I was obviously unimpressed by Billi Speaks. However, I was completely blown away by the Navy's dolphin program. I interviewed one of their trainers here → ua-cam.com/video/sdFCZOIbh4A/v-deo.html
Hi, do you make videos about "calming signals" with different animals? I Work with horses, and get to see how little people actually looks at their pets. They miss a lot of signals, wich often leads to animals "talking loud" with their bodylangage. And then gets misunderstood as dumb, aggressive and so on.
So, a couple things worth pointing out. You were talking about pushing the button and showing the item or whatever to create association. This is how the training begins. You then expressed confusion at the owner pressing buttons. It's a repetition before the association, usually. In other words, if the cat presses the outside button, when you get a moment to do that thing, you press the button, then go outside, confirming the association. I would also point at the moments where I'm picking up expectation on the cat's part, after a button. That said, I haven't really got a clue how the abstract stuff comes in. It's also worth noting that the animals are definitely not "learning English". They're learning uninformed relationships, only.
Not true. Bunny most definitely knows the meaning of the word "is", which is why she was able to confirm the meaning of "dream" by making sure that "dream is night talk", and which is why sentences about "is" are the only sentences in which Bunny's word order is always correct.
I highly disagree that they are not “learning English”. I have two cats who perfectly understand what I’m saying and are able respond appropriately. But with cats it will be on their terms and in their own timing. If I were to introduce the buttons in would be based on the long list of words they already know. But of course receptive and productive are two different things. You might know and understand a word in your second language but everytime you need it, you can’t think of it. My cats are happy with the language we’ve come up with over the years.
That was my thought too, maybe there's bias on the biologists part as well. 😉 Or at least they struggle with nuance - the cat isn't literally ANGRY as in raging out, but cats do have more subtle signs of annoyance/agitation much before they get to the point to where they're arching/clawing/hissing. Airplane ears, tail wiggles, and all of the other things you mentioned is like the cat version of rolling ones eyes, while the biologist is expecting kitty to be having a full blown melt down.
wait, shes a MARINE biologist and scoffing at Billi Speak videos judging them as far-fetched??? this woman is pretentious and only wants attention. I must definitely thank her for wasting my time.
I'm also a biologist and also a huge skeptic of owners when they anthropomorphize their pets. But that being said, there's something about Billi's button pushing that I suspect would satisfy any significance testing you'd like to throw at it. And, at 13, she's not a spring chicken so this isn't just a curious kitten investigating buttons. There's plethora videos of Billi reacting to noises (which she hates) or actually trying to formulate rudimentary expressions. Basically, this cat warrants further observations. And last time you made your mind up after one video... To be fair, you didn't just pick one video this time, you seem to have picked 2. So, kudos on doubling the effort (insofaras watching 3 minutes of 2 videos can be classified as "effort") but maybe you could step outside of your preconceptions (read: refutation bias) and actually watch a few more before jumping to a conclusion?
@@etemytradel4509 yes. The cereal box is called UCSD. And the degree is called "Cellular Biology and Biochemistry". While my studies would have only given me a familiarity with BF Skinner, I also minored in Psychology. So that helped... But since you asked for my CV, where did you get your degree?
I haven't tried ucsd cereal it must have lots of sugar as it has rotted your brain. Maybe you should take up a conversation with a cat or dog I'm way to smart for you.
While I think it’s hard for Billi to completely understand what the buttons mean and how to use it, I think she understands to some extent. There was one video where she accidentally hit a button with her hind leg while walking, and she turned around to press the “oops” button. If she really didn’t have ANY idea of what the buttons meant, she wouldn’t have pressed “oops” since she had no reason to. I think this video shows concrete proof that Billi understands she made a mistake, and turns around to press a button to tell her owner. Link to the video: ua-cam.com/video/CENVRHdnMl4/v-deo.html Honestly I understand where you’re coming from, people do extrapolate, but I am sure that you can’t 100% deny that Billi is capable of communication with her owner. It’s obvious she understands somewhat, and I don’t see how “impossible” it is for an animal to learn what a button means and how to use it. If animals can learn to come when called (they can learn their own name), or to perform tricks, then why can’t they learn a word and use it themselves?
5:00 Cat owners know what an angry cat looks like and it IS this. Billi's not that angry, 'annoyed' would be more accurate. You go on and on about body language and behavioral cues, but you miss the dead giveaway of those ears rotated back. BEFORE the word 'anger' came onscreen, i looked at her and thought "welp now she's annoyed." Although sometimes cats ears will do this when not annoyed, more often than not whenever my cats did this it was because they were irritated
My cat does the same thing when I can't figure out what she wants 😂 They're very expressive, the cartoon anger poses are reserved for the post-vet cone adjustment period.
@@chocoearly I think the tendency to notice these emotions in cats: irritation, annoyed, mad, etc is because cats go out of their way to make it clear if they aren't pleased. Add to that the obvious fact that the cat IS trying to learn the use of the buttons to communicate deliberately repeating itself. I can almost believe that the cat is trying to teach the human what cats do to express displeasure (i.e. the tail flicking back and forth, the ears back) at he same time so the human will learn also.
