Speaker 1: Hey, please take a second and leave us a review
Speaker 1: on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to the podcast.
Speaker 1: Thanks a lot. Hey, welcome to Sign Stuff, a production
Speaker 1: of iHeartRadio I'm More Cham and today we're answering the
Speaker 1: question can we communicate with animals? Can you have an
Speaker 1: actual conversation with your cat or a real dialogue with
Speaker 1: your dog? And could we use AI to talk to
Speaker 1: whales and elephants. We're going to talk to the woman
Speaker 1: who started the worldwide movement to teach pats to talk,
Speaker 1: and we're going to talk to an animal cognitive scientist
Speaker 1: about what we know about animal communication. So get ready
Speaker 1: to chat with jihuahua's and gap with gibbons as we
Speaker 1: answer the question can we communicate with animals?
Speaker 2: Hey?
Speaker 1: Everyone, So I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but recently I
Speaker 1: learned there's a worldwide movement to teach pets to talk.
Speaker 1: Tens of thousands of people around the world are teaching
Speaker 1: their cats and dogs and rabbits and even lizards to
Speaker 1: use words and even put together sentences. And once you
Speaker 1: learn what some of these animals have to say, I
Speaker 1: think you're going to be surprised. So We're going to
Speaker 1: talk to two people today. One is the woman who
Speaker 1: started this worldwide movement, and the other is a Conicis
Speaker 1: scientist who's been researching this phenomenon. Will start with the
Speaker 1: founder of the movement, Christina Hunger. Miss Hunger was a
Speaker 1: speech therapist who worked with kids when she wondered one day,
Speaker 1: what if I helped my dog to speak. Here's my
Speaker 1: interview with Christina Hunger. Well, thank you for joining us,
Speaker 1: Miss Hunger.
Speaker 3: Yes, thank you for having me. My name is Christina Hunger.
Speaker 3: I'm a speech language pathologist and I'm the founder of
Speaker 3: Hunger for Words, which is the whole talking pet movement.
Speaker 1: Amazing. Can you describe what Hunger for Words and the
Speaker 1: Talking Pet movement are?
Speaker 3: Yes. So, as a speech therapist, I worked with kids,
Speaker 3: and in my jobularly, I worked with a lot of
Speaker 3: kids who had different disabilities and disorders and couldn't actually
Speaker 3: talk with verbal speech. They used communication devices instead, and
Speaker 3: so that really inspired everything that I discovered that dogs
Speaker 3: were capable of.
Speaker 1: What did you know about animal communication before you had
Speaker 1: this idea?
Speaker 3: Very little? And I think that's why I was able
Speaker 3: to see this from a new perspective. I knew that
Speaker 3: dogs understood words because I had a dog growing up.
Speaker 3: But then once I brought my puppy Stella home, I
Speaker 3: was really observing her from this new perspective as a
Speaker 3: speech therapist and saw how quickly she was picking up
Speaker 3: on the words we were saying.
Speaker 1: I guess you mean like if you tell a dog
Speaker 1: sit or a rollover, or would you like to go
Speaker 1: for a walk, and they get excited, then you have
Speaker 1: the sense that they understand you exactly.
Speaker 3: And so I knew that these associations were possible, but
Speaker 3: I didn't know how much dogs were capable of understanding.
Speaker 3: I just knew that something was there now.
Speaker 1: In her work as a speech therapist, because Hunger work
Speaker 1: kids with disabilities who were non verbal or couldn't talk,
Speaker 1: and she would often use devices that the kids would
Speaker 1: press a button on or have a screen on to
Speaker 1: say words. And this gave her an idea, did you
Speaker 1: explicitly think to yourself, huh, I wonder what would happen
Speaker 1: if I tried to teach my dog more words using
Speaker 1: these devices.
Speaker 3: I had this very clear epiphany moment where I was
Speaker 3: watching my puppy Stella, seeing how she was understanding words.
Speaker 3: I was knowing you know, remembering that dog's understand words.
Speaker 3: And I was also watching how she was already communicating.
Speaker 3: She would bark at me to get attention. She would
Speaker 3: pot her water dish and it was empty, and I
Speaker 3: was like, she's doing so many things that kids do
Speaker 3: right before they start talking. I was like, I was
Speaker 3: in a speech therapy session right now, I would be saying,
Speaker 3: they're probably going to start talking soon. So I had
Speaker 3: this light bulb moment. If dogs understand words, they just
Speaker 3: need a different way to say words, like, could I
Speaker 3: make a device for Stella and teach her to say
Speaker 3: words if she had a way to say them? And
Speaker 3: that's where it all started.
Speaker 1: Now did you actually make a device or did you so?
Speaker 3: My first thought was could I use something that already
Speaker 3: exists that I use with kids. Most of the devices
Speaker 3: kids would use their fingers to tap a very small icon,
Speaker 3: like on an iPad or a tablet, but I thought
Speaker 3: that would be too tricky with her paw and her nose.
