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!
Well, yeah, there’s a difference “under the hood”, as in how the brain is processing things.
But, on any practical level, dogs learn parts of human language.
What’s really interesting is when you discover that dogs can tell the difference between “let’s go to” specifics. If you’re getting them to go for a walk, they start engaging in pre-walk behaviors. If you’re getting them to go to the car, they’ll engage in pre-car behaviors. Most dogs I’ve interacted with at that level, they can understand a ton of subordinate words like that.
I used the above examples because my corgi had both of those combinations down (though I didn’t use let’s go), plus a few others. I’d tell her “time for a walk”, and she’d go get the leash, bring it to me, and wait for it to be put on.
I’d tell her, “time for a ride”, and she’d go get her seat belt harness, then wait for it to be put on, just with less enthusiasm lol. Rides weren’t always to places she wanted to go
But the cool thing is that I didn’t intentionally teach her any of that. I’d get the leash while telling her it was walk time, call her to me and have her sit while I knelt down. She drew the connections and started getting the leash before I could. The harness part came later, and I did teach her the word for that item, then to go get it, which led to her figuring out the rest.
Dog vocabulary is limited. I can’t recall the numbers, but there are only so many words they can keep and reliably remember. Their grammar if human language is also limited in that they don’t “understand” that “let’s go” has a specific function as in that it’s saying “let us verb”. The “let’s go” is a word to them; you could say shit weird, like “walks gonna get” that makes no real sense in English, but they’d still learn what you meant by it and start getting ready to go for a walk.
It comes down to complexity, tbh. You, as a human, could learn more than a handful of words in Spanish, and eventually speak in whole sentences with clear grammar. A dog can’t. There’s a limit to how much they learn a language vs learning that some human grunts mean something.
See, dogs have language in the absence of humans. You see feral dog packs, and they’re communicating constantly. Tails, ears, body, scent, all of it combined with vocalizations form a language of its own. It just isn’t as complicated as human language. Even the most complicated animal languages that have been studied don’t come close to human. But language isn’t solely our gift.
So the dogs are indeed like you with your grasp of Spanish currently. They understand a pidgin form of human, and we learn pidgin dog. Mind you, most of the time they’re better at human than we are at dog. Learning to understand tail movement, as an example, takes more time and exposure than people think. Did you know that the direction of wagging matters? It’s a thing!