Many pet owners have wondered what their dog is thinking, but few people have actually devoted time to teaching their dog how to communicate directly with them.
Sascha Crasnow is one of the dog owners who has. Her four-year-old beagle mix, named Puppy Parker Posey, communicates with more than 120 buttons that play pre-recorded words, which she uses to make requests and observations.
Crasnow adopted Parker during a gray pandemic winter, after her last dog had died.
“I was determined not to get a puppy this time, but her ears were so cute,” Crasnow said.
Soon after adopting Parker, Crasnow started learning about other communicative dogs, with her dad sending her TikToks of Bunny, a sheepadoodle with millions of followers. She also read How Stella Learned to Talk, a book by speech language pathologist Christina Hunger. Hunger taught her dog to communicate using the same devices as the nonverbal or speech-delayed clients she worked with did.
Parker was alerting Crasnow with a bell when she wanted to be let outside and Crasnow began to wonder if her four legged friend could communicate further with the buttons. She started with six buttons. On the first day Crasnow put them on the ground and pressed all of them, just to show Parker how they worked.
“I was taking the box that they came in to put them in my closet in the other room, and I heard her press all done from the other room," Crasnow said. "So she clearly has a part of her personality that's curious. And so she was just pressing them.”
By the end of the first day, Parker had pressed all the buttons experimentally and Crasnow modeled the meaning of the buttons, adding more as Parker seemed to understand them. After two weeks she had 20 buttons. Now, her vocabulary is about 130 words.
Her buttons are organized on six different foam mats on the floor, each arranged in different shapes to help Parker orient herself, and color coded by Crasnow.
“The yellow tiles at the far left are the social words. So: hi, bye, love you. She has a laughter button there. Her question words are all over there — yes, no, things like that,” Crasnow said. “The purple are subjects. So her name, my name, friend, stranger, human. The teal are action words. Red is objects. Orange is places. And then the dark blue is descriptors. So that's her time-based words — emotions, things like that.”
When the Talk of Iowa team visited Crasnow’s home in Des Moines, Parker interjected a few times to request to go outside, have treat in her snufflemat, get a puzzle or play find it. Crasnow admitted it sometimes takes her more than four hours to finish a 90-minute movie because of Parker’s interruptions.
@puppyparkerposey Parker invents a new word for ambulance. @fluentpet #squeakercar #fluentpet #theycantalk #talkingdog #howtheycantalk #aic #att #animaltechtalk #augmentativeinterspeciescommunication #talkingdogs #dogcommunication #talkingbuttons #talkingdogsoftiktok ♬ original sound - Parker
But Parker doesn’t only use the buttons to ask for things. She also makes observations and narrations.
Crasnow set up a camera so she could look back on one of Parker’s statements that she had missed, and she began sharing the most interesting moments on social media, such as when Parker observed an ambulance with a siren blaring outside the window and pressed the buttons squeaker and car.
“If you had a limited vocabulary, that would be a very apt way to describe an ambulance. And so that was really, kind of my first really major mind blown moment with her, and it still to this day, is kind of one of her most iconic moments.”
Crasnow has a 2-and-a-half-year-old nephew as well. She said when he and Parker get together she observes how similar Parker’s communication is to that of a small child.
“She’s made some comments sometimes about processes that I think are so interesting ... She said, mouth, chew, tummy once. And I was like, well, yes, that's how that works. You chew something in your mouth and then it goes into your tummy.”
Like a child, she alerts her caretaker when she has figured something out about the world.
“She'll press water if I'm watering the plants, things like that. Just narrating what you're doing or what she's doing. She's pressed settle and then gone and lied down, right? So it's not just making a request, right? It's narration. It's asking questions.”
Don’t let her cuteness trick you, though. Parker doesn’t always use her powers for good, such as when she announces to the room that a guest has used the facilities with her infamous poop button.
“One time we were all sitting around laughing, and she pressed the laughing button. I don't know if she was narrating or if she was joining in, but she's a real character,” Crasnow said.
She signed Parker up to be part of a study that is researching talking dogs. Crasnow, who works as an assistant professor of art history at Drake University, said as an academic she was excited to be part of the research.
“I was really interested in being able to contribute to an increased understanding of dogs and their abilities and kind of their inner lives ... I definitely have a completely different understanding of my dogs — my past dogs, my current dogs and with any dog that I interact with — from what I've learned about Parker through her buttons.”
It's really opening up this two way street in communication, rather than just us trying to figure out somehow what they need from us.”Corinna Most
Corinna Most, co-director of the Uaso Ngiro Baboon Project in Kenya, said dogs are unique animals to research because as domesticated animals, they have learned how to please humans to their own benefit — think about the puppy dog eyes they aim at you while you’re trying to enjoy a slice of pizza.
“What these buttons allow the dogs to do is make their intentions and desires and wants more clear to us,” Most said. “So I think it's really opening up this two way street in communication, rather than just us trying to figure out somehow what they need from us.”
In addition to helping humans understand dog cognition, the communication also allows humans to better understand their pet's needs.
“A lot of animals have evolved to hide their pain because it might make them more vulnerable to predators, and so giving these animals the opportunity to be more clear about whether something hurts, where it hurts ... the welfare aspect is going to be a really important component of this, of this research, and of these buttons more generally,” Most said.
That has certainly been the case with Parker. Beyond creating these adorable exchanges, Crasnow said the buttons have deepened their relationship.
“I feel like we much more communicate as equals,” Crasnow said. “We're two sentient creatures living together. And because of the way that it's a human world I have to kind of run the show a bit, but as you can see, she runs it as much as she can. She has a lot more agency over her life.”
To hear this conversation, listen to Talk of Iowa, hosted by Charity Nebbe. Caitlin Troutman produced this episode.
