Or removing buttons and seeing how she might try and communicate without a button she usually uses. This would include having someone who isn’t Devine communicating with Bunny using the soundboard, or testing her on words with no human in sight. Rossano said that after examining Bunny and other canine subjects around the clock and analyzing thousands of hours of data, he and his colleagues will create experiments where the dogs will be tested on the limits of their understanding.
“We know that dogs are much better than any other animal in understanding human communicative signals.” As Yale psychologist Paul Bloom wrote in Science in 2004, “For psychologists, dogs may be the new chimpanzees.”ĭevine has had three cameras on Bunny’s soundboard that capture video for 24 hours a day for the last several months, so Rossano and the research team don’t get just the highlight reel that social media does-they see everything, including mistakes and button presses that don't make sense. “We know that dogs care about humans enormously,” Rossano said. He said that dogs provide a new angle through which to study animal communication because rather than being trained in a lab, removed from their natural setting, dogs can participate from their own homes, and researchers get to take advantage of a strong bond that naturally exists. He has worked with goats, horses, wolves, chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans, gibbons, marmosets, and Japanese macaques-and now, dogs. Rossano’s background is in linguistics, but because of his expertise in nonverbal communication, he has dedicated a large part of his career to animal cognition research. “At that point, it was game on,” Devine said.
#Play bunni how we first met working how to#
“I had zero expectation and quite frankly, I didn't think I would have much success because I don't have any knowledge in any field even remotely related to teaching my dog how to talk.”īut Bunny took to the button within just a few weeks-she was using the button consistently to request going outside. When Bunny arrived at her new home, there was an “outside” button by the door. On the flip side, there are people who call Devine a fraud, and accuse her of selectively editing or cherry-picking her videos.
She sees comments all the time in which people write things like, “Oh my God, this dog is a genius. “Let me see your paw,” Devine says, and then finds an embedded thorn.ĭevine said these interactions have led many of her followers to think of Bunny less as a dog, and more as a human in a dog suit. “Where is your ouch? Where ouch?” Devine says. Once it seemed as though Bunny could tell Devine that she had something caught in her paw. Bunny walks over to the sliding glass door, and when Devine follows she sees a group of neighborhood dogs waiting patiently behind the fence. Devine asks, “How can I help? What help?” Bunny pushes “friend,” then “play.” “Who do you want to play with?” Devine asks. In one recent video, Bunny pushes the “help” button. At times, Bunny also appears to ask for what she wants, whether it's "scritches," or to be let outside. Outside of her existential pondering, Bunny uses her buttons to ask a lot of questions about poop. "What I can tell you is that Bunny clearly seems to be engaging in some sort of communicative exchange.” “Right now, if you ask me, ‘Does Bunny talk?’ the answer is, I don’t know,” Rossano said.
Yet, to figure out if Bunny can "talk," let alone wonder "who this," we have to grapple with defining what language is in the first place, and ask how our interactions and biases about animals might influence our conclusions. One of the lead researchers, UCSD's Federico Rossano, said he wants to prove that studies that probe the limits of animal communication can be done rigorously, with big sample sizes that collect troves of data, and are followed up with targeted experiments in the lab. “Right now, if you ask me, ‘Does Bunny talk?’ the answer is, I don’t know.”īunny is the most well-known of the participants, but there are currently over 900 animals involved. Her custom Augmentative Alternative Communication (AAC) soundboard has over 70 buttons that produce pre-recorded words in six categories the buttons are organized using the Fitzgerald Key, originally developed to teach deaf children sentence structure. Over the decades these inquiries have led to in-fighting between those who believe that some animals can be trained to converse with humans, and those who think that human bias and misinterpretation underlie any such communication skills.īunny is more than a TikTok celebrity, she is a participant in the latest attempt to research these issues, through her involvement in a large study called They Can Talk, based at the Comparative Cognition Lab at University of California San Diego (UCSD).
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