Speaking of communicating across species, let me introduce my three little stooges: our cat, first dog, and second dog. I’ve had pets my whole life – birds, cats, fish, dogs…we even had two hermit crabs once, but they found their way into the classroom of my son’s preschool – partly on account of our older dog at the time wanting to put them in his mouth and walk around as though they were his. Sharing a life with these critters means understanding them. We make ourselves their care givers with a power dynamic that never changes throughout their lives – eternally dependent upon us. It isn’t just a courtesy to learn their mannerisms and determine their needs. It’s an act of welfare.

Dogs and cats are incredibly smart. They aren’t solving calculus problems, but they are intuitive and clever. Our cat, learns everyone’s behaviours. She’s a “work smart, not hard” kind of gal and sometimes lets the dogs make the effort for treats, but she is also assertive as she attempts to communicate using spoken language, screeching and screaming her meows at me whenever she has demands. Sometimes she wants outside, sometimes she just wants to cuddle. She’s always been vocal. I’ve read that this is a feature of domestic cats, but I’m not sure if that is true – that’s another subject. As profoundly loquacious as she can be, she also has a gentler way of communicating appreciation, love, and affection when she looks backwards at me, purring, eyes half open, and maybe sometimes a tiny, soft paw reaches out to your face the way a mother caresses a child.

Then again, sometimes it’s threatening….

My dogs also use their voice to tell me stuff all the time (there’s a delivery driver outside! or there’s a dog on the road!). They use their facial expressions and bodies to communicate as well, especially when they want me to give them something, like cheese, or to go for a walk. My favourite is when my older girl gets belligerent with me and slams her bell by the door the way an entitled snob expresses her disappointment with the hotel staff.

Then there were the buttons. You know the ones I mean – all of the TikTok and Instagram videos out there of the dogs ratting out their human or demanding something….yes, I invested in a few to test the legitimacy of the buttons.

Here is what I learned – they work…..and they don’t. For our eldest dog, who lives for treats, she would hit any button if it meant a reward. When I grew stingy with the rewards, meaning I was only giving her the result of the button (i.e. the button said ‘outside’, then I offered her an open door to the garden), she decided that the buttons that said “hungry” and “treat” were the only ones of any import, ignoring the others. Nay, I take that back. I made one that said “bitch” because it was funny – she pressed that one a lot as well. I think it was because it made us laugh and she knew it was funny somehow. “Bitch! Treat!”

Eventually, the buttons disappeared – first “treat” and “hungry”, then the rest. It was because of the buttons that we ended up with our second dog. We had just moved to the U.S. from Germany and eventually she kept pressing the button that said “friends”. She wanted to go next door to play with the australian shepherd that used to live there.

“Friends”, looking up at me.

“Friends”, forming what I perceive as a smile.

“Friends”, tail begins to wag as she grows hopeful.

“Friends”. She didn’t understand me when I told her that Watson’s mommy wasn’t home.

She was desperately missing her best friend in Germany and my heart broke every time she pressed the button. I took that one away and left her with the button that said “walk”, but as soon as we would put on her leash, she would pull to the neighbor’s house, hoping for a playdate. Goddamnit, she found a loophole.

Some of what we do with our pets is anthropomorphising them – giving the same meaning to their “words” and expressions as we might to a human child. I’m not sure this is always beneficial for them or for us, but I also don’t think that it is always harmful, either. We co-exist, and we create lives with our pets – communicating is part of that. We learn when our fur family is hungry or distressed, and in turn, they learn to recognize when we have had a bad day and need a friend to sit with us. As long as we acknowledge that they are not human and have different requirements for survival and feel or emote differently as well, then I see no real harm in making them our “babies”.

How integrated our language is within our pets, specifically our dogs, was something that stood out a great deal when we lived in Germany – our dog knew English vocabulary, but if we were out on a walk and another dog rushed up at us and I said “no” or “down”, nothing happened. My human brain had to switch – but then it was me screaming a series of “NEIN! AUS! RUNTER! SITZ! PLATZ! WEG! NEIN!” until the dog understood (we often went to off-leash parks so that she could explore). Funny to have a language barrier with a dog, and it isn’t species-directed.

Our youngest “fur baby” is expressive, vocally and facially, when she wants to play or is excited. She also learned from a young age before we adopted her that nothing can be trusted, so she barks at strangers who come in or near the house. The sound of her barks are distinctive to us and she seems aware of our ability to distinguish her meaning, but her ability to understand us seems either selective or shoddy. I appreciate her unflappability when told to stay or not eat a treat that’s been placed before her…or maybe it’s just her profound concentration. Who could say. She looks like a stuffy, judgmental Oxford professor from the 1800s who can’t believe you just asked him that question.

I hope you enjoyed these little stories of my pets and how they communicate with us. I could go on forever, but who has the time?

This week hasn’t really been about anything learned or gained – just series of my musing. I’ve, admittedly, been allowing my mind to detach more from the world, focusing, instead, on my own inner thoughts and the world I keep close to me. I have a lot to say about the recent Trump EPA decisions, but not today. Today I choose peace.

Thank you for visiting and have a great day!