With mine, more warning than a bit of whining would happen, too. If food doesn’t arrive quickly after a couple of meows, the next sound that comes out is a deep, prolonged, blood-curdling yowl. The folks who worked on this probably used an irate murderbeast and a microphone:
My cat’s lucky I haven’t tried to put holy water in her dish.
The older one does that rarely, but will go around testing the bite resistance of plastics until she gets fed. The younger one complains a great deal, and selectively destroys nice surfaces (scratching at the wall) while looking me dead in the eye. Neither of them are truly starving.
That’s the thing. If a dog is healthy, then good nibbles will pretty much always be scarfed up. If Stella’s owner always pats and scratches her (a reward based on the owner’s expectations) after she’s hit “eat eat eat”, then it could be argued that Stella is hitting “eat, eat, eat” because she wants physical contact with and attention from her owner. This talking dog deal screams for the Scientific Method.
Nah, mad dogs prefer to go out in the midday sun.
I find it hard to believe that hunger would not be expressed as “mad”
Hungry is probably the first “mad” we know. Probably takes a while to differrentiate between the two, to learn that mad is a general case that covers lots of things other than hungry.
It you take “mad” to mean more “upset” then I think it’s perfectly apt.
Thank you, I’m going to have Noël Coward singing in my head for the next three days. Ok, so that’s not a bad thing, really.
This can’t fool me. I just listened to:
A hungry baby is often a furious baby, so it seems perfectly plausible to me.
I’d like to hear Stella’s reaction to all of these comments. Stella?
Training one high-energy puppy is already enough work, TYVM, I don’t have the energy for a control puppy right now.
A “control” human would also probably be required. More energy needed. Humanzzzzzzz!
The difference is grammar. People throw around phrases like “a dog has been taught to speak”, but that’s a gross mischaracterization. Dogs don’t have the brain structures to combine abstract thoughts into ideas and string words together to convey those ideas. Stunts like this are a bunch of buttons that map 1:1 with some outcome, and then a whole crap-ton of anthropomorphization is layered on to that by people watching it. This is the difference between “response to stimuli” and “language”. Really only primates, whales, dolphins, possibly crows, and a couple other species have shown any ability to do the latter.
Thanks for this. So is the argument here against generative language? Obviously my dog knows “walk” “no” “sit” etc because I taught him what those abstract sounds mean. How is Stella pressing a button different from my dog ringing a bell or bringing me his leash because he wants to go out?
I guess I don’t understand how language is different from other abstract sounds used to communicate.
Are dog eating disorders a thing? Because ‘mad’ + ‘eat eat eat’ seems like it would also be the state of someone who has eaten more than they are happy about.
Since it’s a dog; I’m leaning toward it not being that; but I’d certainly keep it in mind as a possibility for a human.
I am NOT getting my cat’s a set of these. Ruby demands enough times as it is.
I’ve seen other videos of this dog. She is using buttons to convey information, not just to ask for things.
I’m curious to know how many commenters have had exposure to formal learning about linguistics, about cross-animal communication, or about canine communication, all of which enjoy formalised academic lines of inquiry and I imagine would make one uniquely qualified to provide an evidence-informed opinion on what we are observing in these videos.
At any rate, I’ve been watching videos of Stella with interest and without these videos I would never have learned that dogs enjoy going outside for walks and also that they like eating. (I’m kidding, I find the whole thing fascinating - but I can’t make sense of it from the viewpoint of an expert as I am not one!)
