing is we're now looking at the cat data. One of the top five buttons for cats is.

No, I'm not gonna do it anyway.

But the idea is, you know, once you have thousands of these animals and try to do a bunch of things.

Okay, here are some of the things doctor Rossanna has learned about what cats and dogs communicate. The first is that apparently dogs do care about you.

And what I've learned by looking at what they communicate about, in addition to food, water, playings on, is that these are social animals, and social animals often ask about where are the people that used to be in the house And I'm not currently in the house, somebody is gone, where is that? When the cat dies, they keep asking about where is the cat? And when you are out

So you're seeing this in the data that this is not a fluid that one does did it? Three dogs? Did it?

No? I mean you see it in the data. You see that many of them ask about humans that are not at them, including the experimentals, Like the experimental will be there that will give them treats and stuff, and then they will ask later it's like where is the treat to human? What is the treat to you? And they also communicate a lot about how they're feeling, being scared or being frustrated, or being dealing with something that

The other interesting thing doctor Rossano and his team have found is related to the last issue in the animal communication, and that is whether animals can use words in new ways. This is a concept called productivity. You might be able to teach an animal that certain buns or signs mean certain concepts, but a true test of whether animals can really understand language is whether they can mix words to name something they've never seen before. And apparently some dogs can't do this.

We have one of the dogs started using the combination water bone water bond and the owner was like, I don't know what you're asking for, until they realized that water bone was ice, and so they start giving them ice. And once they introduce the bottom ice, they stopped pushing the combination water bone because now they have the water for it.

Right, So dogs can put together words to make new meanings, does that mean they understand language?

So the issue is there's a lot of anecdotal reports and I've seen clips of course of animals using these things in a way that seem to be contextually appropriate and conveying productivity. But as a scientist, ideally you want to test it. The issue when you see clips and so on is that you never know if it was like, oh, did you actually train this? Was there some other way in which you recreated this scenario and now you filmed it. Whatever you see on TikTok on YouTube these days, you're like,

As the anecdotes are not enough to show that they can do things.

Anecdotes are informative. If you have all the details of those anecdotes, they show that it might be possible.

I think you're trying to tell me I shouldn't believe everything I see on YouTube.

Correct. Well, I mean it is a very important problem for us, and I think anecdotal reports are helpful. Please stand them along. But do not think that just because hey, one time my dog did this, then it has been proven scientifically that that's the truth.

Okay, The last topic we're going to talk about is using AI to understand what animals are saying when they talk to each other. Can we decipher their natural communication language?

Yes. So there's at least two big projects that are big collaborations across several scientists that are interested in decoding animal communication. One is the Species Project. It started with dolphins and whales and so on, and that has now expanded to other species. Another project is called Project SETTI specifically started with the goal of understanding whales songs.

And so what are we learning with all these different AI understanding language projects.

Some of the things, for example, we're learning is that a lot of animals seem to add signals that would be similar to names, like a way of kind of referring to this specific individual in the group. And that is very interesting. Right, So we didn't know that animals might have names for each other, and so this is an interesting phenomenon being documented now for dolphins and for elephants.

Dolphins and elephants have names for each other.

It's a little symptom, fine, but yes, right.

The last question I asked our experts was why communicate with animals?

Ooh, I think it's incredible that we can actually hear how our animals are experiencing the environment we share with them. We can have such a better understanding of what they're thinking about, what their needs are, how we can care for them, and ultimately, I think it'll help us treat our animals a lot better and learn what they've been trying to say all these years.

Yeah, I guess it's a different thing if something is actually talking to you, even.

If people aren't teaching their own pets in their homes, just the knowledge that it's possible for a dog to use words and create sentences, it's like, Okay, this is a very complex creature that is living in my home. I think it can give a really good appreciation of how smarts our pets are and how much deserve.

How do we learn more about what you do and how to teach our pets how to use this system.

So my very first book, How Sell Learned to Talk, is the whole story of the idea that I had all the way through this communication breakthrough and then the world learning about it. Then my second book, Your Dog Can Talk, is the step by step training guide, and then you can find our buttons hunger for words, talking pet buttons and any major retailer Amazon, Showy, pet Co and get started with your own pet.

Does it also work with teenage daughters?

I have seen some applications in the Home for humans very fun. So whoever needs the buttons, go ahead and set it up. Yeah.

I bet the most popular button would be the mute button. Yeah really, well, thank you so much for joining us, MS Hunger.

Yeah, thanks for having me. It is blast.

We know that, for example, a dog can smell things much better than we can. We know that certain animals can hear things that we cannot hear. We know that others can see things that we cannot see. There's so many abilities that are part of the natural kingdom the humans do not quite well. Imagine you're like looking at the world in which there's an infinite amount of possibility in terms of what animals can do. What if they

So if we could communicate with them, they could tell us.

That's the dream, right? What does an elephant know? What does the dog know? What does a lion know? What does a whale know that we don't know?

Not? Just what can we learn about them, but what can we learn from them?

What can we learn from them? And how does that change es? And so that's my dream.

All right. We hope you enjoyed that. Please tell your dog or cat that I said hi. Thanks for joining us, See you next time. You've been listening to Science Stuff. Production of iHeartRadio, written and produced by me or Yhm, edited by Rose Seguda, Executive producer Jerry Rowland, and audio engineer and mixer Kasey Peckram. And you can follow me on social media. Just search for PhD Comics and the