You need to watch the most recent and go backwards. Some are popular because of their titles but not the best example - Billi is learning and expanding her vocabulary- I’m a speech and language pathologist- I believe what is seen is her growing in understanding what these random sounds mean. B) Cats express things like annoyance and anger much more subtlety than the fierce often scared / defensive poses you call anger. C) my cats know not to eat or Harass my birds, miniature chickens, and even little chicks - while they try to hunt other birds. They can distinguish between the “owned birds” and the “wild birds.” 10:20 cats can discriminate much more subtly than you give credit to D) the human is a Zoo Keeper and there ARE videos about repetition and how and why buttons are taught and expanded on. Your lack of research and jumping to assumptions make me wonder how scientific you are E) can you really compare your knowledge of marine life to an animal like a cat? You don’t seem aware of the subtleties of feline expression. So how much expression does coral have? A parrot fish? Even a dolphin? I just could go on. And yes in the beginning I was dubious however - watching Billi run to the door when her owner comes home - greets her - and then deliberately crosses the room, picks her way over other buttons and very firmly pressed HELLO. Makes me feel, as a specialist in language acquisition,) that as I have seen for myself the owner spoke/modeled the use of “sound” we call the word Hello in English - Billi gets its use as a greeting. And as is natural expands her receptive vocabulary into an expressive one. I doubt if I’ll ever watch another if your videos based on such random pseudo science you employed. If you are going to talk as a subject matter expert then research and become throughly knowledgeable of your subject. P.S. I’m not even a “cat” person but can tell when a cat is mad or frustrated- I don’t need to put it into the extreme expressions - and expressions most usually used by cats to communicate fear, dominance, ferocity to OTHER CATS. People for example can show annoyance through many subtle muscles in our face - they don’t need to yell at you. But I suppose mangrove snappers aren’t like that? Do you get scratched a lot by cats? I am also a specialist on Bi-lingual language acquisition and use versus a deficit in the a brains ability to learn language or it’s nuances. Such as what we mean when we say idioms like the “ Judge threw the book at him.” And I see Billi learning and trying out language the way an English speaker might try Japanese.” Or an African language with clicking. Or Chinese when a words meaning can change simply depending on tone. Ugh. I’ll stop but boy did you ever completely make up assumptions, did not look for a quantitive sample, watch the experiment’s timeline. I have made my own assumptions - it’s click hairy if you, not any kind of true reporting and I’m betting you know little about communication in advanced land mammals. Forgive my typos everyone, typing with one finger on a small phone when I’m very tired. I was just so taken a back by the trash value of the video I just watched - I had to make my first negative comment to a UA-cam video.
I wish I could like your comment a million times. You've said what I wanted to say so much better than I could. Billi is amazing. There are so many more examples that she is really communicating and understands. I was pretty sure before watching this video that it would only express its makers confirmation bias. I hoped she'd be more open minded about Billi than Bunny. I, at least, have learned one thing, I never need to watch this channel again.
Great post, with great points, by someone qualified to make them! Thanks for taking the time to type that with 1 finger on a small phone while tired! (I can relate... I'm a 1-finger typer on a small tablet and unfortunately I'm almost always tired!) But anyway, yes, this woman didn't do any of her homework on Billi, Bunny, the research study, the training methods (she didn't even recognize modeling!) their marked progress, the way they begin to use words in new ways they weren't trained for (like Bunny's "big upstairs bird" = airplane), etc, etc. She thinks she already knows it all and we have nothing left to learn from animals on this subject, which is a very unscientific attitude, and she's condescending about it too. Why would I ever want to watch any of her other videos, if this is the way she approaches her subjects? I mean, what if it's a subject I don't already know a lot about and therefore didn't know any better than to take her word for it? She's doing the public a great disservice here, for profit... she knew the growing popularity of the talking buttons would equate to lots of clicks/views... but I bet they received a higher than average percentage of dislikes too! :P
@@TieDyeVikki showing her true colors then. I was already skeptical when she decided to choose from the most popular videos instead of the most recent. Not only is a more recent video more representative of Billi's capacity for understanding, I would not say most people are animal behavior/language acquisition experts and are more impressed by cute or funny videos than they are of Billi's understanding of language, not to mention that older videos with more views are more likely to be recommended to people who watch similar content. The first video she sampled was a very, very old one, Billi was more prone to mistakes earlier in his training, and this sets her expectations for the next video. She is overestimating her understanding of all life as an alleged expert in marine life. I highly doubt she is even going into this with the belief that animals understanding even rudimentary speech is possible, she has likely only worked with giving marine mammals commands.
Why did you only watch videos from the first year of her training? Her newer videos are much better. Billi is very deliberate with her words so it's much easier to know what she wants.
A cat doesn't need to be hissing or puffed to be angry... mines tail twitches when she's angry. I think these behaviorist are bringing their own bias and not considering different personalities and body language
Billie, Bunny, and around 700 other animals are enrolled in a study at the Comparative Cognition Lab at UC San Diego are numerous animals involved in the study . It all started when Christina Hunger, a speech language pathologist , decided to employ an AAC device , typically used by nonverbal people to communicate without speech. These videos are just for entertainment , maybe you could look up a teaching video at the University to explain the protocols and procedures defined in the study.
My 14 year old cat doesn’t have buttons but clearly understands a large amount of English. I also believe Billi is purposely communicating and I have watched almost all of her videos.
You said that you don't see the owner back up and say "Okay, the pet is confused" but Bili's owner does that constantly and waits for her to reassess- sometimes for tens of minutes in sped-up footage. It's also worth noting that while Bili's owner tries to hide her identity, she is clearly some sort of veterinarian with years of experience and a deep understanding of operant conditioning. She might not be perfect, but dismissing her efforts as delusional after watching 3-5 minutes of videos she posted for views seems a little reductive.