Speaker 3: So then I found just some simple, recordable buttons and
Speaker 3: then adapted them eventually and put them all together on
Speaker 3: one big board for her, which was then her communication device.
Speaker 3: So I wanted, like the easiest way to test it out.
Speaker 1: Whoah, you didn't think like I need an iPad the
Speaker 1: size of a table. Her Stella just made me think
Speaker 1: of what would happen if you give a dog a
Speaker 1: phone and the internet? Yeah, right, look up treats all
Speaker 1: the time.
Speaker 3: Yeah, really different parks that they want to go to.
Speaker 1: So Miss Hunger basically gave her puppy Stella a giant
Speaker 1: keyboard had big colored buttons that, when press would say
Speaker 1: a pre recorded word like water or walk. Okay, so
Speaker 1: you got the system, you put it in your house
Speaker 1: for Stella, and then what happened? How did you get started?
Speaker 2: So?
Speaker 3: I started just with a few words. At first, I
Speaker 3: just thought like could I teach her to say a
Speaker 3: few different words to maybe express like some needs that
Speaker 3: she has. So I started with outside, play, water, and
Speaker 3: then eventually I added like eat and walk. And for
Speaker 3: about a month I did the same thing that I
Speaker 3: would do with kids every day. I just used the
Speaker 3: buttons as I was talking. So whenever I was saying outside,
Speaker 3: I would push the button, show her which one it was,
Speaker 3: also say it with my verbal speech, and then take
Speaker 3: her outside. And it did not work right away. It
Speaker 3: took a good month before she started using the buttons
Speaker 3: and really was even interested in them.
Speaker 1: Wow. Initially she totally didn't even think it was a
Speaker 1: thing to pay attention to.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, for the first two weeks, she didn't even
Speaker 3: look at them.
Speaker 1: So for weeks her dog Stella would just ignore the buttons.
Speaker 1: And I think it's safe to say that anyone of
Speaker 1: us would have just given up by now, but Miss
Speaker 1: Hunger's unique background as a speech therapist told her to
Speaker 1: keep trying. And then one day something happened.
Speaker 3: And then about three weeks and she literally just looked
Speaker 3: at the button for the first time and then looked
Speaker 3: up at me, and I was so excited. And then
Speaker 3: within a week of that moment is when she started
Speaker 3: using it for the first time.
Speaker 1: Whoa. It happened quickly once she had that realization of
Speaker 1: what it was.
Speaker 3: So after about a month, the first word she said
Speaker 3: was outside. And when she said outside with her button,
Speaker 3: she went outside and went to the bathroom immediately. So
Speaker 3: that was really exciting because it wasn't just like pressing
Speaker 3: it to explore. So then I was wondering, you know,
Speaker 3: is she going to use outside for everything that she
Speaker 3: needs or what's going to happen here. But the next
Speaker 3: day she started using her play button when she wanted
Speaker 3: to play, and then I think within a week she
Speaker 3: started using water whenever her water dish was empty.
Speaker 1: I imagine you got very excited.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, I was really really excited when she sat
Speaker 3: outside for the first time, But it actually wasn't until
Speaker 3: an unexpected milestone and I started getting like really excited
Speaker 3: and shocked. And that was just a couple of months
Speaker 3: after that, she started using words for different purposes that
Speaker 3: I hadn't taught her, like the same what buttons, but
Speaker 3: in situations that I had never modeled. And that's when
Speaker 3: my speech therapist s brain really started going crazy with
Speaker 3: the potential.
Speaker 1: Okay, this part is important. We'll get into the signs
Speaker 1: of using words in different contexts and something called productivity
Speaker 1: in sentence structure later in the program. Oh what do
Speaker 1: you mean she used buttons for different purposes?
Speaker 3: So, like I had always just modeled water when her
Speaker 3: water dish was empty or when I was filling up
Speaker 3: her water bowl. But one day I was watering my plants,
Speaker 3: which Stella always really liked watching me do, and she
Speaker 3: walked all the way out of the room down the
Speaker 3: hall to her buttons and said water, and so I
Speaker 3: was like, oh, okay, she mut sneed water. I walked
Speaker 3: down the hall looked at her water bowl. It was
Speaker 3: totally full, and she didn't take a drink of water.
Speaker 3: She just came back and kept watching me water my plants.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: Stella wanted to kind of show off.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I like water. That's what she's doing.
Speaker 1: I know what that is exactly. There's a button for that, right.
Speaker 3: And it was just so much more about connection in
Speaker 3: that moment than just saying a button or pushing a
Speaker 3: button to get something. She was using a word just
Speaker 3: to connect and share.
Speaker 1: How did people around you react?
Speaker 3: It was at that point where they started to be
Speaker 3: like amazed as well, Like my friends would come over
Speaker 3: and Stella would hit the buy button when it was
Speaker 3: getting too late and she wanted to go to bed
Speaker 3: and she wanted them to leave.
