Have you ever seen a dog communicate with their owners by pushing a series of buttons? Before your very eyes, what sounds like a reasonable and intelligent conversation plays out between the owner and a trained dog.
These talking buttons came about because a speech pathologist noticed that her new dog, Stella, showed all the behaviors of a preverbal person. She chose to get her dog buttons to press, so that Stella could talk to her for important things like going potty or to alert the owners if the water bowl was empty.
What happened next was amazing, and what spawned so many other talking dogs. Stella learned dozens of other words and could combine them creatively to say what she meant—even if it wasn’t the intended use of the button.
Multiple studies have confirmed that dogs do seem to understand talking buttons, confirming what we appear to see when looking at videos.
Yet if you want to find out for yourself what your dog has to say, getting started can be a daunting task. How do you teach a dog how to use talking buttons?
Start With More Than One
When Christina Hunger, the woman teaching Stella, first introduced talking buttons, she started with only one. When she added more, Stella’s learning accelerated. You can benefit from her knowledge by introducing several buttons the first time instead of just one.
You can also hurry things along by choosing buttons your dog might really want to use. Think buttons like “eat”, “walk” and “park.” What does your dog spend a lot of time trying to communicate to you that they want? Those are the things you start with.
I was reluctant to add the “eat” button because I thought my dogs would just spam it all day long. It turns out the only one interested in buttons, Leia, only uses it when she feels cheated. Every once in a while, I’ll decide she’s had a lot of training treats and doesn’t need a full portion of dinner, so she doesn’t gain weight. It’s these days she’ll finish eating and hit the eat button again.
It’s like she’s got a scale she weighs her food on and if it’s even a teaspoon less she’s complaining that dinner was not sufficient.
On one additional occasion, the water bowl went dry and no one noticed right away. She did not have a ‘water’ button yet (now addressed) so she hit the ‘eat’ button and then showed me the empty water bowl. It was a creative use of the button that I thought was very clever.
Model the Behavior
Although we used the word “train” in our title for SEO purposes, you’re not really training your dog. This isn’t your dog learning, “push the button and get treat” sort of thing. It’s your dog learning that these buttons have a meaning, the meaning is different for buttons, and you can elicit a response by pressing them.
The approach therefore, isn’t push the button and get a treat. It’s showing them how to use the buttons as part of every day conversation.
When it’s time for your usual walk for example, you might walk over to the buttons and say, “Would you like to go for a walk?” and then press the walk button yourself. You might then get their leash and collar and say, “We use our leash and collar when we go for a walk.” And then press the walk button again.
You then put the leash and collar on, and say one more time before leaving, “Let’s go for a walk!” Press walk button.
When you get back from the walk, you might say, “That was a fun walk,” and once again press the button.
This exposed the dog several times to the word and its potential meaning, but it’s up to the dog to decide when and if they want to try and use it themselves. It took Stella several weeks to start using the buttons herself, and that was with a speech pathologist in the house helping her learn. Us normies can’t hope to have the same level of teaching skill.
Keep Buttons in the Same Place
One final tip is to keep all the buttons together on a board. Instead of having one by the water bowl, one by the front door, and one by the back door, keep them all where your dog can see them. This helps your dog sequence buttons later but also saves them a lot of running around. Imagine if they wanted to say it’s rainy for their potty walk and are forced to run to the back door for potty, the front door for walk, and the kitchen for water.
Keeping them together also helps keep them out from underfoot. One of our first personal problems with training wasn’t the buttons or communicating with the dogs. It was the fact that no matter what out of the way corner I placed them, people would find a way to stomp on the buttons.
I finally found a spot by their food and water bowl that only gets stepped on occasionally.
My dream one day is for my dogs to understand the different parks, and be able to ask me for the specific park they’d like to go to. I’ve always wondered if they’ve been secretly pining for a specific location we visited once, and my hope is these buttons will do that for them.
Have you ever wanted to ask your dog a question? What would you ask?
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Yes! 100 times over. Its shocking how much our fur babies actually understand verbally vs visually. My big guy was very quiet as a baby and thus we bell trained him for the potty- which is a very similar concept to buttons. Creating a way we can communicate with each other. Eventually we took the bells away (because my husband had issues sneaking out for work without waking everyone due to ringing bells). But this reminds me again how valuable being able to communicate can be.
That was fascinating!! My dog Jack was a great communicator, and a very good problem solver it was amazing to watch. I can’t imagine how much better he could have gotten with those talking buttons.
I agree! I read the book about the dog who first pioneered talking buttons recently, and she was not able to ask for walks, but tell the owner where she wanted to go. I’m interested in teaching the dogs buttons for that purpose. I can tell they want to go for a walk, but not if they’re pining away for the park or just want to go smell the mailbox. I’d love more detail in what they want!
This is similar to cats doing the same thing I guess? They are so much more intelligent than we give them credit for an can give us so much input about what they want and like!! Communicate better with buttons – right?
Cats can do it too! I actually watched a really tragic video recently of a cat trying to tell its owner through buttons that it hurt to poop. It ended up being cancer. 🙁
These “talking buttons” are so cool! I’m amazed that your dog presses the Eat button when she feels she hasn’t gotten enough food!! Great post, thanks for sharing.
This is such great information, Andrea! I’ve been looking at those buttons for Henry. I admit, I thought it was probably training like anything else – push the button and treat. So helpful to know that is not how to introduce these to your pup. It’s always helpful to know to start with more than one and keep them in one area. I’m marking this one so I can go back when I get Henry his own set.
I love the button idea and think it brilliant but with Nili I am scared she will be pressing the buttons non stop, her one way of communicating with me is low growls and barking when she wants to go potty and once that is done she settles down perfectly. I call her my growling alarm clock as she growls in my ear in the morning to say get up LOL which I think is cute and smart. Great post as always
This is a common fear, according to Christina Hunger, if they spam the ‘eat’ button (which they usually don’t) you treat them like a child and answer them. “Eat later” is what she usually says if they’ve hit the treat button more than a couple times. What amazed me though is that they don’t. Leia has the ‘eat’ and ‘walk’ button which I was sure she’d be pounding every chance she got, but she doesn’t. She’s pretty reasonable about using them.
I love this! When I first saw the talking buttons all I could think of was how cool it would have been to do this with my FiveSibes! (Yes, they were vocal, especially five of them together, but, oh, how fun would this would have been to do with very animated and vocal dogs?!!) I so loved this post as soon as I saw your heading! This is something I’m definitely saving in my files for that lucky day when we can once again welcome a dog into our family, I’m doing this! Thanks for such a fun and interesting post!
I would love to see talking buttons in a husky! They’re already half way to talking with how vocal they are. I bet they’d catch on right away!
That talking button idea is fascinating to watch, and it’s amazing how dogs can engage with us in such a playful way. This post captures the curiosity and warmth behind it really well.