I don't think you've watched enough Billi. That cat is a trip and I believe she understands a lot. Maybe not everything, but way more than you give her credit for. *Mad*
The only confirmation bias I see around here is coming from you, K. Confirmation bias and Strawman fallacy. I see your communication in the comments section here and I see your responses in the video itself, and it's pretty clear. You have no idea what you're talking about because you're basing your opinion on very little information. You evidently formed your own opinions in advance, and are busy looking for signs that support your theory, without giving any serious consideration to what you're actually watching (if you could even call it "watching", considering how often you're stopping the videos so that you can scoff and huff and puff). The cat, for example, remembers the LOCATION of the buttons and that's how it knows what each button means. NOT based on the drawing or text on it or even the sound that it makes. If you'd have watched more videos you'd see how most of the time the cat doesn't even look at the buttons when pressing, and sometimes even presses on them using its hind legs while 'casually walking past', even though the meaning of the button pressed makes perfect sense within the context of the interaction. If the owner had moved the buttons around, it would cause a lot of confusion for the cat, and maybe thrown months or even years of training into the trash. The owner can be seen TRAINING the cat in these videos by REINFORCING the use of the buttons by pressing on them and verbalizing them. This is TRAINING and must be not much different than the sort of training you should be familiar with as a marine biologist (such as hand signals and vocal commands and whatnot). This is training by association and repetition and it takes a lot of time. No one said that these pets "learn language" or that they're capable of "constructing complex sentences" or that they're "pet philosophers". You're completely missing the point. These buttons are simply a tool of communication for them, reinforced through months and years of training and repetition. The intellect of these pets doesn't reach much higher than that of a 3yo toddler. But it's still very impressive. Again: These buttons are TOOLS of COMMUNICATION. The pet learns their meaning by repetition and association. It's nothing fancy, but also definitely nothing to scoff at. Anyways, based on how you've interacted with other "negative" comments here, you're probably going to dismiss what I say with some pretentious hand-wavey response that supposedly shows how much better you are than me. I don't mind. I'm not here for my ego. I just had to get this off my chest because it is an insult to science to see the way you behave here. Somebody had to say this to you. Have a great week.
I think the point she's trying to make here is that cat's don't comprehend language and so these button presses are very basic learned behaviors rather than sophisticated communication. Personally I think she's being unrealistically harsh. Yes, point out that it's not what it seems but it feels like she's totally dismissing that the cats have any intention in pressing these buttons. I'm also less impressed by the "full sentence" button layouts because at that point it becomes superfluous and far too anthropomorphistic but having a handful of buttons with noun/verb associations can be good. "play", "litter", "food", those are all phrases I use myself to talk to my cats and they will talk back to me and get excited because they've already come to associate that term with the feeding right, so it's no different. She's pretty cynical in this video imo.
Billi's latest video is fascinating. Her mum is on a conference call and ignoring Billi so Billi selects the buttons "all done" and "TV." TV isn't a button she uses often and you see her actually sniffing the buttons and looking at them to try and find the one she wanted. Also the fact that she called her mum's laptop "TV" is absolutely impressive!
@KPassionate have you actually watched the rest of her videos? Are you also aware that they are participating in a study to gather whether Billi actually understands or not? Her mum says herself she doesn't completely know if she is just pressing random buttons but the longer she carries on and the more words she uses, it is getting harder for her to stay cynical. Overall though Billi gets enrichment from this activity and this is what counts. I'd love to see you on a video with Kendra so you can explain your definition bias to her in person while watching Billi use the buttons, rather than just spouting it here from one video or an explanation of a video. That would be a really good experiment and I'd love to see you elaborate more on your conclusion over more instances of Billi using the buttons. This is not a criticism, I'm just someone who likes thorough investigation and explanation.
@@MsWesty81 I have watched so many videos. They are all the same. I will be checking out the "study" once it is out but currently all of the extensive research on the topic backs me. And their study will do the same
@KPassionate can you give me a link to the research please as I'd be interested to read it? Thank you. Also which videos in particular have you watched as they all differ in my opinion.
[1] www.nature.com/articles/news.2009.1079 [2] bigthink.com/life/ape-sign-language/ [3] www.gesundheitsindustrie-bw.de/en/article/news/why-don-t-dogs-talk These are just a few examples. I also strongly recommend this excellent article published in Neuroscience News, the leading journal in the fields of cognition and communication. It was written by Mélissa Berthet, a PhD researching Primatology, Bioacoustics, Semantics, and Animal linguistics. neurosciencenews.com/animal-communication-18280/
Sorry, but I have to jump in here: I'm a Vet and a cat owner and these"airplane" ears are a definite expression of annoyance/ negative emotion/ anger. The pictures you showed depict scared and belligerent cats. Big difference.
WHAT?! Your "research" was ONE VIDEO?! Please get the phrase "scientific method" out of your mouth. You only watched ONE "talking dog" video, used it to generate the hypothesis that dogs can't use syntax and everyone is full of nothing but confirmation bias, and just... Called it a wrap and smugly made a video without testing your hypothesis? Um... If you don't see the irony, I think we need to take away the big words like confirmation bias until you're ready for them. We've all heard the Clever Hans lecture, so thank God we didn't get that, I guess
@@KPassionate That's the problem. You didn't do any research and you base your opinion on "somebody said something about it and he is well know"... Somebody also said that the earth was flat and he was well know as well, do you belive everybody just because they are scientists ? According to you a scientist cannot be wrong ? Especially that with pets there is hundreds and thousands of studies that says everything and it's contrary almost every day. A cat for example can understand up to 10 words. A dog, more. A crow is as intelligent as a 7yo child. How do i know that ? Because i educate myself, i search because i am interested and i am not even a "marine specialist" or whatever. In any case it's nearly impossible that you are or ever will be a cat or a dog owner. One last thing, an opinion is based on a lot of points of view, yours is based on what, 2 at best ? It's like reacting on a mechanic video while you are a commercial for a tools brand...
