This is a fascinating summary of training process and accomplished results. Author is speech therapist for children and applies similar approach instead of rewarding dog for just pressing buttons. Most of comments here are too dismissive of methods and results.
People do not want to believe animals are sentient and can communicate. They often spend their whole lives ignoring the evidence plainly in front of their own eyes. Hell, they used to do this with other humans..
I would argue this training is not about teaching the dog to communicate, they already do that. This is teaching the dog to communicate in a way that is understandable and verifiable to people other than their owner.
My dog learned to cough to get my attention and then point to the thing he wanted, or give me a look he knew I would understand. Barking at me would often just get my frustration, but he was so excited when he found out that we could both make the same noise coughing. After that, he would only bark if he was mad. Communication, but not with repeatable, verifiable 'words'.
There are enough that still explicitly do and another set that uses things like Evo Psych, IQ testing, and renewed interest in Non-African human origin and arguments that humans aren't a single species (since species isn't an exact term to begin with) to imply the same.
I genuinely wasn't trying to be dismissive, I was just looking for some other confirming (or disconfirming) evidence. There is a thing called the "Clever Hans Effect" (see other comment) which can mislead people to thinking that they are communicating with animals. I'm not suggesting that this is what is happening here, only that it could be a possibility. I would very much like for this to be actually what is happening as I'd love nothing more than to be able to communicate in a sophisticated way with my own dog! That would be brilliant. I appreciate that the owner is a speech therapist, so does she have any published, peer-reviewed material on what she has achieved? If this were to be repeatable, I can imagine a lot of people wanting to enrol their dogs into "communications school" so that they could replicate the behaviour.
"Using a substantial number of trials, Pfungst found that the horse could get the correct answer even if von Osten himself did not ask the questions, ruling out the possibility of fraud. However, the horse gave the right answer only when the questioner knew what the answer was and the horse could see the questioner. He observed that when von Osten knew the answers to the questions, Hans got 89 percent of the answers correct, but when von Osten did not know the answers to the questions, Hans answered only six percent of the questions correctly."
Still pretty amazing capabilities, actually indicating advanced communication skills.
As far as im concerned the horse is effectively outsmarting people by finding easy and unanticipated ways to answer hard questions. If a human child did this it might be considered clever.
Comments
https://www.hungerforwords.com/post/teaching-my-dog-to-talk-...
This is a fascinating summary of training process and accomplished results. Author is speech therapist for children and applies similar approach instead of rewarding dog for just pressing buttons. Most of comments here are too dismissive of methods and results.
People do not want to believe animals are sentient and can communicate. They often spend their whole lives ignoring the evidence plainly in front of their own eyes. Hell, they used to do this with other humans..
I would argue this training is not about teaching the dog to communicate, they already do that. This is teaching the dog to communicate in a way that is understandable and verifiable to people other than their owner.
My dog learned to cough to get my attention and then point to the thing he wanted, or give me a look he knew I would understand. Barking at me would often just get my frustration, but he was so excited when he found out that we could both make the same noise coughing. After that, he would only bark if he was mad. Communication, but not with repeatable, verifiable 'words'.
There are enough that still explicitly do and another set that uses things like Evo Psych, IQ testing, and renewed interest in Non-African human origin and arguments that humans aren't a single species (since species isn't an exact term to begin with) to imply the same.
First I have heard of that stuff. So that is like, a new type of racism? Kind of next-level racism.
It's basically scientific racism and was used to justify slavery for a while.
Communication is a lower bar than using language; there isn't doubt that animals communicate.
I genuinely wasn't trying to be dismissive, I was just looking for some other confirming (or disconfirming) evidence. There is a thing called the "Clever Hans Effect" (see other comment) which can mislead people to thinking that they are communicating with animals. I'm not suggesting that this is what is happening here, only that it could be a possibility. I would very much like for this to be actually what is happening as I'd love nothing more than to be able to communicate in a sophisticated way with my own dog! That would be brilliant. I appreciate that the owner is a speech therapist, so does she have any published, peer-reviewed material on what she has achieved? If this were to be repeatable, I can imagine a lot of people wanting to enrol their dogs into "communications school" so that they could replicate the behaviour.
From the "Clever Hans" Wiki article [0]:
"Using a substantial number of trials, Pfungst found that the horse could get the correct answer even if von Osten himself did not ask the questions, ruling out the possibility of fraud. However, the horse gave the right answer only when the questioner knew what the answer was and the horse could see the questioner. He observed that when von Osten knew the answers to the questions, Hans got 89 percent of the answers correct, but when von Osten did not know the answers to the questions, Hans answered only six percent of the questions correctly."
Still pretty amazing capabilities, actually indicating advanced communication skills.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans
As far as im concerned the horse is effectively outsmarting people by finding easy and unanticipated ways to answer hard questions. If a human child did this it might be considered clever.