Speaker 1: No kidding, Yeah, I could use a button like that
Speaker 1: when I have people over.
Speaker 3: Right, very functional.
Speaker 1: After about a year or so of teaching her dog,
Speaker 1: Stella this hunger, decided this was something that couldn't just
Speaker 1: stay in her living room, so she started a blog.
Speaker 1: She would write about what her dog was learning and
Speaker 1: her perspective as a speech therapist, and she posted videos
Speaker 1: of Stella using the buns to talk. And at first
Speaker 1: there were about five hundred people reading this blog, and at.
Speaker 3: That point she was using about thirty different words, combining
Speaker 3: words together to create her own phrases short sentences, And
Speaker 3: that's when I started this blog. One of the people
Speaker 3: in the audience had a family member who was a
Speaker 3: speech therapist, and she happened to share one of my
Speaker 3: blog posts on her personal Facebook, and then this reporter
Speaker 3: saw it and reached out and was like, this is
Speaker 3: absolutely incredible. I want to write a story on it.
Speaker 3: We did an interview and it just blew up in
Speaker 3: a way that I never could have anticipated or been
Speaker 3: prepared for. Like it was trending around the world. I
Speaker 3: went from five hundred followers to five hundred thousand in
Speaker 3: less than two weeks.
Speaker 1: Oh, that's incredible.
Speaker 3: It was insane, truly insane.
Speaker 1: How did you feel when this wave of attention and
Speaker 1: people following you? How did you process that?
Speaker 3: It was of course very exciting. I again, never in
Speaker 3: my wildest dreams thought it would reach that level of awareness.
Speaker 3: I'm not going to lie. It was extremely overwhelming. Like
Speaker 3: I was getting thousands of messages and emails. Reporters had
Speaker 3: figured out how to look up my number, outs getting
Speaker 3: house all the time, and like I was just a
Speaker 3: normal speech therapist, working my normal job and just getting
Speaker 3: flooded with everything, and suddenly it's like once it's out there,
Speaker 3: there's no going back.
Speaker 1: All right. When we come back, we're going to talk
Speaker 1: about this global movement that miss Hunger started that has
Speaker 1: people teaching their cats, dogs, goats, and even horses do
Speaker 1: use buttons to talk. And then we're going to talk
Speaker 1: to these scientists that has taken this idea to the
Speaker 1: next level. Stay with us, you're listening to sign stuff,
Speaker 1: Welcome back. We're talking about whether animals can communicate. And
Speaker 1: we started with the movement sparked by Christina Hunger's blog
Speaker 1: where she wrote about teaching her dog Stella how to
Speaker 1: use buttons to talk.
Speaker 3: Where where what weird?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Weirds?
Speaker 1: The blog went viral and since then people around the
Speaker 1: world have jumped on to teach their pets to use
Speaker 1: the same buttons. So he started with dogs, but I
Speaker 1: imagine people out there have tried it with other pets.
Speaker 1: My friend does it with a cat. What are some
Speaker 1: of the other animals. You've heard people try the song.
Speaker 3: I've seen people teach pigs to talk with buttons, some
Speaker 3: farm animals, cows, goats, horses. I've actually worked with someone
Speaker 3: who's teaching her horse and that was really cool as well.
Speaker 3: So it's been just amazing to see that once the
Speaker 3: idea was out there, people are just running with it
Speaker 3: and trying it in all different areas.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: Which is the chattiest animal?
Speaker 3: I think dogs still from my knowledge at this point,
Speaker 3: but cats have been very chatty as well.
Speaker 1: Dogs that live with us are more eager to talk
Speaker 1: to us.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they're hearing us talk all the time. Oh, it's
Speaker 3: just a unique bond between a human and a dog.
Speaker 1: What are some things you've heard of other dogs doing?
Speaker 3: Like one of my training clients recently had a really
Speaker 3: cool story where her dog said hurt with a button
Speaker 3: and then potty with a button, and she took her
Speaker 3: to the vet the next day and she had a
Speaker 3: bladder infection, something she would not have even known. Whow
Speaker 3: So to be able to express with that level of
Speaker 3: clarity something that was wrong and then get help immediately,
Speaker 3: I mean, that's a game changer for the future of
Speaker 3: pet care.
Speaker 1: Oh, incredible. What's the funniest thing Stella has said to you?
Speaker 3: The funniest and most heartbreaking when she's upset with me?
Speaker 3: She has said this several times over the year, love
Speaker 3: you No, no, Yeah.
Speaker 1: That blows my vine, Christina.
Speaker 2: I know.
Speaker 3: It's like I never would have thought by introducing a
Speaker 3: love you button that I would someday be hearing love
Speaker 3: you know sometime. But when she gets upset, still pull
Speaker 3: that card sometimes love you know.
Speaker 1: Whow It makes me wonder, what did you do? Christina?
