Dear General
My mistress has given me a FluentPet button board for Christmas and is very excited about it, thinking it will allow us to communicate. I don’t know whether to play her foolish games or just ignore it, but I don’t want to hurt her feelings. What would you do?
Bella
Blighty
Dear Bella
You’re not alone — these FluentPet button boards are being sold to dopey pet owners all over the world, ever since that young sheepadoodle Bunny went viral on TikTok late last year.
This trend started during COVID-19, when people locked up with their pets tried to start up conversations with them, having wanted a talking pet since they read Peter Rabbit, or watched Mickey Mouse cartoons.
Leo Trottier, a cognitive scientist, spotted the opportunity on social media and developed a button system for dogs to press that could be customised with labels by their owners, starting at a bargain $65. And the owner could add a voice to each button.
Words such as ‘play’, ‘outside’, ‘water’, ‘cuddle’ and ‘potty’ seemed to be among the favourites — for the owners at least — whereas you’d think ‘scratch’, ‘more’, ‘food’ and ‘NOW’ would top the list from a dog’s point of view.
Bunny, who hit TikTok in October, is supposedly working with 110 buttons at the moment and other owners report their dogs can use up to 150; naturally it has led to a series of studies to investigate the elusive quest to have a conversation with your pet.
They have quickly shown that cats don’t have much to say at all — they mainly meow to get attention. And as you and I know, the dogs are just playing along to guarantee their next meal, hoping the fad will pass.
Sadly it won’t: Trottier, who has now sold a million button boards, convinced researchers at the University of California to set up a study on animal communication, which now includes 2000 dogs and cats in 47 countries. Who knows — maybe you are one of the guinea pigs!
It’s a funny thing, Bella, why humans would want us to speak in their language, as if it would help us somehow. They try to read us through our tail wags, whimpers and barks, but for real communication you need a sender and a receiver — and mostly they aren’t receiving what we’re sending.
What they are missing from us is how to wake up every day with promise, greet the morning with enthusiasm, derive pure joy from another early walk with us — the same old walk for them but a whole new experience of smells, sounds, sights and possibility for us. They think about last night or the day ahead — we relish the present moment.
So Bella, while they go to meditation and mindfulness classes to find inner peace and enlightenment, they’re blind to seeing it in us. They need to just be, but they can’t: they’re not ready. Go along with a few basic words to amuse her — but being your exuberant, accepting and companionable self is the reason she bought you: it’s the thing that will keep her happy. Woof!
The General
19°C