I wouldn't have said Billi was angry, but she did look annoyed. With her ears back like that, she was either annoyed or there was a sound behind her that caught her attention.
Right, cats arch their back and hiss when they are deeply threatened. I've seen my cat do that maybe once. When he is just irritated with me he might cry. There is a difference between mild irritation and utter rage.
As someone who has taught my dog to use talking buttons I would like to remark specifically on your comment about the videos just being of animals hitting a bunch of buttons on a board and that if we wanted to teach our animals that a specific button had specific meaning we would place that button next to its meaning. I get that you are responding to random videos that followers told you to watch so just so you know.. there are days and days and weeks of a single button next to its intended purpose before an animal gets a board. We started by modeling potty by the front door and each individual button has been introduced on its own before being added to a board which grows over time. As far as humans having to read into what the animal wants based on the button pressing.. what would you have us do..? When a two year old strings a group of words together you have to figure it out as best you can right? From what I understand dogs specifically have the equivalent mind of about a two year old. If the plan is to give them a different way of communicating to accompany the non verbal communication they already show then should we just ignore them unless they string together a perfect and complete sentence..? Would that help a 2 year old human learn? It’s been proven scientifically through MRI scans of dogs brains that they experience similar emotions to humans, you’ve said yourself that they are smart so I don’t see why it’s such a leap to attempt to communicate with them in a different way than just reading their body language. Also in your first video where bunny pushes “hungry” after eating. By your logic I should give my dog food every time he begs but anyone who studies dog behavior knows that a dog will continue begging for food long past the point of being full bc evolution has ingrained in them from years of hunting and only eating once a day and then not for several at times that they should eat at any given opportunity for survival not just when they are hungry. Sometimes what they want and what they need are different things unfortunately. I would love to give my 15lb dog as many treats as he wants whenever he wants but you know.. obesity.. So yes, they can press what they want all day but it doesn’t always get them what they want. Also, no one knows their specific pet better than their owner. I may not be able to tell you how someone else’s pet shows anger or sadness or not wanting to be bothered unless it’s super obvious like you said hissing or nipping but I can tell you what you can do to avoid those things with my specific dog. Yes all animals have a non verbal way of communicating but not all animals are the same.
Having followed this channel for months now and watched close to all the videos, I can say that this cat can and does use the buttons to communicate. The videos show progression over more than a year during which time the cat becomes more capable with the buttons. The owner is a vet, working for a zoo. My specialty is child development. The cat is using the buttons at a level equivalent to an 18 month to 2 yr old child. Therefore, you will see mostly short, one or two button, sequences. They primarily express the cat's wishes - generally food or playtime. As with child/adult communication, plenty must be interpolated by the owner. I have seen as many as five button sequences, but these are rare. The cat seems able to put buttons together to express a concept she does not have a button for. Again, not a daily occurrance. The cat remains a cat. Therefore, frequent occasions of manipulation (offering cuddle and then quickly changing to food) which is not surprising to those who know cats. Is the cat's thinking equivalent to that of the toddler? Probably not. But I find it clear that some cats are capable, given the tools, of fairly complex communication.
I am immensely skeptical about this - putting words together to formulate meaning is an extremely difficult thing to do even for small humans. All we are seeing in these videos are the moments that make us think there is deeper meaning behind what the cat was pressing. For example "where before?" as from the video has so many concepts in itself that we should wonder why other cats didnt start writing down their thoughts and let us buy their philosophy books. First of all: Its in relation to what the cat was "thinking" that the owner took a long time. The concept of time and time passing might be an easy one but that is then combined with the concept of "making someone wait" or "having something else to do" - now that means the cat doesnt just "ask" (another concept that is by the way inherently human - understanding that someone can give you information by asking them) why it has to wait in the sense of "why do I need to wait when I call you" - no its asking for the particular reason for a situation that is gone already. Or lets assume just for a second that the cat associates the buttons with good things and ask ourselves if this could explain the cats behaviour better. Such associations could be attention, food, play example. It presses them randomly to get something out of it because it learned that pressing buttons will do something. It will probably learn aswell that just pressing the food button doesnt give the cat more food - it has to press various buttons to get something and usually the more buttons it presses the better will be the reward. Another thing that is kind of interesting is how we are anthropomorphizing the communication between cat and owner. The cat presses a button and looks at the owner like its deeply listening to its owner and what they have to say. Why though? Why would it care about why the owner was late and what it was doing - those concepts dont make sense from a cats point of view and frankly even children dont do this until they are older. What if the cat just looks at their owner because it wants something - something that makes sense in the cats world like pets, food, play.
