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!
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.
Some personality for sure, also a year old is still quite young for a dog, he’s probably still battling those dogly instincts.
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.