Your Dog Can Talk: A Step-By-Step Guide to Button Training

Your Dog Can Talk: A Step-By-Step Guide to Button Training

A definitive guide and workbook for training your dog to talk using button communication, from the New York Times bestselling author of How Stella Learned to Talk. It’s a question that has crossed every dog owner's mind: What would it be like to know what my dog is thinking? In Your Dog Can Talk , speech pathologist and New York Times bestselling author Christina Hunger helps dog owners teach their pets to speak by using button communication, a method that allows dogs to give voice to their daily thoughts, requests, and feelings by pawing buttons that activate prerecorded words. For the first time in history, we have a window into our dogs’ minds and can hear firsthand how they’re experiencing the environment we share with them. When we know exactly what our pets need and are thinking about, we can better care for them, strengthen our bond, and create a relationship grounded in mutual respect and communication. Your Dog Can Talk is an indispensable resource for long-time dog owners, new puppy parents, and everyone in between. Using the methods she developed with her own dog, Stella, Hunger shows readers how to create an easy-to-implement speech training plan for their beloved pups. Filled with simple explanations, realistic goals for owners, and step-by-step instructions, as well as helpful anecdotes from Hunger’s own experiences working with thousands of dogs, Your Dog Can Talk makes button communication more understandable and accessible than ever before. Christina Hunger , MA, CCC-SLP, is a speech-language pathologist and the first person to teach a dog to "talk" using button communication. She is the New York Times bestselling author of How Stella Learned to Talk , and her work has been featured in National Geographic , Forbes, The New York Times , The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post , and more. She is the founder and CEO of Hunger for Words, a pet communication company focused on bringing her revolutionary knowledge and products to the public. She lives with her husband, Jake, and her dog, Stella. Introduction When I was twenty-four years old, I made a decision in a grocery store parking lot that changed the course of my life and the world forever. I said yes to bringing home Stella, an adorable eight-week-old puppy that my boyfriend and I had fallen in love with. At the time, I was working as a pediatric speech-language pathologist. Specifically, I helped nonverbal children learn to talk using communication devices. These devices looked like iPads with hundreds of icons, each representing a different word. When the child pressed a button, the device would say the word, allowing the child to express their thoughts, needs, and wants with words for the first time in their lives. All day, every day, I focused on communication at work. When I came home at night, I couldn’t turn this part of my brain off. Within a week of adopting our new puppy, Stella, I had a lightbulb moment: If dogs can understand the words we say to them, why can’t they say words back to us? I noticed Stella pawing at her water dish when it was empty, gesturing that she needed more. I saw that she was starting to understand the words we were saying to her frequently. I observed Stella barking to get our attention and using different barks for different reasons. I noticed just how many similarities Stella shared with babies and toddlers right before they start talking. All these observations led me to try something that had never been done before. I decided to see what would happen if I used my skills as a speech therapist with Stella. Could I teach her to “talk” using a communication device? Could Stella learn to communicate with words if she had a way to say them? I put my questions to the test, creating a device for her by adapting the technology I used with children and teaching her words in ways similar to how I taught children every day. Fast-forward to now, just seven years after I programmed my first few buttons for Stella. She has learned to use fifty different words independently. She combines words every day to create her own phrases and short sentences. Stella asks and answers questions, makes comments about what is happening around her, and says how she feels, all thanks to speech therapy. After my work with Stella became public in 2019, hundreds of thousands of dogs and their humans have followed in Stella’s and my footsteps, creating a global talking dog movement. My first book, How Stella Learned to Talk: The Groundbreaking Story of the World’s First Talking Dog , hit the New York Times bestseller list as soon as it was published in 2021, and videos of talking dogs under the hashtag hunger4words have been viewed over 1 billion times across social media platforms. A study involving thousands of dogs who use buttons to communicate is under way. Research has been published showing that dogs do understand the button words and are creating meaningful, intentional word combin