My Dog Won’t Stop Talking
Our dog won’t stop talking. Not only is Mimolette talking, she is lying. She is obsessed with our cat Samosa. Samosa hates Mimolette. Samosa hates anyone who’s not my husband. But Mimolette is fixated on Samosa, who lives in the room through which we access the garden. So now, when Mimolette says she wants to go outside, she probably just wants to harass Samosa. We let her out but we hide the cat first.
She talks back, too. Two days ago she wanted a treat: “Treat. Treat. Treat.” “Treat all done,” we said. “No,” she replied.
Mimolette talks to us using buttons. These buttons are known as Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) devices. You record the words and place them on the floor, where the dog can tap them.
Within a day of receiving her first button — “outside” — Mimolette was using it appropriately. Two days later, we gave her another — “walk.” Now her chattering is incessant. First, she only told us what she wanted. “Food,” she would tap. “Play.” Now she tells us what she just did. She’ll rush in from a stroll and tap “Mimo. Walk.” And we can’t sit down for dinner without Mimolette narrating what we’re doing. “Maman. Food.” Still, she asks for what she wants. “Ice. Walk. Play. Outside. Maman. Now.”
(“Maman” means “mom” in French. It is what my family calls me because I’m French.)
We didn’t invent this. The trend, which took off on Instagram and TikTok, started with Stella, “the world’s first talking dog.” Stella’s owner is Christina Hunger, a speech-language pathologist. Hunger uses AAC devices with her human patients to help them communicate. One day, it occurred to her to do the same with Stella.
It begins with stuff the dogs might want: “Outside.” “Food.” “Potty.” “Walk.” Owners can model it: press the button and follow through. The dogs are quick to catch on.
The idea spread, and new dogs are garnering attention. Bunny, a three-year-old sheepadoodle, is TikTok’s megastar. Bunny now uses more than 100 buttons secured to foam tiles by categories: people, objects, actions, feelings, places. Her thoughts appear shockingly complex. She tells her parents she loves them. In one video, she tells her mom “Mad. Ouch. Stranger. Paw.” (It turned out she had a foxtail spikelet between her toes and she wanted her owner to remove it). Bunny retells her dreams, complains about her younger dog-brother Otter, and her questions are… existential. “Who this,” she asked, looking at herself in the mirror. “That’s Bunny,” her owner said. Bunny processed this for a while and then tapped “Help.”
So of course, cat owners followed suit. There is Billi, whose favorite button is “mad.” And a cat named Justin Bieber, who has notes on his mom’s singing (“Noise. Mad.”). Justin Bieber, who is seven, only started using buttons last year. Now he has 40 of them.
When we adopted Mimolette — a one-year-old pitbull/border collie rescue — social networks started pushing dog content on us, which is how we first heard of Stella and Bunny. I liked the idea. We are raising twins and both my husband and I work full-time, so I thought it would make things easier if Mimolette could express her needs. But I didn’t expect her to nag, interrupt, or back talk. Let alone lie.
Cognitive scientists tut-tut all of this. Are we anthropomorphizing the pooches? Almost certainly. But some scientists are intrigued. A team of researchers led by UC San Diego’s Federico Rossano launched a study to try to answer the question in all of our minds: can dogs really talk? I know what I believe.
Watch a video of Mimolette using her buttons. Stella’s account on Instagram. Bunny’s accounts on TikTok and Instagram. Billi’s account on Instagram. Justin Bieber the Cat’s accounts on TikTok and on Instagram. Rossano’s They Can Talk study. Listen to “ Animal Minds,” a Radiolab episode on cross-species communication. Read this 2017 scholarly article from the Annual Review of Anthropology on human-animal communication.