Speaker 3: It would just be like I didn't go to the
Speaker 3: park or didn't say enough attention to her after she
Speaker 3: had asked for something.
Speaker 1: Just made me think of my teenage daughter.
Speaker 3: A lot of drama plans the door shut.
Speaker 1: Yes, maybe I should get my teenage daughter some buttons.
Speaker 1: All right, now, we're going to dive into the signs
Speaker 1: of animal communication. As you might imagine, still, it was
Speaker 1: not the first non human animal ever to be trained
Speaker 1: to use signals to talk to humans, and so to
Speaker 1: get a wider view what we know from animal study
Speaker 1: in current research, I reached out to Professor Federico Rossano.
Speaker 1: I can't get to scientists from the University of California,
Speaker 1: San Diego, who specializes in communication between humans and animals.
Speaker 1: He has several interesting projects, including the largest citizen science
Speaker 1: study on bun pressing pets, and he's involved in efforts
Speaker 1: to use AI to decode how whales and monkeys talk
Speaker 1: to each other. But first I wanted to know the
Speaker 1: history of scientists communicating with animals. Well, thank you, doctor
Speaker 1: Rosanna for joining us, Thank you for having me. So
Speaker 1: I was hoping you could start by just giving us
Speaker 1: a broad history of when did we start getting interested
Speaker 1: in communicating with animals.
Speaker 2: Well, it's a very interesting question because I believe we've
Speaker 2: always been interested in communicating with animals. There are many
Speaker 2: cultures that believe, for example, animals have souls and so
Speaker 2: you can communicate with them. He can think about all
Speaker 2: the fables for kids from two hundred years ago and
Speaker 2: even more where we attribute to animals intelligence or emotions,
Speaker 2: and so in that sense, the idea that animals might
Speaker 2: have cognitive abilities and even things that they are trying
Speaker 2: to communicate as existed for a long long time.
Speaker 1: According to doctor Rossano, a scientist in the last century
Speaker 1: started to wonder to what extent animals can use language
Speaker 1: and whether it's the thing that really makes humans different
Speaker 1: from other animals. Now, one of the first people to
Speaker 1: make the case that maybe humans are not that different
Speaker 1: from other animals in terms of language was Jane Goodall.
Speaker 2: One of the first one was Jane Goodle that clearly
Speaker 2: told us, look, these chance are communicating with each other,
Speaker 2: and clearly they have gestions and they have facial expression,
Speaker 2: they have signals that they convey to each other that
Speaker 2: seem to be meaningful, they seem to be relevant. And
Speaker 2: so once you start showing that actually wild animals might
Speaker 2: have a code to communicate with each other, then opens
Speaker 2: up a completely new possibility. Maybe, just like humans are
Speaker 2: thousands of languages, maybe animals each species as at least
Speaker 2: one code that they can use to communicate with each other.
Speaker 2: And now the challenges can we crack this code?
Speaker 1: The next step side this tried was to teach animals words,
Speaker 1: but they quickly found almost no animals had the ability
Speaker 1: to pronounce words like humans.
Speaker 2: And so the next step was, well, what if we
Speaker 2: teach them sign language. And a lot of animals and
Speaker 2: these did learn sun language or at least quite a few words.
Speaker 1: And this is referring to Coco for example, was Coco
Speaker 1: in the seventies.
Speaker 2: Coco was later, and Coco was in the eighties and
Speaker 2: early nineties.
Speaker 1: Coco, by the way, was a famous gorilla passed away
Speaker 1: in twenty eighteen. They were said to have a sign
Speaker 1: language vocabulary of over a thousand words.
Speaker 2: There were several others. One of the most famous one
Speaker 2: was Washow was a champ that I had learned actually
Speaker 2: quite a lot of gestures. And one of the things
Speaker 2: that I find most fascinating is he had learned a
Speaker 2: lot of gestures, but one of the signs he could
Speaker 2: never learn was why. It's like, how do you even
Speaker 2: teach why? Like? What is it? What is it? The Youngaha? Anyway,
Speaker 2: the interesting thing was some of these animals seem to
Speaker 2: be able to learn a few underwards and use the
Speaker 2: signs in a way that potentially was interesting. But some
Speaker 2: scholars said, look is the equivalent of just Pavlov's dog bell.
Speaker 1: Okay, here we get to the first big issue in
Speaker 1: the study of teaching animals to communicate, and that is
Speaker 1: if you teach a dog or a cat or a
Speaker 1: gorilla to use a bun or a hand sign that
Speaker 1: means food, and they get a treat every time they
Speaker 1: use it. Are they really learning language or are they
Speaker 1: just learning that if you press that button they get food.
Speaker 1: This is called stimulus response. You might have heard of
Speaker 1: Pavlov's dogs, where they taught dogs to expect food every
Speaker 1: time their trainer rings a bell. Well, here are the
Speaker 1: lingering questions surrounding examples like Washo the champoor, Coco the gorilla,
Speaker 1: or Stella the dog. Is whether you're really proving that
Speaker 1: animals can use language in the same way that we
Speaker 1: use language. And so the science shifted gears and it
Speaker 1: tried a couple of different directions.
