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.
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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.