[robbedpeter]

This is not true. Pre-verbal animals like wolves know the difference between rabbit in hole and rabbit not in hole. Raining and not raining. Pack and not pack. Food and not food.

In coyotes, it is the absence of pack members in communal howling that triggers hyper-fertility.

In arboreal primates, they tend to have three threat vocalizations (air, tree, ground) and one "no threat" modality.

I don't think it's nearly as clear as you're suggesting. There is even evidence of the use of mathematical 0 in animal cognition and communication.

Formal verbal communication seems more a matter of physical capability than cognitive capacity. Giving animals the ability to speak with sign language (Koko the gorilla, RIP) or buttons (like Bunny the talking dog) has shown that animal cognition isn't nearly as distinct from human cognition as has been thought.

What makes humans special is sophisticated verbalization, opposable thumbs, and being the ultimate endurance/persistence predator.

[carapace]

Well I did say "the beginning of language and rational thought", eh? And you're picking some very intelligent animals as counter-examples. :)

I wouldn't be surprised or disappointed to find out that non-human intelligence is more common than previously suspected.

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> What makes humans special is sophisticated verbalization, opposable thumbs, and being the ultimate endurance/persistence predator.

Aye. FWIW, I would add to that list the capability for recursive and self-reflexive thought.

[robbedpeter]

There are three well known talking animals from YouTube and tiktok - Stella and Bunny (dogs) and Billi (cat) - that regularly exhibit evidence of reflection and recursive thought. Bunny has made poop jokes, talks about dreams (night talk,) and understands time abstractions like morning, afternoon, night, before, later, tomorrow, today, and yesterday. Billi schedules pets and toys, and complains if her humans don't wait, and so on.

My own dog has 30 buttons, and picks up new words and abstractions without explicit training. I've used 3 to 5 word sentences with him for 2 years, with great results. He's started using "outside water" in recent weeks to indicate he wants to pee outside, or "potty" for number two, where potty was all it was before. I give complex instructions, 2 to 4 deep, using 20ish named toys, like "take zebra to box, bring shark to me, then sit."

One thing I'm noticing is that while all the cognitive tools humans use seem to be present, they're shallow. There's not as many layers to the experiences they're communicating, and sophisticated abstractions might be impossible for them.

It looks like the animal internal narrative is a kind of "living in the moment" type of existence, whereas even 2 year old humans have a multi-layer internal narrative, including deception and fantasy, which is the biggest divergence I've seen so far between animal and human.

Any particular facet of cognition seems to be there, it just looks like humans process more deeply and broadly.

I think if you give an elephant, horse, dog, cat, or parrot a neuralink implant and a 1000+ word vocabulary, by the time the animal is 4 or 5 it'll communicate with a mature understanding of its vocabulary. Elephants and dolphins might be able to tell stories.

At some point the buttons will have to become cheaper, or a better animal interface will be needed for talking pets to become more common. I hope I live to see talking pet "classes" and animal education become mainstream. I think there will be a cultural shift toward more empathy and better treatment of pets.

https://youtube.com/c/BilliSpeaks

https://youtube.com/channel/UCEa46rlHqEP6ClWitFd2QOQ

https://youtube.com/c/hungerforwords

And: https://fluent.pet/products/they-can-talk If you want buttons for yourself.

[carapace]

What you're doing with your dog is amazing (I was wrong above, I am a bit surprised!)

> I hope I live to see talking pet "classes" and animal education become mainstream. I think there will be a cultural shift toward more empathy and better treatment of pets.

I think you might be putting the cart before the horse. It seems to me that if we develop more empathy and kindness towards animals we would naturally find out how to communicate with them; and contrariwise, if we learn to make them talk before we learn empathy and compassion we'll almost certainly just enslave them (more than we do already.)

You know the folks who live near orangutans say that they know how to talk, they just don't do it in front of humans because they don't want to be made to work.

- - - -

I think what you really discovered or developed with your dog is your own perception and intelligence. I don't mean that the dog isn't intelligent and understanding you. What I mean is that, if your dog can do this, then I would assume that most dogs can do this (no offense or disrespect intended, you might have Doggie Einstein, eh?) and therefore the limiting factor (for communicating with dogs) ins't the dog, it's the intelligence and perspicacity of the humans involved, eh?

[robbedpeter]

I'm pretty sure most dogs are going to be able to talk, it's just a matter of exposure and access to words. My dog is smart, but definitely not doggy Einstein. There will be different levels, I'm 100% certain chihuahuas aren't geniuses, cattle and working dogs are probably smartest, but ferrets and rats and birds will likely also be able to use hundreds of words.

The thing that amazed me is that I didn't have to train my dog on the buttons after the first set. Once he figured out food, water, and outside, I just kept adding buttons and he figured out what he wanted to say. I maybe put an hour into training and treats, the rest was whatever he picked up naturally (and my consistent use of small sentences while talking to him. )

There's a whole untapped marketplace for animal->computer interfaces. I want to give my dog hundreds or thousands of words, but the buttons run about $9 a pop, so it's not financially feasible. I've been tinkering with mechanical keyboard keys and so on, but the ultimate system would be portable that allowed the animal to trigger words through a speaker on the collar. Dogs don't do fine motor control, so keys have to be big and sturdy, which makes portable hard, and so on. Maybe a laser protection keyboard? There's a product waiting to happen, hopefully someone figures it out.

Working dogs with portable communication could gain huge advantages by notifying their people "found the sheep" or "there's a wolf out there" etc.

Marine life would be phenomenal. If you could train an orca to talk, or dolphins and whales, they could complain about noise or pollution, or interact with researchers in plain English. Wild birds and weasels and even bears could be given words, it's just a matter of giving them the right interface, motivation, and a safe situation to communicate. Bears and lions have brains more similar to humans in size and morphology than most other mammals, talking to them would be fascinating.

It does expose animals to more sophisticated exploitation, but I think that the definite knowledge that these animals have an emotional inner life will make it harder to abuse them at a cultural level.

Humans are still special, but it seems more a matter of degree or depth and not anything unique in our cognitive toolkit. The more animals we give voices, the more we will see that their inner life and mind isn't as different as we thought.

Some other thoughts I've puttered around with, dogs that can speak will develop cognitive tools that other dogs don't have. They think about things differently because they can, so vocabulary and experience will cause them to develop in relationship to humans in a novel way. A 10 year old dog that has been able to speak its whole life is a different kind of dog than any that have come before. Why and how and what questions get asked and answered, letting the dog develop ideas that non speaking dogs can't achieve. It's gonna be a million times harder to see my dog pass away than my previous pets that didn't talk.

Talking buttons are a potentially huge development in human historical relationships to animals, and I think we should lean into the technology as hard as possible. A police dog that can communicate details about what it smells - k9 units that instead of alerting as a catch-all could be describing the exact thing they smell, so cops wouldn't be able to abuse it as easily. A dog could say "meth" or "roadkill" or "stranger dog" and so on, and you wouldn't go to jail for tires that smell interesting to a dog.

Speaking rats and birds would be useful for all sorts of inspection and construction jobs. Speaking service animals would be able to communicate requests for help "owner is seizing" or "owner fell down, come help please."

There's a vast and fantastical set of possibilities for profit and improving life for people and animals. If only we can figure out a portable cheap system.