Speaker 2: And so in the early eighties, basically there was the
Speaker 2: decision that this switcher should kind of be stopped. It
Speaker 2: wasn't really helpful in anyway. Some people continued, but the
Speaker 2: field kind of moved in three directions that I think
Speaker 2: we're very interesting. So one was, well, what if we
Speaker 2: actually tried to look at their natural communicative systems? Right,
Speaker 2: So there's a famous paper from nineteen eighty on the
Speaker 2: vever monkey alarm calls that basically says, hey, if you
Speaker 2: look at vever monkeys, they have these different vocalizations that
Speaker 2: seem to be associated to different types of predators. Like ego, leopard, snake,
Speaker 2: and so the idea was, what if actually they have
Speaker 2: something like words, So maybe we should look more at
Speaker 2: the spontaneous communicative system and what they used to communicate
Speaker 2: with each other instead of teaching them human language.
Speaker 1: That's one direction, looking at the language that animals use
Speaker 1: on their own instead of trying to teach them a language,
Speaker 1: and later on we'll talk about how doctor Rossano is
Speaker 1: using AI to figure that out.
Speaker 2: The second direction was what if we look at animals
Speaker 2: that can actually learn hum of vocalization and so, for example,
Speaker 2: you can train a parrot to start reproducing the words
Speaker 2: in that way, it's not just teaching them sign language.
Speaker 2: But you can have animals that we know our vocal learners,
Speaker 2: and if they can learn new sounds, maybe they can
Speaker 2: also start putting them together in ways that might be
Speaker 2: more flexible.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: So, indeed, there was amazing research that was done on
Speaker 2: vocalizations and teaching parrots, for example the constant of sameness
Speaker 2: or colors and things like numbers.
Speaker 1: Here the most famous example is Alex, the talking great
Speaker 1: parrot trained by doctor Irene Pepperberg that had a vocabulary
Speaker 1: of over one hundred words I could count and name
Speaker 1: shapes and colors. Alex lived thirty one years then pass
Speaker 1: away in twenty oh seven. Then there's the third direction
Speaker 1: that the science of animal communication took, and this one
Speaker 1: will seem familiar.
Speaker 2: The third direction was, what if instead of trying to
Speaker 2: do this training that is unclear with sign language and
Speaker 2: what exactly do they know, we try to use something
Speaker 2: there's a lot more automated, kind of like a touchscreen,
Speaker 2: like almost like a keyboard that you can actually push
Speaker 2: buttons in and then combine and create sequences. So this
Speaker 2: had already started in the seventies, but it became particularly prominent,
Speaker 2: for example with famous bernobos like Kanzi that died actually
Speaker 2: very recently. And so the idea was, what if we
Speaker 2: use these devices that had been used previously with long
Speaker 2: global humans to kind of learn to communicate, for example,
Speaker 2: that you want the start of food, or that you
Speaker 2: want a specific object or you want to play. And
Speaker 2: so the idea is they learn to associate a specific
Speaker 2: button with the concept and then they can push it
Speaker 2: when they want it. But then you can start combining
Speaker 2: some those things and try to produce things that look
Speaker 2: like scient instance, and so Canzi, for example, could use
Speaker 2: a keyboard that has several hundred of this science. And similarly,
Speaker 2: that was what done with dolphins, where there were dolphins
Speaker 2: that actually could learn to use some symbols to request
Speaker 2: for things. This was done with one dog in two
Speaker 2: thousand and eight.
Speaker 1: Yes, this is the Pushbunton idea that's part of the
Speaker 1: recent talking pet movement. Back then scientists even tried it
Speaker 1: with dolphins. But here we run into the second big
Speaker 1: issue in animal communication research, that is that often these
Speaker 1: studies have a sample size of one.
Speaker 2: What happens is we're just taking usually one animal, maybe two.
Speaker 2: We spent hours and hours and hours and hours training them,
Speaker 2: often removing them from the natural environment, and what we
Speaker 2: get out of this is like this one subject that
Speaker 2: possibly is a genius, possibly is the flukes, and we
Speaker 2: don't really know right, It's like, it's it real. Imagine
Speaker 2: if like you, as a scientist, spend your entire career
Speaker 2: just training this one animal to show that they can
Speaker 2: do something amazing. You can see how there's skepticism, there's concerns,
Speaker 2: and maybe you might have an interest in making sure
Speaker 2: that the abilities are emphasized.
Speaker 1: It's an an equals one.
Speaker 2: Exactly, It's an equal one often of animals that have
Speaker 2: been removed from the natural environment, is what you're getting
Speaker 2: representative of what any animal in the wild could possibly
Speaker 2: communicate about, or is it just like this one that
Speaker 2: you spend years and years training that ends up being
Speaker 2: able to do this.
