Do Our Dogs Have Something to Tell the World?

Koko the gorilla and her facility with sign language have met their Very Online counterpart: “talking buttons” that humans train animals to use in order to communicate their wants and needs. Are they a conduit to our pets’ consciousness, or just a testament to our ability to see patterns where we want to see patterns? Camille Bromley talks to the true believers and the skeptics—both inside and outside the research community—to find the truth about doggy dialog.

The field of animal behavior, also known as ethology, had itself transformed since 1980, when the term “animal cognition” was barely used. It is now known that primates, despite being our closest genetic relatives, are not all that good at understanding humans, while dogs (and cats) get us more easily. Research suggests that dogs, which have co-evolved with humans over the past 18,000 to 32,000 years, might in fact be the ideal species with which to study two-way communication. They were the first domesticated animals and very likely the first that listened to us talk. When dogs hear human speech, their brains light up with interest. They look where we point. They recognize our facial expressions. They mirror our anxiety. In the buttons, Rossano saw an opportunity to learn what else they could do. But he was cautious. “I did not want to destroy my academic career, to be very honest,” he told me.