Hi @Tuulikki. I follow a cat on instragram (billispeaks) that has learned to use the board. Of course her favorite word is “mad”.
I take it back
that Billie knows a thing or two. You have to love them... As for my two kitties, Bob and Ruby....not so sure 
I think I am just not paying enough attention. I think I will observe my kitties more and see what they are up to. You have one smart cat @gottathink. One thing my kitties do - I wish they wouldn't - is to bring live prey in for me to admire or eat, I am not sure which. They drop it on the carpet and watch me for a little while to see what my reaction is. If it is live mouse I will try to catch it and put it outside (well away from the house) or if it is a live bird and I think it stands a chance of survival, I will take it to my local wildlife hospital. I am very adept at catching mice these days. Fascinating creatures...cats
Oh yes they are for sure.I think I am just not paying enough attention. I think I will observe my kitties more and see what they are up to. You have one smart cat @gottathink. One thing my kitties do - I wish they wouldn't - is to bring live prey in for me to admire or eat, I am not sure which. They drop it on the carpet and watch me for a little while to see what my reaction is. If it is live mouse I will try to catch it and put it outside (well away from the house) or if it is a live bird and I think it stands a chance of survival, I will take it to my local wildlife hospital. I am very adept at catching mice these days. Fascinating creatures...cats
Another adorable communicating doggie
After Devine’s videos started picking up traction in early spring, Federico Rossano, director of the Comparative Cognition Lab at UC San Diego, started discussing them with people in his department. They began planning a project to study Bunny and other dogs like her who are learning to use the buttons. They hope to determine scientifically whether non-humans can really use something like language to communicate. There are now over 700 participants, including dogs, cats, and even horses, and Rossano says the growing number is almost certainly due to Bunny’s popularity drawing people in.
[snip]
When Bunny presses “Settle, Sound, Ouch,” she might be using a novel string of known words to tell someone to quiet down, or she might be pressing a random series of buttons while confirmation bias on our part does the rest of the work. Even Devine says that she thinks Bunny’s “speech” is primarily operant conditioning, where Bunny has made an association between pressing a button and something happening. A true understanding of language goes beyond simple associations, and involves pulling unique combinations of words together into narratives.
Bunny and her cohort are part of a long legacy of the search for human-like communication and cognition in animals. There are famous non-human primate examples like Kanzi, the bonobo who has memorized hundreds of symbols on a special keyboard. There are also dogs like Chaser, who could remember the names of over 1,000 objects. The researchers at UC San Diego are less interested in how many symbols or words Bunny can memorize, and more in how her vocabulary might lend to meaningful communication with humans.
How Bunny the dog is pushing scientists’ buttons
What the TikTok star can teach us about animal cognitionwww.theverge.com
The dog said "Ball Ball Ball settle sound ouch". As I understood, the dog meant to stop throwing the ball repeatedly onto the wooden floor because it gives him an uncomfortable sound (and it sounds kind of clicky too). He didn't mean "stop talking", IMHO. If he meant "shut up and throw my ball!" then the "ouch" makes less sense to me.
fb.watch
