Now Hear This!

Can you really train your dog to talk?  Should you train your dog to really talk?…Do we even want to train our dogs to really talk?  All valid questions and one which goes mostly un-pondered, and probably for good reason, but what if.  What if you could train your dog to talk and hold a conversation, how cool would that be?

I don’t know about you, but I love dogs!  I appreciate them for their companionship, and all the other wonderful things that will us to own a dog, but gosh gee golly oh my I hate when dogs bark for what always seems to be no reason. There’s never a dangerous man wielding an axe, nor a stranger or even a cat in the area.   For me a barking dog is as pleasurable as chewing on tin foil. As dog lovers we tolerate it, but think how nice it would be if instead of dogs barking at squirrels and other meaningless inanimate objects if they could talk! How awesome would that be?  Replace “yip, yip, BARK..whine, bark, yip” with “Good morning fair owner, how are you this splendid day? Can I fetch anything for you or just sit?”

If your house was on fire, would you prefer your dog bark wildly to get you our of bed and have you think they just want to go pee and you be forced to think when you want to sleep?  Or would you rather them jump on your chest and say “Hey.  The house is on fire”

What Did You Say?

Obviously dogs will never be able to actually string sentences together, or essentially do anything other than mimic their owners, but there are some cute dog videos floating around that do prove that dogs can indeed speak in a human language that with minimal imagination, we can pretty clearly understand. Talking dogs are certainly no stranger to animation or the big screen, but here in real life, I wouldn’t hold my breath for your neighbor’s family dog to do a public service announcement on adopting homeless dogs or anything.

What if we put every ounce of patience, time and know how into teaching a dog to hold a conversation.  Could we do it?  Even if The Dog Whisperer, Cesar Millan spent years, the fact is that the fluent talking dogs will be left for fiction.  Vocal chords in the canine body simply aren’t meant to produce human language at any length.  When considering any sounds a dog may make, we must realize that for the most part, those sounds are ancestral based and used for breed survival such as pleading sounds for help, pain, aggression, contentment and breeding…and I might even throw in annoying the neighbors for fun.

I need a Drink!

Although intellectual conversations won’t be had tonight with your pooch over a sniffer of brandy, dogs do talk, it’s just not in language form.  Dogs speak often through vocal cues, but the canine non-verbal communication is much more obvious and prevalent.  Dogs will talk and communicate effectively with a tail wag, a change in body posture, a perking up of ears, a paw on your lap and the occasional lick, but I say were lucky to leave it at that and use the dog training for something other than talking dogs.  Something more useful like opening the refrigerator door and bringing back a beer.