Speaker 1: So that's the second issue in studying whether we can
Speaker 1: communicate with animals, and studies where there's one scientist that
Speaker 1: spends a long time teaching one animal to communicate, there
Speaker 1: are lots of questions of whether this applies to all
Speaker 1: animals in that species or whether the animal can only
Speaker 1: speak to that one person. Although, as doctor Rosseno says,
Speaker 1: a sample of n equals one is still something.
Speaker 2: As a scientist, it's like any equal one, it's not
Speaker 2: an equals deal. Like if you have a flying pig,
Speaker 2: you have a flying pig.
Speaker 4: I mean, it's something that we should know about, right aside,
Speaker 4: these pigs can fly. Pigs can fly, like it's possible, right,
Speaker 4: So it's like if all of a sudden you have
Speaker 4: one bonobo that can start doing things and nobody else
Speaker 4: could even imagine they could do it is worth knowing, right,
Speaker 4: It's like we should yeah, yeah, at least investigative photo
Speaker 4: all right.
Speaker 1: We'll get to the last issue, figuring out if we
Speaker 1: can communicate with animals, and then we'll talk about the
Speaker 1: idea of using AI to possibly translate what animals are
Speaker 1: saying for us. Stick with us. We'll be right back,
Speaker 1: and we're back. We're talking about whether we can communicate
Speaker 1: with animals, and so far we've learned the answer is yes.
Speaker 1: Pet owners can communicate with their dogs or cats using buns.
Speaker 1: You can teach apes to use sign language, and you
Speaker 1: can even teach a parrot to count and tell you
Speaker 1: what color something is. But the answer is also sort
Speaker 1: of no. We don't know for sure yet whether we
Speaker 1: can ever truly communicate with an animal beyond simple words
Speaker 1: or concepts. An animal's ability to use buns or sign
Speaker 1: language could just be learned behavior like Pavlov's dogs, for example.
Speaker 1: A famous cautionary tale in animal studies is the story
Speaker 1: of Clever Haunts.
Speaker 2: So there's this famous horse that at the beginning of
Speaker 2: the twentieth century was claimed to be able to do
Speaker 2: mathematical operations, so additions and subtractions, and so the idea
Speaker 2: was this horse became super famous and people were paying
Speaker 2: money to go watch the horse, and so it would
Speaker 2: be something like, okay, Hans, what is five plus two?
Speaker 2: And so you hear Hans kind of knocking his hoof
Speaker 2: from the ground, and when he gets to like five
Speaker 2: six seven, and then it would stop and people just
Speaker 2: you know, start clapping and being amazed. But god, but
Speaker 2: what happened was that Hans was very good at picking
Speaker 2: up cues from the audience in terms of when he
Speaker 2: was hitting the right number. So people were all of
Speaker 2: a sudden smiling when he was the correct answer, and
Speaker 2: so he was kind of like slowly hitting the holes
Speaker 2: until he got the correct one. I see you smile.
Speaker 2: Now I'm done. Obviously he couldn't do math. He was
Speaker 2: just picking up cues.
Speaker 1: It's almost a little more impressive than counting yes.
Speaker 2: So that's a funny thing. So clever haunts as a
Speaker 2: term has been used in almost a derogatory way to
Speaker 2: refer to people believe the animals can do things that
Speaker 2: really they cannot do.
Speaker 1: Now, doctor Rossana has two interesting projects he's involved in.
Speaker 1: The first is that he's the lead researcher basically the
Speaker 1: scientific side of the Talking pet movement, doing science on
Speaker 1: a massive scale. The second project is that he's using
Speaker 1: AI to study how animals communicate in the wild. We'll
Speaker 1: talk about the Talking Pet project first.
Speaker 2: And so this thing started because a speech language pathologist
Speaker 2: in twenty nineteen. This went viral and then a clips online.
Speaker 2: I'm not on social media, so I didn't even know,
Speaker 2: but basically a colleague asked me, you know, would you
Speaker 2: like to do this? I thought it was going to
Speaker 2: be a lot side project, and I media realized a
Speaker 2: lot of people thought this was a terrible idea. So
Speaker 2: I had a lot of colleagues telling me, what are
Speaker 2: you doing. Didn't you know that we stopped doing the
Speaker 2: cameray so thirty years ago, fuckty years ago, And I
Speaker 2: was like, yeah, because we were doing with chips. But
Speaker 2: now there's are dogs. Well let's look into this and
Speaker 2: let's see what happens. We now have ten thousand dogs,
Speaker 2: and actually every week we keep getting an out of
Speaker 2: twenty thirty dogs signed up and seven hunderd cat in
Speaker 2: the study from forty seven countries, and just to give
Speaker 2: you an idea, we get one million. Buttom presses pretty
Speaker 2: much every month.