animals can recognize "words" "sounds" and associate them with a things and object based meanings and feelings. like "food", "treat", "walk" "their name" the names of family etc. it doesnt mean that this animal "knows the brittanic definition of the word" but recognizes the associated noise with meaning, they can even recognize tone and emotion. i think its equally incredulously biased to think that animals CANT percieve words and associate them with things. surely they are not on parr with us and our linguistic capabilities BUT they do have rudimentary communicative abilities. so much so that cats and dogs from different regions and linguistic human cultures cannot understand commands given in foreign languages. also im so pissed that she said "this cat isnt angry" there are different levels of "anger" and the cat doesnt know/have a word for "frustrated" or "irritated" so billie uses "mad". emotion is a complex spectrum in which they can conflict and coincide. when you get mad you have levels. you dont start at hackles raised teeth bared... even psychologically stable HUMANS dont start out at 100% aggression. it builds. i can be absolutely mad at an asshole who dinged my car and drove off or mad that i dropped a perfectly uneaten peeled banana but am i going to come out fists raised teeth clentched and scream like a maniac in fight or flight? NO. because thats not how anger works. also you can be angry and sad. angry and scared. angry but motivated. there is no one default expression of anger. weve even shown that dogs EVOLVED to mirror our expressions to better imprint on us as we domesticated them. post edit: also its amazing if you research how a dogs facial muscles evolved/were selected to be able to nonverbally communicate with us
Honestly, it sounds like KPassionate is bias and a bit proud of her professional skills in working with animals. Giving animals buttons is another form of communication and isn't hurting anyone. Simply saying it's just button mashing and confirmation bias is discounting the intelligence of other animals. KPassionate also seems to be a bit condensing and harsh with her judgement.
I do say multiple times that if you want to spend money on buttons then feel free. Just know that they don’t work as advertised. And there are many better ways to communicate with your pets.
@@KPassionate I think issue I'm seeing here is that you're dismissive of the idea that companion animals can communicate with the buttons. The buttons don't take away from body language, and verbal communication. Learning to use the buttons to communicate takes time and consistency, just least learning a second language does for humans. Making mistakes is part of the learning process. It appears that you're simply laughing at it and dismissing the possibility that they could be understanding that the buttons are a form of communication. The first person to teach their dog to use the buttons is a speech therapist who saw similarities in the way her puppy was communicating and the way non-verbal children communicate. Further research is needed to determine how much they understand, but you don't seem to be open to it.
@@Jamie-813 the research has been done and companion animals can’t string together words to form meaning. A study on one border collie showed he could learn more than a thousand words! Super cool stuff, but he was never consistently successful in stringing together words to form meaning. That is with years of training from professional animal trainers. The buttons could be used if you had one for outside or something like that. But the people in these videos are either intentionally misleading people for money, or simply not educated about animal training, biology, and communication. I am dismissive of the videos because every one I have ever seen is utter nonsense and the science is clear. However, I do wish I hadn’t been so rude in the video. So that feedback is valuable and I have incorporated it into subsequent content. Thanks!
Billee's mom does train her on each button. There are videos showing how she introduces new buttons to the cat. And, yes, there are times when Billie is confused.
You obviously don't know cat body language as many commenters have pointed out. When you have to brag about your so called expertise, it just makes you look foolish and arrogant.
"OMG the animals are not constructing full sentences, this is a failure, shut it down." More cherry picking and another biased review. Maybe you are deflecting because this goes against what you were taught in college and on the job, which I saw a lot during my studies. Students and professors refusing to give up on old theories. After watching 30 hours of these types of videos, I believe the animals are actually communicating. The example of the "angry cat" is really just an annoyed cat, and doesn't disprove the cat being mad, because mad could be annoyed or angry. These buttons group words together to make them easier to learn, and you as a human have to unbox their meaning. Animals are not going to construct full sentences, communication can be simplified, which is partly how we read body language. Sure, you can just read body language, but that doesn't limit other forms of communication.
Cats are one of the only animals that has developed sounds ONLY for human communication. Cats don't meow at each other yet cats have been shown to produce over 30+ different meows only used towards humans.
@@matschrepf The only cat I ever had that meow to other is my actual one. Who is disabled and will fall trying to communicate normally (as the tail is also used in the balance he is lacking XD) (the balance, not the tail. Don't cut animal body part unless it's neutering or life/death situation for them)
@@matschrepf YES THEY DO! Many of us have seen cats fighting or about to and they are extremely vocal. They also make a number of little noises to communicate as well, Mostly to show intention.
Sorry, but being a behaviour expert and saying a cat needs to have a high back/puffed out fur as the only way to communicate as angry is very surprising. Billie turned her ears back. It was very clear she was irritated. The human putting "angry" there is logical. A cat only pulls out the high back when she feels endangered and/or truly furious (it tries to intimidated by looking bigger, to seem less like an easy prey). You're very, very biased. I'm aware of the bias theories and have done peer reviewed researches using the scientific method. What you're doing here isn't it. Also, you're association argument: the animals already learned what buttons are associated with what action. The video's you've shown are every day use video's, not training video's.
She did this in the dog video, too. She said dogs only wag their tails if they’re happy. Oh, Patricia McConnell would have some words with this dolphin trainer!
im starting to question her status as a "scientist" too. there have been too many mistakes in such small parts regarding the genetics that throws up red flag. What was your ph.D topic about and how many publications & citations have you got? what is your publication list?
The training videos show how the associations are made between the button word and the concept. The Instagram videos are for viewer entertainment not to train or show what the words mean. I agree that you showed examples of confirmation bias, but I don't agree with your overall assessment. I think you have to watch over a period of time to get that each critter develops their own use of words with their people. I don't see why it's so difficult to believe. I mean are you also suggesting that Koko the gorilla was unable to sign? Any pet owner knows that their pets learn some English words. You say "leash" and the dog grabs the leash, you say "sit" and the dog sits. Why wouldn't the inverse be true? Why is it such a stretch that a dog might press a "walk" button rather than grabbing the leash and dragging it out to the living room and barking? For example, my rabbit reversed Pavlov on me and trained me to feed him when he rings a bell. I started feeding him because I assumed he was hungry when I heard it and he started ringing the darn thing at 5am every morning. Is there such a difference between him ringing a bell and pressing a "food" button? If you really want to disprove this phenomenon, try teaching an animal to use speech buttons. See what happens if you provide something other than what they request. Most of the animals on these social media channels respond by going back and repeatedly pressing the button for the item they wanted or by pressing a negative emotion button like "mad."
