Meet the incredibly clever dog who has learnt how to speak through using a sound board and can now communicate with her owners.
Sheepadoodle Bunny has been learning how to talk to her owners by using a sound board where she presses on alternate buttons in order to activate voice recordings of different words.
The 11 month old dog joined the Devine family home in September 2019 where her owners quickly introduced her to an ‘outside’ button.
Bunny’s owner Alexis Devine was keen to introduce the unusual method of communicating to their home in Tacoma, WA after seeing the technology being used online by other dog owners.
Bunny quickly learnt to use the ‘outside’ button to signal when she wanted to leave the house in just a matter of weeks, leading her owners to introduce more buttons.
Her current sound board has 45 buttons that Bunny uses regularly with her favourite words at the moment being ‘play’, ‘beach’ and ‘park’.
Artist Alexis said: “The sound board has been an overwhelmingly positive experience.
“Bunny and I work on engagement, tricks and obedience to strengthen our bond daily, but this has added so much laughter, joy and wonder to our lives.
“It’s always an adventure, and we are thoroughly enjoying the ride regardless of the destination.
“Bunny currently has 45 words on her board with five of them being new enough that we are still helping her to understand them contextually.”
Alexis made her own sound board after being inspired by speech language pathologist Christina Hunger and her dog Stella.
Christina uses augmentative and alternative communication to help non verbal people communicate and was one of the first people to use the sound board technology with dogs.
Alexis said: “The first sound board that we used was one that I had made after following Christina’s guidance on her blog.
“We used that for several months before I connected with Leo Trottier who is a cognitive scientist.
“He was looking for beta testers of a new device and that is the board we are currently using with Bunny.”
