Teach Your Dog to Talk: A Beginner's Guide to Training Your Dog to Communicate with Word Buttons

Introduction

Hello, and welcome to Teach Your Dog to Talk!

If you’re reading these words, you obviously want to learn how to communicate with your dog or any other species of pets (cat/lizard/horse/peacock/lemur/pig) that are currently students/learners of animal Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC). Even though this book is called Teach Your Dog to Talk, rest assured that I see you exotic animal teachers and think it’s super cool that you have a talking iguana. Learners can be furry, scaled, or feathered, but the basics of animal AAC are essentially the same. The only difference is that you may have to modify your approach based on your learner’s size or species.

Animal AAC is a relatively new phenomenon pioneered by speech-language pathologist Christina Hunger. Ms. Hunger had the bright idea of creating the first word board for her dog, Stella, a Catahoula/Australian cattle dog mix. She has also written a book called How Stella Learned to Talk, which is part memoir and part how-to guide. For anyone wanting to do a deep dive into the world of AAC, I recommend picking up Ms. Hunger’s book, in which her experience and background shine.

Teach Your Dog to Talk focuses on some best practices being employed by learners and their teachers (pet owners) to date. This is to say that animal AAC is an evolving landscape. Just as with dog training, many people within the animal-training community and beyond will probably begin to develop their own opinions about and methodologies for achieving the same end goal—getting your pet to communicate effectively. Since I belong to numerous groups devoted to learning more about animal AAC, I am distilling our shared experiences into what I hope will be an informative and easy-to-follow guide for teaching your dog to talk. I am by no means an animal behavior or AAC expert, but I am an enthusiastic supporter of this movement and want to help you get started as quickly and as easily as possible.

The community of learners and teachers of animal AAC has mushroomed ever since Ms. Hunger posted an Instagram video of Stella talking using the Learning Resources Recordable Answer Buzzers back in October 2019. And, while those of us participating in this exciting endeavor still wonder to what extent the animals understand language, we have enough anecdotal evidence to suggest that our learners are at least communicating with us effectively.

My Talking Dog

I began teaching my dog, Casper, to use the recordable buttons in 2019, shortly after seeing Stella’s videos on Instagram. Casper is a Border Aussie (50 percent border collie and 50 percent Australian shepherd). Besides his being adorable, one of the reasons I chose him was because both border collies and Australian shepherds have a fantastic working memory for language. This makes them highly trainable and, as I would come to find out, great candidates for AAC learning.

Soon after purchasing my first set of recordable buttons, I turned our dining room into a makeshift Dog Button Board Craft Workshop, much to my family’s dismay. I’m pretty sure they thought I was crazy, and given that I also have a penchant for grand projects that often go unfinished, they were no doubt rolling their eyes at my latest hobby. But there I was with some plywood, recordable buttons, and Velcro, determined to get my dog talking.

While talking with your dog has a very real utilitarian purpose, I have remained committed to this project because it is engaging and, oftentimes, hilarious. Casper became an accidental TikTok sensation when I posted a video of him getting mad at my daughter for not taking him on a golf cart ride. We’ve enjoyed all the support we’ve gotten online. There are still a lot of skeptics, and that’s okay. Sometimes we don’t even believe that Casper’s communication skills are real.

Why I Wrote This Book

I wrote this how-to book for a couple of reasons. First, I’m the parent of an autistic child, and even though he is verbal now, years of speech therapy brought him to where he is today. His speech therapists used various forms of AAC with him, so I saw firsthand how beneficial it was and still is. That’s why, when I saw Stella using her words for the first time, I thought, "Well, of course they can communicate!" It really resonated with me for that reason.

In How Stella Learned to Talk, Ms. Hunger laments the fact that more speech-language pathologists aren’t trained to use AAC.¹

Hopefully, books like hers, this one, future ones, and this entire movement will bring more awareness to AAC in general. AAC tools are remarkable in that they help unlock the power of communication for those individuals who don’t have the capacity for language, be they humans or animals. We’re getting a window into our learners’ minds, which were previously inaccessible to us because we didn’t realize they could use these tools.

Giving our animal companions some power over their communication skills is really incredible. The fact is, we are seeing animals convey emotions that we wouldn’t otherwise understand if they didn’t have these devices. Casper can tell us when he’s mad or sad. It never gets old seeing a learner make progress and communicate something fairly complex.

I talk to Casper and our new puppy Chico’s vets all the time about the animal AAC movement, which they wholeheartedly support. However, they said most vet schools don’t cover much about animal emotions. One person who has interesting insight into communication is Temple Grandin, whom I learned about due to my son’s autism diagnosis. She is an animal behavior expert who also happens to have autism. In a speech given to vet students at Tufts University, she said evidence is clear that animals experience fear, rage, panic, novelty seeking, and other emotions such as lust, caring, and playfulness.²

This isn’t a surprise to most pet owners, especially those of us utilizing AAC. We see our pets use words to communicate emotions on a regular basis.

It will be interesting to see what impact this movement will have on the field of veterinary medicine, animal behavior, and cognitive science. Given the