@KPassionate I know you are busy but I agree here that you should try to teach a cat to use buttons and see what happens when you present them with a different item then asked for. And if you aren't able too maybe you have some colleges that would be interested in doing the experiment applying the scientific method. We know animals are intelligent and I myself wish I had a meow translator so I could tell exactly what my kitten wants. He is a munchkin and because it's hard for him to get up and down the bed we give him elevator rides. But sometimes his meow didn't mean he wanted down and we feel bad while he struggles to pull himself back up. It would be nice if he could tell me by pressing a button so if he didn't press it and was meowing then I would know it was something else he wanted. I hope that if you are unable to conduct an experiment to prove the button pressing true or false that someone in the scientific community will see this and do so. They would gain some fame maybe even some television appearances no matter the outcome. And then we call all stop arguing if it's true or not. I do agree that there is no way the dog is forming complex sentences and the owner is reaching. But I think cats are smarter than dogs so of course I would think that.
@@buddybearcslv cat button training is a perfect animal behavior graduate student research proposal. However, to have a rigorous study, the researcher would need a healthy sample population of cats of different breeds/ages to not only test skill uptake, but to also serve as a control - eg. To only use word intonation and vary the words to see if it's the tone or the words the cat understands. Animal behavior is a tricky science to prove data, so I understand why KPassion has doubts about the talking buttons being used to convey complex ideas and emotions.
@@buddybearcslv these studies have been done. Look them up. Even the CIA tried it. It doesn't work. Just because someone revived a dead thing from 70 years ago and claims it works doesn't mean no one ever tried before. It didn't work then and doesn't work now.
Arched back, hissing and puffed-up hair are signs of a scared cat, not an angry one. While some bias is most likely present in the talking pets' owner's perspective, here it seems there is a case of skepticism bias. To follow the scientific method properly, you need to let go of biases not only for the theory but also against it.
Hard agree. You can see the bias is in effect in how she only watched two videos and reacted to seconds at a time without waiting to see how any incident played out. She said that ears back with wide eyes is not "mad" when anyone who's ever had a cat knows that ears back is the first sign that you need to stop what you are doing if you don't want to get scratched or bitten. I've definitely been bitten after ignoring ears back and tail thumping, but I've never made a cat arch it's back or raise it's fur---because I'm not an abusive piece of shit, as being abusive is what it would take to incite that behavior. Do I think that Billi's mom is always correct in her interpretation of the buttons Billi presses? No! Do I think that the buttons are only being used as a means to an end by Billi? Well, she often does use the buttons this way, but sometimes she just will summarize what had just happened. I guess the argument is that she's just wanting attention when she uses the buttons that way. I guess maybe? But you can really say the same for a lot of human utterances. Even art created by humans could be argued as something done for attention. IDK, this really rubs me the wrong way...the editing--music choices, the choice of clips...you can really see a contrast when you compare it with her video on otter intelligence. When she talks about her success training otters and how smart they are, there's uplifting music. Getting into the trainer's pockets is touted as a sign of intelligence but it's probably just that the otter has seen the trainer take treats out of that pocket hundreds of times before. It would be more convincing if she used the same skepticism as she did with Billi, sarcastically saying, "maaayyyybee the otters I train are smart, or maybe they just know that if they do the behaviors I want, they get food!" But she won't do that, because in doing so she would be attacking her own profession and pointing out how meaningless it arguably is. I'm playing devils advocate, I don't think otters are stupid or that all work with marine animals is useless, but I think being able to understand one's pet better would be more useful to the vast majority of people.
@@AriKitae Yeah. I don't think it's 'speech' as humans use it. But I think it's more interesting how the button use has progressed over time...an evolution of how this cat and this owner communicate. And for pure entertainment value MAD & Billi 4th wall breaks are hilarious.
@@acatnamedm4529 I have absolutely no problem with anyone saying the word buttons aren't language or that the scientific method isn't in place here. Kendra isn't claiming either of these things. I have a problem with KPassionate pretending that Billi isn't attempting to communicate with Kendra.
Just crossing over to this video from the other video from your comment. As someone whose career it includes a whole lot of sitting down and reading rather biased and often low quality research papers (even at journals and conferences!) to sift through the crap and debias the authors' intents from the actual results themselves -- it's hard for me to absorb the arguments made here. There's a lot of logical fallacies here, including appeal to possibility/probability. There's also a lot of bias and it seems pretty clear that you already have made up your mind on a topic before approaching it, because the evidence presented is already interpreted through that entropy-collapsed lense of personal bias (which is a huge red flag to me in any paper/presentation -- I need data, not personal beliefs). I hope this doesn't feel like an attack or deep personal criticism from what it may feel like the other video was doing -- but it is a stern statement of discomfort in terms of methodology and approach, and I'm doing a much lighter job of sugarcoating it than I usually do. I came here hoping for a video that was a little more neutral in terms of looking at the evidence (Todd Grande comes to mind stylistically), and I think I see myself honestly watching videos in the future that you could make on this, so there's some personal selfish gain for me to be had in potentially moving the needle with how neutral your presentations may or may not be. That's one personal bias on my side, and I hope to check in in the future and see some more scientific detachment from these issue in those videos (and I think that much of your audience could too!) In any case, back to the matter at hand -- I think good discussion on both sides is helpful, but this is a pretty biased perspective I think that doesn't keep the benefit of the doubt in mind, and thus I think creates a separate camp disjoint from the people with observational biases with these pets (and that does little to answer the underlying question). We have good tools for debiasing these things, and I think if we're making arguments that this is just attention-mediated behavior, then I think putting it forward as a hypothesis rather than a one-and-done "here's the solution" video helps expand the argument a bit better. I just get frustrated watching this because I think we can do better, if we're scientists, let's please present our information in a scientific manner. Best of care -- FB&co.
