I’ve had a few people tell me that although the dog and the person are both imagining the same thing - going for a walk, and all that that entails - the dog is merely associating the sound of the phrase with the activity.
But… isn’t that… what language is? What’s qualitatively different between the human and the dog here? The human is undoubtedly making connections and associations far more complex and expressive, but at bottom it’s all just “sound = thing”, no? 🤔
I don’t speak Spanish, but I know that when I hear someone say something that sounds like “andallay!”, it means “hurry up”. I don’t know what the word literally means, or how to actually spell it (well, I do now that I looked it up: ándale), or its etymology or whether or not it’s a loan word from Chinese, but I know from experience (and cartoons) that it means “go faster”. Am I a dog to a Mexican in this scenario? My understanding is as perfunctory as my dog’s understanding of “go for a walk” is. But we wouldn’t say that I’m not using language when I react appropriately to the “ándale!” instruction.
What am I not getting?
Cheers!
human is undoubtedly making connections and associations far more complex and expressive, but at bottom it’s all just “sound = thing”, no? 🤔
The understanding of this complex and expressive structure is significant because it allows you to convey novel or abstract information. You will not be able to explain what a walk is to a dog without a demonstration, while you will be able to do so (to some degree) to the unfortunate hypothetical person who have never taken one before.
That is exactly what language is. Someone makes a sound and you know what it means. Animals can’t reason the fine details of what the meaning of words or context mean. The understand if A happens it means (action), and they do respond to the tone of your voice. Say the same thing in a different tone and it becomes confusing. An example is, if I angrily yell words in French at you (which you don’t speak), even though those words mean “happy, joy, sunshine”, you think I’m angry. But if I cuss at you in French in a super sweet voice, you think I’m being romantic. Humans, can speak non-native languages and not know how to read or write them.
I had this realization some days ago and am nearly ashamed to say that because it took me some decades to think of it.
My dogs know very well what cheese means.
My dogs understand the phrase “let’s go” and can understand it as a combined phrase such as “let’s go for a walk”, “let’s go outside”, “let’s go upstairs”. People very much underestimate dogs’ ability to truly understand human language.
I even had a very experienced and highly regarded dog trainer recently tell me that commands should ideally be single-syllable. Maybe, but certainly not due to any limitation in the dog’s ability to understand longer words and phrases. I can even be cuddling with the dogs on the couch, say, “I need to pee”, and they go running off to the bathroom (have to protect me, I guess).
I thought all dogs were smarter than people thought because my first one (Yorkie) was practically a little kid in how he could understand me. I could tell him to go somewhere and he’d do it. He let me know if he needed to pee outside or if he was hungry. Always surprised me how much a dog could understand!
Then I got a new one recently (Goldendoodle) and this little guy is a complete dumbass.
I suspect it may come down to experience though. Yorkie was already about 4 when we got him and only took about a year for me and him to really understand each other. The Doodle we got when he was only a little over a month old and we’ve had him close to a year but it has been a pain to train. Could also just be down to personality, because he has done some pretty intelligent things that surprised us.
A huge part of it is talking with your dogs, training your dogs, and being consistent.
The more you talk to your dog, being careful to use consistent language, the more it will understand. And the more it will focus on you, which is good for behavior in general.
Some personality for sure, also a year old is still quite young for a dog, he’s probably still battling those dogly instincts.
I think it’s more you as a person understand that the sentence is that, a sentence. You understand how the sentence is made, why it means what it means, not just what it means.
The dog only understands the what.
Doesn’t mean you still can’t help teach dogs to communicate. Even saw a segment recently on PBS about dogs learning to use buttons that produce words and using them to make short sentences to communicate with their owners.
Dogs are way more smarter than we give them credit for. They are the only animal that has been able to establish a relationship with humans to such a close degree, having evolved alongside us for tens of thousands of years.
I don’t look at my dog Rocket as my pet, but rather as my best friend whom I rely on daily.
A while ago I didn’t want him to get overly excited when I said the word “walk”, so I started spelling it out instead. Didn’t take him long to figure out it was the same thing.
It’s not just a monologue either. He responds in ways that have subtle differences depending on how you say something and the intonation of what is said.
No other animal has even come close to creating such a close co-existence with humans. I’d go so far as to say they are better than most humans. People can be wankers, but a good dog will always have your back if treated with kindness and respect.
No other animal has even come close to creating such a close co-existence with humans.
Horses are at least close
Yeah, I can see that, but with a horse it’s more about training I would imagine. A punishment/reward system. With a dog it’s more buddy like. I’ve never really had to chastise my dog, other than perhaps a little shock value smack when he was a pup. As for rewards, it doesn’t even have to be a treat (although it helps). Sometimes his reward appears to be just seeing me smile or laugh, which brings me on to sense of humour. My dog certainly has a sense of humour and knows what’s funny.
All that aside, I wouldn’t want a horse jumping up and sitting on my knee.
I think what you’re not getting is that dogs are neurologically wired different from humans, and so experience the world differently.
So a dog’s sense of self is different from a human’s, its sensory inputs are different, and its language processing is different.
It’s kind of like those AI models a decade or so back that were really good at identifying where a picture was taken — and then it turned out they’d mapped the relationship between the geolocation numbers in the EXIF data and weren’t looking at the image data at all.
I think you’re right. The only discrepancy I can think of might be that you implicitly know that “andalley” has meaning and context beyond what you currently understand and ascribe to it. A dog probably doesn’t think too hard about whether walking is the action of moving one’s legs or the state of being outside.
Nope, you’ve got the hang of it.
