My girl and I celebrated 10 years together last Friday! The traditional tenth anniversary gift is tin/aluminum, so I figured her food cans counted. I really did spend all weekend turning to her and saying “Happy Anniversary!” (which wasn’t pathetic at all). Each time I’d do it she seemed excited, judging by the waggy tail, but pretty quickly her expression morphed into “so… do I get food for this or what?” As much as I love my girl and recognize her superior intellect, I do figure that the main thoughts on her mind are “feed me” and “touch me,” occasionally sprinkled in with “take me outside.” Am I selling her short, though? A new breed of pet-parent has emerged (breed—see what I did there!), and they are pioneering the age of “button dogs.” Basically, you purchase a mat of buttons, record a word for each button, and teach your dog how to speak. It’s become such a phenomenon that “button dog videos” has become a genre on social media (so we know it’s real). Button dog parents, researchers, and experts weigh in:
Button dog 101: Sascha Crasnow believes that Parker, her two-year-old Beagle mix, can “speak” to her by using her paw to tap buttons with prerecorded words on them. The dog recently coined a new term for ambulance, after spotting one parked outside, by pressing the buttons “squeaker” and then “car,” she says. During a visit from Crasnow’s father, the dog asked his name by using three buttons: “what,” “word” and “human.” They are known as “button dogs” for their perceived ability to communicate by pressing buttons identifiable by pictures, symbols or location corresponding to specific words. Pet parents record nouns, verbs and emotions, and believe the buttons enable their dogs—and in rare cases, cats—to ask questions, express such feelings as pain (“ouch”) or anger (“mad”) and indicate something they want (“treat,” “cookie” and “outside”).
Some doubtful opinions: “We already understand what dogs are trying to tell us without the buttons, but when we use a human linguistic interface, we start ascribing too much to our joint understanding of these words,” said Amritha Mallikarjun, a postdoctoral fellow at the Penn Vet Working Dog Center at the University of Pennsylvania. “If a dog hits the button ‘love,’ maybe what it means to the dog is: ‘when I hit this button, I get pets, or everyone says my name.’” Sarah-Elizabeth Byosiere, director of the Thinking Dog Center at Hunter College, believes “our dogs have been ‘talking’ to us this whole time, but we just haven’t been ‘listening,’” she said. “The short videos I see online seem to indicate that dogs are able to form associations between a button press and an outcome, but it’s really difficult to say if anything more is happening.”
Studies are being done: The research, created by Federico Rossano, the principal investigator, is being conducted in partnership with FluentPet, which produces and sells buttons and soundboards. The company is sharing data with Rossano’s lab and the University of California at San Diego, but is not funding the study, he said. “We are not paying for the data, and they are not paying us to analyze the data,” Rossano said. “My lab collects additional data and runs behavioral experiments as well, completely independent of FluentPet.”
Are these dogs just pressing buttons: The scientists also plan to visit the dogs and run tests to establish if they are actually communicating or randomly pressing buttons. Results likely won’t be available before year’s end. The scientific papers outlining their evidence are either under review for publication, or in the process of being submitted. “While there are clear individual differences among dogs in the study, we have now compelling evidence that for several dogs in our study, the button presses are not random,” he said.
Maybe we should learn their language instead: Alexandra Horowitz, who directs the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard College, pointed out that dogs already “tell” us what they want, signaling when they want to go outside and tossing a ball when they want to play. She thinks dogs can learn to use the buttons, but that doesn’t necessarily advance their current ways of communicating. The risk she said, is that focus on button communication “may distract us from the elaborate communications they already make.”
The line “and in rare cases, cats,” made me laugh. You just know cats are thinking “fine, I’ll learn this stupid thing just to tell you to f— off.” So, my inclination is to agree with the experts who suggest we should devote more energy to learning about dogs’ natural languages, rather than making them learn our own. That being said, the proud parent mentioned in the article, Sascha Crasnow, just shared this tearjerker video of her Beagle Parker using the mat to say she had an emergency bathroom situation—the only hitch was Crasnow was out running errands and caught the whole scene later on the dog cam. Fair warning: it’s a rough watch. After a thorough discussion with my girl, where we reviewed the pros and cons and if she was even interested in learning to speak button human, we ultimately decided that the $20 to $235 the mat sets can cost would be better spent on food, treats, and more food. Happy Anniversary!
Photos and videos via Instagram @whataboutbunny @puppyparkerposey
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