Pressing the 'HELP' button on dog-human communication

New research suggests humans really can use soundboards to communicate with dogs. Why am I still a little bit cynical about the whole thing?

Meet Oz. He’s a Bedlington terrier / whippet cross and transmuter of many feelings, often all at once. Here’s a photo. Look at the state of him!

Did I mention that Oz can talk? Not words, obviously, or even much by way of sign language but he has a few routines that are tried and tested that work on me like a charm.

If I walk into the room and we meet eyes, for instance, he’ll roll onto his back and expose his tummy (ROUGH TRANSLATION: “Can you stroke this please?”). He’ll stand by the front door and look at the handle (“I need to pee/poo/stare-into-the-sky-for-no-real-reason”) or when he wants to play, he’ll go and stand in front of a specific cupboard in the living room and stare hopefully, as long as I am watching, at the door behind which are kept (get ready for this) a family of seven small squeaky toy bears made of a rubber so thin it can only be (I suspect he thinks) real-life organismal skin. Thrills, kicks – we’ve all got ‘em.

There’s a few other ‘request-like’ interactions that Oz is able to use on us successfully. These include “water” (nudge bowl); “come play” (grab socks and run away); “stroke my rump” (push rump human-wards, bend long, goosy-neck around to maintain eye-contact). And, of course, there’s the play-bow - a classic bit of dog-speak.

I love these kinds of interactions. If you have a dog or even (EVEN) a cat, you will know them too, dotted around in their day-to-day repertoires. It’s one of the perks of the friendship, identifying and acting upon moments like these, I believe.

My reason for mentioning dog-speak is timely, because (at long last) some research on how dogs and humans may or may not ‘talk’ using special push buttons (‘soundboards’) has finally been published.

First, some back-story on soundboards…

For those that don’t know, these are the novelty plastic button arrays that (usually laboratory) animals (chimps, dolphins, dogs etc.) train themselves to press, which get them desired goals and rewards. The dog presses the ‘PLAY’ button, for instance, and a human audio recording says ‘PLAY’ and the human companion / trainer responds, delivering the requested objective to the dog. These products are now very much part of the pet market.

A few years ago, when I was doing talks about my book ‘Wonderdog’, I was often asked about Bunny, the Instagram dog (1.5 million followers) who appears especially proficient at using buttons to communicate.

You might have come across Bunny (who no-one could doubt is a star… but then, aren’t all dogs, really?) if you know dogs or have an interest in dog cognition. Or, if the algorithm ordains it, you may have seen these ‘press-and-talk’ pet products advertised in your social media feeds, sometimes referencing Bunny, sometimes not.

In the past, I’ve expressed general unease about this product, not least because it’s exactly that: a product, advertised, to be bought, sold. There just didn’t appear (back then at least) to be much consideration of actual science. Plus, there’s the ethics. I mean, as the more cognitively endowed being, shouldn’t we learn to ‘speak’ dog a little bit better rather than giving them tools to ‘speak’ human? Dogs can and do communicate in ways which humans can come to recognise, provided they’re paying plenty of attention. Oz (the scruff-looking nerf herder - see beginning) is one example of millions able to do this without any obvious training.

I heard that Alexis Devine (Bunny’s human companion and trainer) was saddened from the lack of support for the product shown by the animal cognition community. But what else might you expect? Many animal cognition scientists put years (sometimes decades) into their craft, identifying strong hypotheses and meticulously battering them from all angles to see how strongly they hold. Just to re-iterate, years. This process seemed entirely missing in the story of Bunny and Co. back then, where the arena in which ‘tests’ were playing out seemed (to me at least) only to be on social media, perhaps the least trustworthy realm in the history of our species.

The good news is that this is now being remedied. Thanks in part to Devine herself, soundboards have been the subject of some more rigorous science, courtesy of research that came out last month…

‘Humans can communicate with dogs using soundboards, study suggests…’ came the headline from the Guardian reporting on the first of these studies. The results of the research, led by Prof Federico Rossano of the University of California San Diego, suggested that dogs trained to use soundboard buttons respond to some pre-recorded words just as they do to spoken words. Dogs (59 in the study) were especially responsive to play-related interactions, which says a lot about the complex needs of dogs – play (not just food, the traditional opinion) is a big part of our connection.

In the Guardian, Professor Clive Wynne (author of ‘Dog is Love’) called the paper’s conclusion a “nothing burger” (after all, is it that surprising that a dog can respond to verbal cues?) but my feeling is slightly more positive: these results are peer-reviewed stories rather than Instagram Stories, and that can only be a good thing. It’ll be interesting to see what is published next. Apparently, there are two more papers in preparation.

So, great. Finally, some science on dogs and soundboard buttons. More please.

Will this plastic product offer some dogs new ways to express their wants and needs? Sure. Might it be a good way for humans and dogs to interact and ‘play’ more effectively. Perhaps, for some. My gut-feeling is, based on 10,000 years+ of evolutionary inter-species liasons, we have the tools at our disposal today to connect in a very strong way, without batteries, plastic gadgets or subscriptions required. But gut-feelings are irrelevant here: what matters is science, mostly. So let’s wait and see…

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In other news…

For those interested in Infinite Life, my re-telling of the evolution of animal life through the lens of the egg, please note that this “STAND OUT” (cough, Nature) non-fiction title was released in the US last week, with some lovely reviews including…

'Infinite Life has the potential to change your perspective on the history of our planet. It offers a journey that will intrigue and open your mind to the wonders of all life on Earth.' Science

'Even the most hard-boiled reader, accustomed to overlooking eggs in favor of the free-living creatures that emerge from them, will likely be softened. And delighted.' - Wall Street Journal

It’s available in all good bookshops, so go get a copy. I’m really proud of it. If you’re reading this in the UK, don’t forget, as well as Hardback, it’s also on Audible (read by me) and Kindle, where I notice it’s back on at £1.99 for a limited period. A steal!

Have a great week, Jules