Can dogs really talk? Why I’m not so convinced the “button training” hype is legit

Imagine this: your dog presses a button and suddenly speaks to you. Not just barking or whining, but actually stringing together words to express their thoughts. Sounds like science fiction, right? Well, many viral Instagram accounts and articles claim that dogs can talk by pressing buttons—and not just any buttons, but a whole soundboard of them. Seeing this for the first time, I couldn’t help but be skeptical. It’s not that I don’t believe animals are intelligent – I find it fascinating to learn about all the things scientists have observed in species like elephants, dogs, and even ants. And it’s not that I don’t believe humans and dogs can communicate - I know for a fact that we can. But having thoughts, translating those thoughts into words, putting multiple words together, and communicating abstract concepts? Those are some high-level cognitive and linguistic abilities that, despite my deep love and awe for dogs, I’m not convinced they possess.

Spoken language is a complex ability

Spoken language is an incredibly complex ability. Humans evolved to speak with one another, and we needed that ability in order to create the rich societies we live in today. Dogs, however, are different species that evolved with different needs. Dogs don’t ‘talk’ to one another in the same way humans talk to one another. Sure, dogs make sounds, but the majority of dog-dog communication revolves around body language and other unspoken cues. That’s complex in its own right – but completely different from the ability to string together words and phrases.

There’s no doubt dogs are more connected to us than arguably any other species. They share tens of millions of our homes, they sleep in our beds, and they’re integral members of our families. Throughout their evolution, they’ve tuned in to our cues to better adapt to living in our societies. If you’ve ever pointed at something and your dog moved in that direction to see what you were pointing at, you’ve observed a surprisingly rare phenomena in the animal kingdom. Dogs are the only known species to be able to do that, and they do it intuitively. Chimps, our closest cousins, don’t intrinsically know what it means when we point, and they have a very difficult time learning it.

Dogs also understand our words (or, more accurately, respond to our sounds) – they can be taught to respond to verbal commands, and make moves towards their treat bin or towards the front door when being asked words or phrases like ‘do you want a treat?’ or ‘do you want to go for a walk?’. But making the leap from responding to our sounds to forming words in their own heads and communicating complex thoughts and abstract concepts, is HUGE – too huge, in my opinion, based on the knowledge we currently have of dog cognition and behavior.

Scientific studies have been overextrapolated

Now let’s talk about the scientific studies that most of these articles cite, and what their results actually tell us. One is widely cited amongst button training enthusiasts as proof that these buttons work. But if you actually read that study, you’ll find that the only thing it showed was that dogs respond to words, whether their owner is in the room or not. Seriously, that’s all it showed. When someone pressed the “food” button, producing the spoken word “food”, the dog would make indications towards its food bowl. Same thing for words like “outside” and “play.” The dogs in that study were not pressing the buttons themselves – they were responding to the humans pressing the buttons and the words that were played as a result. So the compelling result here is that… dogs associate words with actions? Doesn’t anyone who has ever interacted with a dog already know that? Making the leap from the results of this study to “dogs can express complex thoughts and emotions by pressing buttons on a soundboard” is sensationalist journalism at its finest.

Another study does investigate button presses by the dogs, rather than by the humans – but the results to me are not compelling. The researchers claim that “soundboard-trained dogs produce non-accidental, non-random, and non-imitative two-button combinations.” I won’t contest the non-accidental, non-imitative assertions – I know from experience that dogs can be taught to very purposely perform certain actions, without seeing a human do it. It’s the ‘non-random’ part I find questionable. The researchers made this claim based on the finding that certain words were pressed in combination more often than could be predicted by random chance. These words were “FOOD + PLAY” and “OUTSIDE + OTHER” and “HELP + OTHER”. But hear me out here – what’s more rewarding than food and play? Than going outside (plus any other random button)? And than pressing ‘help’ (something that gets a lot of attention from the owner) - plus any other random button? Don’t you think dogs are going to press the buttons that give them the greatest rewards with the greatest frequency? Using this data alone to say dogs are stringing words together to speak to us requires immense extrapolation.

Alright, so scientific studies haven’t proved this yet. Big deal. What about the people online who claim they can do it anyway?

