Can dogs talk with buttons? A biologist takes a second look at What About Bunny, the talking dog who speaks with buttons.
00:00 - Bunny the Dog
01:06 - Responding to Criticism
02:16 - What About Bunny's Thorn in Paw
03:10 - Biologist Reacts to Bunny the Dog
04:20 - Do Pet Buttons Work?
05:49 - The Self Aware Dog
07:41 - Can Dogs Understand English?
08:46 - Why Dogs Can't Talk
10:01 - What About Bunny's Existential Crisis
In part 2, I take a close look at the video where Bunny looks in a mirror and appears to say "who this" and discover something shocking → https://youtu.be/jObcXvhZu_Q
Two years ago, I reacted to What About Bunny, the talking dog who speaks with buttons. I got hundreds of comments like "You need to watch more videos” and “One video with nothing but your educated opinion and a lot of ego.” So let’s look at more videos of Bunny the talking dog.
There are two reasons why I personally don’t see evidence of communication. One, the famous video where Bunny appears to tell her owner "ouch stranger paw" to indicate that she has a thorn in her paw is EDITED in two very key moments. The first cut is right after Bunny pressed the “ouch” button. How much time passed between “ouch” and “stranger paw”? How many other buttons were pressed? Were there any failed attempts? Was it even filmed on the same day? We don’t know. The second cut is more important, we never see the thorn being removed from Bunny's paw. We have no way of knowing if the thorn came from the paw. There’s a lot of missing context that we simply can’t ignore. It’s impossible to know if the video was cut just for pacing or to tell a curated story.
My second concern is the definition of the word "stranger." Here, stranger means a thorn. In other videos, stranger means a coyote or even a new smell. That’s a common thing in these videos. Definitions are fluid and change meaning in order to be “accurate”. In another video, Bunny pressed the word “bird” and that was interpreted to mean “airplane.”
“Some well-known research biases that are normally carefully avoided in formal scientific studies are not controlled for in these videos. In particular, the ‘meaning’ of ‘sentences’ produced by the dogs is often reconstructed by the owners themselves… and what is interpreted often seems to be… whatever the owner wants it to be.” -- Neuroscience News
https://neurosciencenews.com/animal-communication-18280/
Study after study has shown that visual, tactile, and olfactory communication is far more important to a dog than verbal communication.
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27338818/
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6116041/
There have also been studies using EEGs and MRIs to measure brain activity in dogs when they hear human words. These studies found that dogs do not have the ability to distinguish different words AND that almost 50% of what they respond to when they hear a human speak is their emotion and tone of voice.
[1] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.200851
[2] https://www.livescience.com/dogs-word-processing.html
[3] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/02/140220132152.htm
[4]https://www.rspca.org.uk/-/blog_how_dogs_know_what_were_feeling
[5] https://phys.org/news/2020-12-dogs-word.html
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What About Bunny
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