Mastodawn

grateful wolf Oct 11

@dd a friend of mum's mum had two standard poodles who she taught to call her mama (heard them myself once) #TalkingDogs

I'm really angry at people exploiting that valid means of communication for the clicks and views, and ultimately profits. Casting skepticism on all of us.

So, the scam part.

I do believe that some of the videos are by people who are scamming.

I believe some of the videos are by people who may be under the influence of wishful thinking and projection. Anthropormorphizing.

I am skeptical of dogs that talk about their dreams or when to expect rain.

For the number of buttons we had, for the words my dog already knew from our daily lives, they worked. They were not a scam.

So I kept using button vocabulary, with her and Kai, who never got the hang of buttons, and with every dog I had care of after.

She got over not having buttons.

Sophie's personality was such that if she wanted something, she ENTHUSED at me. She got all excited to get my attention. And it was obvious how disappointed she got when I just didn't get whatever she wanted me to know. The buttons really helped us both with that. When they worked.

I felt betrayed by FluentPet. I presume she felt betrayed by me, since I controlled her whole life. I couldn't take the heartbreak.

When people are training their dogs to use buttons, the manner of verbal speech changes to focus on the words the dogs already know from the course of their lives. Instead of saying, "Sophie, do you need to go pee?" or "Sophie, do you need to go out?" I started saying, "Sophie, outside?"

Talk with the button vocabulary.

I taught my dog to do something and the both of us took great joy in this. To have it suddenly fail, and keep failing until more can be shipped out, was devastating to her.

I had taught my dog to do something that gave us both huge joy. When that started failing, and kept on failing until the next shipment arrived, Sophie took it a lot harder than I did. The betrayal.

She was making me understand, and the means suddenly vanished.

Sophie was up to 7 buttons. Outside, Walk, Park, Play, Water - crap, I am forgetting the other two. But we got a bad batch of buttons that died after a couple months instead of lasting two years.

FluentPet replaced the buttons for free, but those died too. We repeated this a couple times and then I gave up.

I was feeling defensive. Of course I am still grieving. It's almost a year since Sophie died, a few years since I gave up on the buttons project. Not because she couldn't do them, but because the buttons kept failing.

We were enrolled in the university study (I now forget which university is/was doing the study) where we had to upload our spreadsheets of how well our animals (there were a few cats, a couple birds, and a cow) were using the buttons.

Yeah this is a sub-toot.

A few fays ago someone posted about talking dogs with buttons being a total scam and I got All Up In My Feelings.

Thanks to my 12-step program, I now know to Pause, then Respond rather than React. Give myself time to see where this is coming from, why I feel this way, and whether I'm actually being attacked or not.

Because, of course, I am not.

Feelings are not facts. Feelings are dashboard lights.