Thank you >'you already have made up your mind on a topic before approaching it' I totally agree with that point. TS says she tried but it's clear she didn't bother. The whole point in her video was that buttons are not needed and that they are pressed randomly, even though in comments she agrees that some buttons (1-5) can be used for mutual understanding and the animal can actually understand what happens after they press them. Okay, so why not let the pet learn something? And if you can push it to ten or more buttons, why not? Yes, sure these 'animal parents' read the signs wrongly and read too much, but, well, TS does the same (but she doesn't understand hoomans, which is less understandable). For example. Billi is *angry*. It's obvious, that this word is used just for meme. People make content for others to watch and to have fun. Obviously, they use memetic words and constructions. Also, the button 'mad' is used as the opposite of 'happy' (if one watches the beginning of Billi's training, it is quite obvious to see), as the animal does not need many complex emotions, it needs one to describe happiness and one to say that something is not ok. So the system of buttons is actually done so pets wouldn't need to construct difficult sentences. And that's exactly what we see there. Also, these pets do not use complex words much, but there IS difference for them, how you respond for their need. I don't know about dogs, but if your cat wants to cuddle and you start playing with it, it wil reject you indignantly. I am astonished that 'behavior scientist' will say that it doesn't matter for them. It's just strange. So, honestly, I am disappointed in this 'scientist', she's just hyping here imo.
@@mintgardener To be fair, it is some solid criticism from me, and I've been in a similar position on the other side of the table so I can empathize. I think something here in this whole conversation has hit a personal nerve for the author and it's causing a fair bit of suffering (once again as someone who's been through this loop too), so there's loop of needing to make another thing to prove and show that the thing being attacked really is true, and so on and so on into infinity. I don't think it's anything too terribly wrong just the ideological equivalent of the cold or the flu. Every single one of us gets our whole core humanity, personhood, and etc wrapped up in one issue or another at some point. So who might I be to judge that, haha. But I think the eternal traintrack run from criticism could be de-scarified by slowly dismantling that foundation of self that gets threatened by criticism. Once again I'm incredibly verbose but that's just how I talk, haha. Thanks for your comment, it was validating and I greatly appreciated it. Much love and hopefully not foul to anyone involved here, ❤️🥰🤗😍☺️😮🦢🦆😁👍, Best of care -- F.B.&co.
@@fernbear3950 I get hundreds of comments and can’t possibly respond to them all. I made the cat button video simply because it was requested several times. It was actually very painful to sit through so not really done for pleasure lol. I have put together all of my experience in animal behavior and behavior modification and done research into the topic. Based on what I have found these dog buttons in the way they portray them in these videos is fantasy. If you believe something else that is of course fine. Cheers
Those of us who have followed Billi over the years have seen how her communication has actually developed over time. when you watch it daily you see that she is communicating with more precision than what you seem to be finding. Your skepticism can't counteract the interactions I've observed daily for over a year.
@@KPassionate Ok, but at this point no one can be right. I agree partially with you, but I think you also have strong bias. To be a scientific hypothesis, you need to accept that it could be wrong. There is clearly a lack of studies about it. If someone show you something you just always say it's a confirmation bias which is hard to argue against because you cannot be proved wrong because in your point a view : everyone that think differently is in denial and its always a confirmation bias even if other behavorial specialist, speech pathologist or a vet says something different. I am a biologist myself and I am fully aware of the confirmation bias and other bias. I see some animals as the same intelligence level as some very young child (numbers of studies show problem solving skills of monkey, cats, dogs, crows compared to humans and they can do sometime as good as some child) which can give me anthropomorphic bias.. but I can argue that some of my esteem collegues have another very old bias common in biology, the opposite of anthropomorphizing which was vastly present in biology research like for a while researchers thought babies cant feel pain, non-human vertebrates cant feel pain, dogs cant feel love (they have oxytocin too), animals cant do probem solving or learn, aniamals cant use tools to do things or solve their problems and basically thinking animals are far more further that us that they really are. Bias are everwhere!!. Basically, it's like both side refuse to hear or accept the other side and tell the other one they are in denial and have confirmation bias. Exemple : you see a video of the cat making no sense : confirmation bias on your part too because it confirms what you already think, but do you remember the number of times toddlers makes non sense and we have to do extrapolation or the time of the video or if it's a recent one where billi is not very good and making more mistakes? or if it"s a new button arrives that he doesnt know and has to learn what it means ? Also, in Neuroscience news, they say rat can press a lever without actually understanding that it is a word or understanding the word... Very young children may not not know that and human's learning is strongly attached to association and behavorial link (If I do or say this, then this happen)... The thing is pets (dogs, cats, birds) can differentiate words like their names from others words. Dogs knows commands even from other people and to the disctinction from other words if they are listening and knows when we do "baby talk by example" we are trying to communicate with them. Why not words like walk or food from a button and then expressing the need for food or water by pressing the button that said that word. We know that if some word are too close to each other, they have trouble understand it in a command but not if they are rellat distinctive! Even bees can learn and likes to play! Bias are everwhere and discerning the truth from what we think it should be or our perception is really hard!! I dont have the time to link all the studies but they are pretty mainstream in biology world (I learned them in the first year..)