Speaker 1: Yes, there are ten thousand dogs and owners signed up.
Speaker 1: And if you go to the University of California, San Diego,
Speaker 1: Comparative Condition Lab website. You can sign up to potentially
Speaker 1: be on the study too. So what have they learned
Speaker 1: so far from these thousands of dogs and cats?
Speaker 2: One other thing I love is you can see what
Speaker 2: buttons are pressed the mass and if you are a dog,
Speaker 2: what do you think is the button they press the
Speaker 2: moss freak, food free, and then it's outside and then
Speaker 2: it's play. And so you're like, yeah, does it sound
Speaker 2: like a dog? Yeah, that seems very reasonable. My favorite
Speaker 2: thing is we're now looking at the cat data. One
Speaker 2: of the top five buttons for cats is.
Speaker 4: No, I'm not gonna do it anyway.
Speaker 2: But the idea is, you know, once you have thousands
Speaker 2: of these animals and try to do a bunch of things.
Speaker 1: Okay, here are some of the things doctor Rossanna has
Speaker 1: learned about what cats and dogs communicate. The first is
Speaker 1: that apparently dogs do care about you.
Speaker 2: And what I've learned by looking at what they communicate about,
Speaker 2: in addition to food, water, playings on, is that these
Speaker 2: are social animals, and social animals often ask about where
Speaker 2: are the people that used to be in the house
Speaker 2: And I'm not currently in the house, somebody is gone,
Speaker 2: where is that? When the cat dies, they keep asking
Speaker 2: about where is the cat? And when you are out
Speaker 2: of the house, they might ask about you. And so
Speaker 2: they think about you, and they think about the ones
Speaker 2: around you, and they think about the other animals they
Speaker 2: live with. And it's kind of obvious and yet mind
Speaker 2: blowing to be reminded that, like maybe the same way
Speaker 2: in which you care for them, they care for you too,
Speaker 2: And it isn't that nice to know?
Speaker 1: So you're seeing this in the data that this is
Speaker 1: not a fluid that one does did it? Three dogs?
Speaker 1: Did it?
Speaker 2: No? I mean you see it in the data. You
Speaker 2: see that many of them ask about humans that are
Speaker 2: not at them, including the experimentals, Like the experimental will
Speaker 2: be there that will give them treats and stuff, and
Speaker 2: then they will ask later it's like where is the
Speaker 2: treat to human? What is the treat to you? And
Speaker 2: they also communicate a lot about how they're feeling, being
Speaker 2: scared or being frustrated, or being dealing with something that
Speaker 2: is bothering them. And especially you know when some of
Speaker 2: the animals they live with ee and you see them
Speaker 2: asking when they're sick. So we have examples of some
Speaker 2: of them saying they're concerned about some other animals, maybe
Speaker 2: because they're limping or they seem to be sluggish and
Speaker 2: so on. And I think the idea is these are animals,
Speaker 2: they have some level of empathy and they care about others.
Speaker 1: The other interesting thing doctor Rossano and his team have
Speaker 1: found is related to the last issue in the animal communication,
Speaker 1: and that is whether animals can use words in new ways.
Speaker 1: This is a concept called productivity. You might be able
Speaker 1: to teach an animal that certain buns or signs mean
Speaker 1: certain concepts, but a true test of whether animals can
Speaker 1: really understand language is whether they can mix words to
Speaker 1: name something they've never seen before. And apparently some dogs
Speaker 1: can't do this.
Speaker 2: We have one of the dogs started using the combination
Speaker 2: water bone water bond and the owner was like, I
Speaker 2: don't know what you're asking for, until they realized that
Speaker 2: water bone was ice, and so they start giving them ice.
Speaker 2: And once they introduce the bottom ice, they stopped pushing
Speaker 2: the combination water bone because now they have the water
Speaker 2: for it.
Speaker 1: Right, So dogs can put together words to make new meanings,
Speaker 1: does that mean they understand language?
Speaker 2: So the issue is there's a lot of anecdotal reports
Speaker 2: and I've seen clips of course of animals using these
Speaker 2: things in a way that seem to be contextually appropriate
Speaker 2: and conveying productivity. But as a scientist, ideally you want
Speaker 2: to test it. The issue when you see clips and
Speaker 2: so on is that you never know if it was like, oh,
Speaker 2: did you actually train this? Was there some other way
Speaker 2: in which you recreated this scenario and now you filmed it.
Speaker 2: Whatever you see on TikTok on YouTube these days, you're like,
Speaker 2: was it really spontaneous or was it made up? So
Speaker 2: the idea is to design studies in which you try
Speaker 2: to elicit those kind of responses, right, So that's what
Speaker 2: we're trying to do.
Speaker 1: As the anecdotes are not enough to show that they
Speaker 1: can do things.
Speaker 2: Anecdotes are informative. If you have all the details of
Speaker 2: those anecdotes, they show that it might be possible.
