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What
science says about the debate.
A new study has collected thousands of reports from
the owners of “button” dogs, who believe their pets
talk by tapping buttons with prerecorded words
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”).
The concept is growing in popularity. Pet owners can purchase buttons and soundboards
from about $30 for a starter kit to $230 for a “They can talk” complete set. Button dog
videos have become their own genre on social media. One of the hashtags used with
videos of button dogs, #dogbuttons, had more than 102.8 million views on TikTok, as
of Monday afternoon.
Button dogs are also the subject of debate, with animal behavior experts raising
questions about what the dogs are really “saying” and whether the words mean the same
thing to a dog as they do to us.
“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.”
Can dogs talk by pressing buttons? What science says about the debate.