Can I Get My Cat to Talk with Buttons?
If you watch a lot of animal videos online like me, you most likely would have come across these videos showcasing TALKING animals. By talking, I mean, using buttons pre-recorded with human voices that animals can press to communicate with their human friends. I’ve seen videos of cats, dogs, and horses doing this, and every time I am blown away by their unexpectedly precise articulation of the human language.
If you watch videos like these and also own a cat, it’s only natural to want to try it yourself with your cat. I mean, how great would it be to watch your cat look at you tenderly in the eyes and press the “I love you” button? How convenient would it be to have her tell you exactly what she wants, rather than you trying to figure out her endless meows that don’t stop no matter what you try?
I wanted this with our cat Juno, a 2-year-old grey/brownish tabby who my wife and I adopted in January of 2021. To start off, I bought a copy of the book by Christina Hunger titled “How Stella Learned to Talk.” Hunger, a speech therapist, is the person who started this groundbreaking endeavor and showed the world that it is possible to communicate with your pet at a whole another level. She usually works with toddlers and kids who have difficulty with verbal communication. When she adopted her dog, Stella, she could not help but notice striking similarities between Stella’s ways of communicating and those of toddlers right before they speak. She typically uses augmentative and alternative communication devices (ex. an iPad app with buttons that each sounds out particular words) when working with her human clients, so she decided to experiment with Stella using a similar tool, hence the recordable buttons.
What’s so amazing about this approach is that it implies a new appreciation and understanding of our pets’ intellect. All along, we’ve been trying to understand and speak our pets’ languages rather than teach them to speak ours. I’ve seen many apps that claim to “translate” our language into meows and barks for our pets to understand us. I’m not convinced that these apps do what they advertise to do, but they perhaps illustrate our implicit assumption that our pets, though smart enough to understand our language to some extent, are not smart enough to express themselves with human language, and therefore we have to speak theirs, not the other way around. Humans have taught their evolutionary cousins, primates, to use sign language (ex. Koko the gorilla), but perhaps we didn’t think our cats and dogs’ intellect were close enough to ours for them to acquire our language. (The Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal talks about this human hubris in his book “Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?” which I’m definitely going to write about at some point.)
Much impressed by Hunger’s work and very excited at the prospect of communicating with Juno in a wholly different manner, I decided to try out Hunger’s method. My ultimate goal of teaching Juno to express herself with buttons was not only to communicate with her at a more intricate level, but also to have her tell me when she’s sick or hurt, given that cats are not the best communicators when it comes to their illnesses. I first purchased recordable buttons that Hunger used for Stella, a set of four buttons that come in four different colors. I then recorded words in each button that I thought Juno would respond best to, such as “outside,” “play,” and “Churu” (Juno’s favorite treat). The basic idea behind this is to let your cat learn that pressing a button that sounds out a particular word will lead to a particular outcome. There are now many pet owners who already have had success with teaching their pets this skill and are sharing their experiences. Watching their videos and resources, I decided that, for Juno, the best way to start was to acquaint her with the buttons first, as Juno usually needs quite some time to familiarize herself with new things.
The way I went about it was to get Juno to first touch the buttons. I thought that creating the association between the sound of a button and an action for cats would be quite easy, as they already understand that words such as “treat” lead to us giving them treats. The more difficult part of this endeavor, I thought, would be teaching the cat to actually press the buttons themselves. In going about this task, I referenced a Youtuber who had a nice step-by-step tutorial on this part of the process.
But the thing was, this trick didn’t quite work for Juno. So the way I went about it instead was by rewarding Juno every time she touched the button, even by mistake, in whatever fashion. I would push the button close to her and do whatever I could to get her to lift her paw and make it touch any part of the button. I tried the airplane method where you move her favorite treat like an airplane (as if you are trying to feed an unwilling toddler) and make her paw follow it, eventually getting her to touch, even slightly, the button. And when she did, I immediately gave her the treat and showered her with praises as if she had done the most difficult, most amazing thing in the world. I did this for 10 minutes every day, and after about 3 days, she figured it out and touched the button to get her treat.
The next step was getting her to press the button. One thing I wish I had done differently was getting Juno smaller buttons that were easier for her to press. The buttons that I got might have worked for a big dog like Stella, but for Juno’s paws they were a bit hard to push down. So it took some time to get Juno to learn how to press down on the button with her weight, but we got there eventually (the trick I used was getting her to lean slightly forward (baiting her with a treat) when she had her paw on the button and only giving her the treat when she fully pressed the button).
Once we got her to press the button, the next steps were quite easy. Now using the three buttons that each sounded out “outside,” “play,” and “Churu,” we modeled pressing the buttons right before the activity we were about to do (ex. us pressing the “outside” button before we go out onto the balcony). She picked this up pretty quickly and started using the buttons herself to ask for the activities accordingly, in the right contexts.
I was beyond ecstatic when it finally seemed like we were communicating with Juno through these buttons and was planning to expand her vocabulary one by one. The problem was, Juno started pressing the buttons… nonstop. This was not an unexpected scenario, which, according to those who have already succeeded at this button business, suggested that using an “all done!” button will solve the problem. We tried that. The thing was, Juno easily picked up and understood what the “all done!” button meant. She just decided to ignore it.
Eventually, we realized what the core of the problem was. Juno was bored. She was just expressing that by pressing the buttons nonstop to get our attention. Play, play, play, outside, outside, outside. She needed a playmate who could play with her full time, she still being quite young (just turned 2 yesterday!). Using these buttons, she was conveying to us what it is that she really needed. So we decided to shelve the buttons for the time being, and we are at the moment considering getting her a sibling sometime soon. Juno already figured out the buttons, so we are sure that she’ll pick it right up again when we re-introduce them after she’s adjusted with her new sibling. So for the time being, Juno will stay buttons-free, but I expect that in the future she and her sibling will happily go about pressing buttons to let us know exactly what they want!
