Dog Buttons

This isn't about fastenings for canine clothes. It's about electronic buttons dogs use to communicate:

Talking Dog Buttons

The article explains the electronic sound board isn't meant to replace the natural canine modes of communication. It offers an additional way for owners to interact with their pets. How it works: "The sound boards for dogs have circular buttons with words on them, each pre-recorded to say the word when pressed." Dogs push the buttons with their noses. Regular, consistent training is required for an animal to learn the which button corresponds to which word and what the words mean. A dog will grasp the significance of "food," for instance, only if the human consistently says "food" when offering a meal. The technique consists of "basic operant conditioning," no different in principle from "training a dog to ring a bell to go outside."

Does the dog understand the words, though, or simply associate a particular stimulus (the sound of the word) with a specific object or outcome? This question arises especially with an expression such as "love you." How can the meaning of an abstract concept like that be demonstrated to an animal? It's not like opening a door in response to the sound "outside." While the dog might learn to link an affectionate action (e.g., licking) with the sound "love," it's quite a stretch to assume he or she "knows" the word's "meaning."

The world-famous Border Collie Chaser could identify over 1000 toys by name.

Chaser

Her trainer claimed she had the "ability to understand sentences involving multiple elements of grammar." But did she actually "understand" the words she recognized?

It's now known that parrots do more than "parrot" the sounds they've learned. They use words in context. The grey parrot Alex is a well-known example:

Alex the Parrot

According to his trainer, he displayed intelligence on a level with great apes and dolphins. Does that behavior imply understanding in the human sense?

In cases such as these, the crucial question is how we define "understanding."

I once read a comment about an ape who "talked" through a computer keyboard, declaring that when she typed, "Computer, please. . ." she didn't know what "please" meant. She was only pushing a button that she'd been trained to use for introducing a request. How does that differ from the way a human toddler uses "please," though? To him or her, it's probably just a vocal noise required to induce adults to listen favorably. (As some parents say, "What's the magic word?")

A traditional hard-line behaviorist (if any exist nowadays) would maintain that nobody, animal or human, "understands" anything in the popular sense of the term. All behavior ultimately arises from stimulus and response, whether on a simple or complex level. Consciousness is a meaningless epiphenomenon. Free will doesn't exist.

If, as most of us believe, consciousness and the ability to choose do exist in humans and some animals, where do we draw the line to say certain creatures do or don't possess these traits? Maybe understanding is a continuum, not a sharp binary.

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Animal Facial Expressions

A study at the University of Kansas Medical Center "discovered that cats use nearly 300 distinct facial expressions to communicate with one another":

Cats' Facial Expressions

In contrast, humans have 44 different facial expressions, and I was surprised to read that dogs have only 27. Feline expressions of emotion often involve ear movements and whiskers, however, so it's not so strange that they have more "distinct" expressions than we do. I was also surprised that cats' "facial signals" play such a large part in their communications with each other. As this article points out, cats are more social than people usually assume.

Chimpanzees convey a lot of information to each other by subtle facial movements:

How Chimps Communicate with a Look

Lisa Parr, director of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, discusses how small changes in expression can communicate different emotions. Chimps were tested on how well they could distinguish and identify the significance of other chimps' facial expressions. Studying these behaviors in chimpanzees may contribute to better understanding of human nonverbal communication.

Dogs may have developed some types of facial expressions specifically to communicate with us:

How Dog Expressions Evolved

Of course, as this article mentions, a lot of canine communication occurs through body language. Maybe that's why they haven't evolved as many variations on facial expressions as we have. Also, scent plays a vital role in dogs' experiences of the world, a sensory dimension we almost entirely lack compared to canines.

Quora features questions about why animals of the same species tend to look so much "alike," while human beings have distinct individual appearances. Some answers explain, in addition to the human-centered bias that causes us to make finer distinctions among members of our own species, that many animals have less variation in facial appearance than we do because they rely on other senses such as smell to recognize each other.