As a dog trainer who teaches dogs a novel ‘language’ via e-collars, I’m not someone who necessarily needs a “scientific study” in order to buy into something. E-collars are the furthest thing from politically correct, and you won’t find a study out there that shows how awesome and gentle and effective they can be. And yet, they work. They’ve worked for thousands of dogs. There are step by step, actual processes for how to train them. If you take these protocols and replicate them yourself, you can get the same results. No “scientific study” needed. However, I haven’t been able to find any compelling step by step guide about how to teach dogs to string buttons together to actually “talk” to us. Teaching a dog to ring a bell to go outside, or press a button for food or water – easy peasy. I have replicated that with my own dog. Could this be translated to pressing a button on a board? Sure. However, in my opinion, these large button packs have gotten wildly out of hand.

In her book, “How Stella Learned to Talk: The Groundbreaking Story of the World’s First Talking Dog,” Christina Hunger describes how she taught her dog to “speak” using her background as a children’s speech therapist. Giving children the means to express themselves when they can’t speak is powerful, important, deeply meaningful work that has no doubt helped so many children and their families. But the whole point of the book, the part where she takes her incredible work with children and assumes it applies to dogs – is where she loses me. Just because a child can do something does not mean a dog automatically can, even if they appear to follow the same physical patterns as children right before they’re about to speak. She provides tips for you if you’re doing it with your own dog, but they’re abstract and not specific. I was hoping for more of a how-to guide; instead, I got some fascinating information about human language learning capabilities, some “tips” for button training your own dog, and an unconvincing story about how one person claimed to have taught one dog to express phrases and abstract concepts. Other online stories / videos are equally unconvincing. Without a clear, replicable process and reasoning to back it up, I have a very hard time believing that the author, or the owners in the viral Instagram videos, are actually teaching their dogs to speak in the very human sense.

Important questions don’t yet have answers

There are still too many questions here – questions that are so fundamental to this training that, in my mind, need to be settled before we can make any assertions about it at all. First, how are dogs supposed to distinguish between tens of buttons on a board? From what we know, they only see the colors blue and yellow – so as cute and colorful as these boards look, all dogs see are blue, yellow, and lots of brown/gray. Alright, maybe dogs just learn and remember the unique positions of the buttons on the board, and the colors are just for our benefit – maybe. Dogs can certainly learn plenty of words (Chaser, a border collie, was taught the names of over 1,000 different toys and will go into another room and retrieve them). But those toys are individual items with their own looks, textures, and scents – what about buttons that all look, smell, and feel the same?

Second, how could you possibly teach a dog an abstract concept like “want” and “help” and “later”? Think first of how you would explain them to another person without using any words. Not so easy, right? Now imagine trying to explain that to a dog, who has an entirely different brain than you do – how on earth would you even begin to do that?

And finally – how would you teach dogs to string words together in a meaningful way? If we take the second study’s claim that some words were combined at a frequency higher than random chance, can you prove that they’re not stringing those words together just because they get the highest rewards from those buttons?

Humans shave a tendency to see what they want to see. There’s nothing wrong with that – it’s just part of who we are. Psychics are one example of this. Given a few words from a psychic, people can extrapolate all kinds of meanings. Similarly, our dogs ‘tell us’ a few words, and we can extrapolate all kinds of meanings from them too.

Personally, I’m not even someone who completely discounts psychics (there was a medium who came to our house when I was younger that mentioned things about deceased family members that no one – I mean no one – but our family could have known). There is so much of this world that remains undiscovered, perhaps forever shrouded in mystery. Unfortunately, we don’t have a window into our dogs’ minds, so knowing what’s actually going on inside them is a next-to-impossible task. However, based on the evidence that’s currently out there, it’s going to take a lot more evidence to convince me we’ve truly taught our dogs to “talk” with these buttons.

And if you’re struggling with behavior issues with your dog, teaching them to demand more of you is the surest way to never get those issues resolved…

If you’re struggling with unwanted behaviors in your dog – anxiety, leash aggression, incessant barking, to name a few – please don’t think button training is going to help you solve them. Your dog doesn’t need to tell you why she’s anxious, aggressive, or barking her head off in order to fix these issues; she just needs to be taught that those behaviors are unacceptable. She needs you to honor her as a dog, communicate with her in a way she’ll understand, and teach her that you’re the one she should be listening to, not the other way around.