When last we left our intrepid heroine and her faithful, hopeful human, we had unboxed the FluentPet kit, and read all the instructions, ready to teach Max How To Speak – or at least, use buttons to tell me what she wanted what she really really wanted.<\/p>\n
The first part of Operation Button Speak went according to plan. I chose two words to start with – “toy” and “out.”\u00a0 Max knows both in context, so the trick would be teaching her that\u00a0she <\/em>could create the context (ask for the thing).\u00a0 Basically, this was going to involve a lot of association, repetition, and rewarding.<\/p>\n It went well.<\/p>\n The next step was to introduce Max to the buttons.<\/p>\n Um.\u00a0 Yeah.<\/p>\n Me holding the button, pressing it to hear the recording of the word, and then associating an act with the action?\u00a0 No problem.\u00a0 Max knew exactly what was going on.<\/p>\n Max<\/em> pressing the button?<\/p>\n *record scratch*<\/p>\n Houston, we have a problem.\u00a0 Max Does Not Like The Clicky Thing.<\/p>\n And I don’t mean, “she was suspicious of it” or “it scared her a little” and she’ll get over it the same way she did puppy gates and garbage trucks.\u00a0 I mean, she would see it on the floor, and detour the long way around the apartment to avoid it. Immediate, unequivocal Do. Not. Like. Not with her paw, not with her nose – and this is a dog who will happily “touch” anything I point her at, while we’re on walks.\u00a0 Not even her beloved trainer, S., could get her to go near the button except under mild duress. And we worked too long and hard to ease her stress reactivity, to intentionally add any to her life.<\/p>\n Okay, Max.\u00a0 Okay.<\/p>\n I’m not giving up, though.\u00a0 The buttons remain on the floor.\u00a0 We’re ignoring them for now.\u00a0 Maybe, eventually, she will decide they’re harmless.\u00a0 Or maybe she will never trust them enough to use, and we’ll pass them along to someone else.\u00a0 Am I disappointed?\u00a0 Yeah, a little.\u00a0 But the thing about dogs, as with all living things we let into our lives, is that you need to love them for who they are, not who you wanted them to be.\u00a0 And Max?\u00a0 Is not a button-pusher.<\/p>\n But she’s definitely a word-learner. She may not “say” them, but her comprehension library is growing – and she’s understanding complex commands.\u00a0 I’ve already learned more about her than I knew before, how she thinks and reacts, so in that sense this was a successful experiment.\u00a0 So we’re going to lean into her strengths, and see where it goes.\u00a0 Updates as they happen, I guess.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, it was suggested that I try the buttons with Castiel. Um, er, no<\/strong>.\u00a0 My cat already<\/em> speaks his mind\u00a0 He doesn’t need any help.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When last we left our intrepid heroine and her faithful, hopeful human, we had unboxed the FluentPet kit, and read all the instructions, ready to teach Max How To Speak – or at least, use buttons to tell me what she wanted what she really really wanted. The first part of Operation Button Speak went […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[91],"tags":[375,57,441],"class_list":["post-2049","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-animals-pets","tag-language","tag-laura-anne-gilman","tag-writers-and-dogs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2049","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2049"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2049\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2050,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2049\/revisions\/2050"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2049"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2049"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2049"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}