If intelligent Martians existed, we might think they all look alike, as the narrator of Heinlein's DOUBLE STAR does at the beginning of the novel. On the other hand, the Martians would probably have trouble telling Earth people apart.

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Portraying Animal Viewpoints

Recently I've read several bestselling first-person, canine-viewpoint novels by W. Bruce Cameron, the trilogy A DOG'S PURPOSE, A DOG'S JOURNEY, and A DOG'S PROMISE, plus a stand-alone book, A DOG'S WAY HOME. (I've watched three movies adapted from them, too, and I recommend those films. They stick as close to the novels as practicable within their running times.) The latter is realistic, aside from the literary convention of having the canine protagonist narrate her experiences in articulate, grammatical English. The author's afterword mentions the extensive research he did to ensure that her 400-mile cross-country travels would be plausible and also discusses two important motifs in the story, breed-discriminatory legislation and therapy dogs for veterans. The trilogy is fantasy, since it deals with a dog's many lifetimes, reincarnated over and over as he/she strives to fulfill his/her purpose. (Even if I believed in reincarnation, I'd classify these novels as fantasy, since we have no way of knowing what the afterlife is like or exactly how the rebirth process would work.) These books portray the world through a dog's mind and senses, smell and hearing preternaturally acute by our standards, but an understanding of human words and actions necessarily limited. The canine narrator acts like a living video and audio recorder. He or she sees and hears everything that goes on within sensory range, but a lot of it goes over the dog's head. Therefore, the reader understands what's happening even when the narrator doesn't. The dog recognizes many words but is often puzzled by the context. For instance, why do people frequently mention the names of other people who aren't present? Why don't humans appreciate the importance of chasing squirrels or checking out intriguing scents? In a funny scene in one of the books, the dog thinks his owners are encouraging him to bark louder when they yell at him to stop barking. The dogs in Cameron's works don't talk among themselves. They infer the moods, motives, and emotions of other dogs from smells, nonverbal vocalizations, and body language. I highly recommend these novels. Yes, they're tearjerkers with sentimental happy endings, but I love that if it's done well, and the human characters have believable, non-trivial problems.

Fictional animal autobiography goes back at least to BLACK BEAUTY in 1877 (and earlier, according to Wikipedia). Again, the horse narrator tells his life story within a framework of equine perceptions and concerns. Human actions are described and interpreted as they directly affect him. Like Cameron's dogs, he and his animal companions don't talk. Aside from having a horse tell the story, BLACK BEAUTY sticks to events that could actually happen. Indeed, the author's principal purpose was to awaken people to the real-life sufferings of horses and incite reforms in the treatment of animals.

There's a similar level of animal verisimilitude in BAMBI (Felix Salton's novel, not the Disney animated film). The main difference is that the deer do converse verbally. Otherwise, they behave like normal woodland creatures.

The rabbits in WATERSHIP DOWN represent a step away from completely naturalistic wildlife behavior. They have not only a language but culture and mythology. The author, however, researched the actual lives of rabbits, making his characters behave like their nonfictional models. For example, extreme fear can make them go "tharn," paralyzed with terror.

Diane Duane's feline wizard trilogy, THE BOOK OF NIGHT WITH MOON, TO VISIT THE QUEEN, and THE BIG MEOW (the latter available only through the author's website), being fantasy, depart further from strict realism. This series features cat wizards with human-like intelligence and a complex feline language. Nevertheless, aside from their wizardly duties, they view the world and human society from a feline viewpoint. For instance, they make a sharp distinction between neutered and sexually active members of their species, and intact males, even cat wizards, still act like tomcats.

On the opposite end of the spectrum from BAMBI and Cameron's dog stories, we have books such as George Orwell's ANIMAL FARM. Although the pigs and other farm inhabitants retain many animal traits, they essentially serve the function of satirizing human political structures rather than attempting to portray the actual lives of domestic livestock.

At its best, deep-dive immersion animal viewpoint fiction can allow the reader imaginative access to minds unlike our own that we can nevertheless empathize with.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt