This is a really interesting interview with the speech pathologist who owns Stella the talking dog. Stella uses an augmentative and alternative speech device, a board with recorded phrase buttons, to functionally communicate with her owner. While that sounds like jerking off dolphins territory for animal cognition, we communicate with our pets every day and they communicate back. Their larynx doesn't allow for that to go very far, so they just bark and do nonverbal cues in frustration. Given a tool that allows them to engage the vocabulary they already know in phrase structures they already frequently hear, dogs are particularly receptive to this tech.
I run reddit.com/r/wordsbutton for the topic, though it hasn't gotten off the ground. Anecdotally my own dog picked it up without any coaching, using five buttons currently only because I don't have the space for a full board. He no longer howls at me or scratches at the door because he knows that, like a gentleman, he can say he wants to go outside and differentiate between that, go potty, go get mail, and go kitchen.
Anyone who doesn't think that animals are capable of meaningful communication with us is probably themselves not capable of meaningful communication with anything.
Animal cognition was one of the things that initially drove me toward radical politics. When we mystify intelligence and wall it off to our own species because we express it on a more complex level, it sets the stage for a greater devaluation of animal life. I don't think they can be taught to think at a human level or communicate abstract human ideas, but working in wildlife rehab and forming close relationships with various species my entire life it's clear that in those relationships there is meaningful communication happening where there's use-value for it. A raccoon and an ostrich are both capable of associating words with things they like or dislike, but neither has a way of natively making those sounds or formulating their own interspecies word for it. AACs like this remove the anatomical barrier to that functional communication and open up some really fascinating scientific and ethical territory.
With dogs and cats it's super neat. Boards of like 40 words, abstract usage of ones like "water"/"outside" and consistent syntax. I'd love to see the possibilities with other species that form close human relationships where they're exposed to this kind of language daily.
It's one of my favourite podcasts in my regular rotation, and definitely overall favourite science podcast at the moment. The host is perpetually fascinated by everything, is at least politically a left-liberal if not some kind of socialist, and the guests are all really engaging.