Speaker 1: I think you're trying to tell me I shouldn't believe
Speaker 1: everything I see on YouTube.
Speaker 2: Correct. Well, I mean it is a very important problem
Speaker 2: for us, and I think anecdotal reports are helpful. Please
Speaker 2: stand them along. But do not think that just because hey,
Speaker 2: one time my dog did this, then it has been
Speaker 2: proven scientifically that that's the truth.
Speaker 1: Okay, The last topic we're going to talk about is
Speaker 1: using AI to understand what animals are saying when they
Speaker 1: talk to each other. Can we decipher their natural communication language?
Speaker 2: Yes. So there's at least two big projects that are
Speaker 2: big collaborations across several scientists that are interested in decoding
Speaker 2: animal communication. One is the Species Project. It started with
Speaker 2: dolphins and whales and so on, and that has now
Speaker 2: expanded to other species. Another project is called Project SETTI
Speaker 2: specifically started with the goal of understanding whales songs.
Speaker 1: And so what are we learning with all these different
Speaker 1: AI understanding language projects.
Speaker 2: Some of the things, for example, we're learning is that
Speaker 2: a lot of animals seem to add signals that would
Speaker 2: be similar to names, like a way of kind of
Speaker 2: referring to this specific individual in the group. And that
Speaker 2: is very interesting. Right, So we didn't know that animals
Speaker 2: might have names for each other, and so this is
Speaker 2: an interesting phenomenon being documented now for dolphins and for elephants.
Speaker 1: Dolphins and elephants have names for each other.
Speaker 2: It's a little symptom, fine, but yes, right.
Speaker 1: The last question I asked our experts was why communicate
Speaker 1: with animals?
Speaker 3: Ooh, I think it's incredible that we can actually hear
Speaker 3: how our animals are experiencing the environment we share with them.
Speaker 3: We can have such a better understanding of what they're
Speaker 3: thinking about, what their needs are, how we can care
Speaker 3: for them, and ultimately, I think it'll help us treat
Speaker 3: our animals a lot better and learn what they've been
Speaker 3: trying to say all these years.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I guess it's a different thing if something is
Speaker 1: actually talking to you, even.
Speaker 3: If people aren't teaching their own pets in their homes,
Speaker 3: just the knowledge that it's possible for a dog to
Speaker 3: use words and create sentences, it's like, Okay, this is
Speaker 3: a very complex creature that is living in my home.
Speaker 3: I think it can give a really good appreciation of
Speaker 3: how smarts our pets are and how much deserve.
Speaker 1: How do we learn more about what you do and
Speaker 1: how to teach our pets how to use this system.
Speaker 3: So my very first book, How Sell Learned to Talk,
Speaker 3: is the whole story of the idea that I had
Speaker 3: all the way through this communication breakthrough and then the
Speaker 3: world learning about it. Then my second book, Your Dog
Speaker 3: Can Talk, is the step by step training guide, and
Speaker 3: then you can find our buttons hunger for words, talking
Speaker 3: pet buttons and any major retailer Amazon, Showy, pet Co
Speaker 3: and get started with your own pet.
Speaker 1: Does it also work with teenage daughters?
Speaker 3: I have seen some applications in the Home for humans
Speaker 3: very fun. So whoever needs the buttons, go ahead and
Speaker 3: set it up. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I bet the most popular button would be the mute button.
Speaker 1: Yeah really, well, thank you so much for joining us,
Speaker 1: MS Hunger.
Speaker 3: Yeah, thanks for having me. It is blast.
Speaker 2: We know that, for example, a dog can smell things
Speaker 2: much better than we can. We know that certain animals
Speaker 2: can hear things that we cannot hear. We know that
Speaker 2: others can see things that we cannot see. There's so
Speaker 2: many abilities that are part of the natural kingdom the
Speaker 2: humans do not quite well. Imagine you're like looking at
Speaker 2: the world in which there's an infinite amount of possibility
Speaker 2: in terms of what animals can do. What if they
Speaker 2: could tell you? Just imagine how different our sense of
Speaker 2: being in this world would be.
Speaker 1: So if we could communicate with them, they could tell us.
Speaker 2: That's the dream, right? What does an elephant know? What
Speaker 2: does the dog know? What does a lion know? What
Speaker 2: does a whale know that we don't know?
Speaker 1: Not? Just what can we learn about them, but what
Speaker 1: can we learn from them?
Speaker 2: What can we learn from them? And how does that
Speaker 2: change es? And so that's my dream.
Speaker 1: All right. We hope you enjoyed that. Please tell your
Speaker 1: dog or cat that I said hi. Thanks for joining us,
Speaker 1: See you next time. You've been listening to Science Stuff.
Speaker 1: Production of iHeartRadio, written and produced by me or Yhm,
Speaker 1: edited by Rose Seguda, Executive producer Jerry Rowland, and audio
Speaker 1: engineer and mixer Kasey Peckram. And you can follow me
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