! I also agree with you that some dogs owners or cat owners are extrapolating way too much for sentences that I dont think the cat or the dog understand and some words are really complex to learn. Sorry for my english, french is my first language... Also, you mixed the "mad, ready to attack", "scared" and "frustrated' behavior in cats.. Also, you are not a specialist in language from animals, its far more complex than juste one gene and the discovery (2001) is pretty recent. There is a lot we dont know so it's better to be careful (what are the other genes ? are non-human animals have them ? How they relate to understand word, expressing them, intelligence ?)... Also FOXP2 is linked to speech and not necessarily to understanding (even tho in human some mutations of it is linked to low IQ and difficulty to understand) but it does not mean that having few in the genome, or every mutations means no understanding of verbal words... www.embopress.org/doi/full/10.15252/embr.201847618?cookieSet=1 www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0959438805001546 www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1364661303001049
@@esbeelavallee2568 I think you are misunderstanding scientific principles. When you perform a test on a hypothesis you are not testing to check if your hypothesis was wrong or right your checking to test if it was supported or not supported. As of now there have been no scientific experiments that remove the potential confounding variables like body language from owners, as an example a cat may learn ohh when I stomp on the buttons my human looks happy, lets step on these buttons to get more positive attention. As such we must use previous research as was done on chimps and gorillas to inform ourselves. We can state the current literature on animal’s understanding of human language does not support the notion that animals can process human language past associations with single words. With this knowledge in mind we can state that until research shows otherwise we can not conclude this cat is processing language and using it in multi word sentences. Science is not about making hard statements like this is wrong or this right, but about creating theories and building off previous research. What the person who made the video is trying to say is that these “experiments” are not valid evidence to support the notion that they really understand what the words on the buttons mean. As a biologist you should know that we make inferences based on previous research, does Clever Hans the horse or KoKo the gorilla ring any bells. The research has been done this is just round 4 of trying to teach animals language, and guess what this is not even a real science experiment.
@@KPassionate the irony is so rich, noone has the definitive answer to this question yet, you assert your position is correct. *cough* *cough* isnt there a term for this? 🤔
@@KPassionate which is what you have, as well. More studies need to be completed. When you say "there is nothing here. Like NOTHING here" That is confirmation basis. The cat is clearly communicating something. Perhaps the owners interpretration is wrong, but that doesn't negate the possibility that something COULD be there. I think we need to see more of this.
I think everyone who watches animals use word buttons understands that there is possible confirmation bias, but also can't completely rule out the possibility of the sequence of buttons having at least some meaning.
What you described as a cat being angry is NOT what a cat is like when they’re angry. Upset behavior in cats is presented with ears pulled back, tail flicking, sometimes they’ll vocalize or growl. What you’re describing is a cat who is experiencing pain or fear and is lashing out in aggression. It’s kind of obvious you just googled angry cat behavior because I got the exact same description you mentioned from just googling it. Just because you’re a marine biologist, doesn’t mean you understand domestic animal behavior. Look, it’s fine to be skeptical about this because it seems like there needs to be research into it. I’m not going to dismiss it outright until we have more evidence. As a fellow scientist you should be open to the possibility there’s something more going on. It seems like maybe you should check your own biases. This is classic Dunning-Kruger.
I have watched a lot of Billi. Over time the communication has developed. The first video wasn't meant as a demonstration of great communication between them, it was a cats are moody/selfish joke. So you really only watched 1 video about the concept. Cuddle is actually something that Billi shows as wanting, I think that was the prompt for the video's meme title. Her owners model the behaviour, and press the buttons when communicating too. That makes sense. The notations are coming from the owners knowledge of their pet, in this case "anger" might have been a bit hyperbolic, but not so much. This isn't a documentary, it's a record of their journey. There have been many where there have been very contextual button presses. I was very sceptic early on, but over time there has been progression and depth in Billi's communication. There are videos where there is confusion on both parts, as you would expect at times. I don't think the animals are learning "to speak english" per se. But they are learning to communicate in a way that allows for more clarity as they learning to associate different buttons with different concepts. And Billi's owner is a veterinarian. She is not ignorant of animal behaviours. She doesn't make outlandish claims. If you read the about page on their website she acknowledges that they don't know the full depth of comprehension and meaning being achieved and that research is ongoing and not conclusive. It was also something started without any firm goals. They tried it out and it seems to be working.
I wouldn't agree that the most popular videos are the ones that "most represent their case" because the most popular videos are short and funny, they'e not about "proving" anything. Bunny's human mentioned that the full video data gets sent to the research team they work with, although I don't think their conclusions would change people's interest either way. Christina Hunger, who pioneered the buttons with her dog Stella, emphasizes that the goal is better communication, even if you don't use buttons - paying to how they're already communicating with us.
I'm a child behaviorist and early education teacher and what you said about "recreating the words to make a sentence" is exactly how children learn language. I've worked with many non-verbal children and this is how they communicate. I'm not saying that this animals are speaking a language... only that they are communicating. Some children may say "car.. fast." or "milk" and point to their belly. They aren't creating sentences but they are communicating. I've actually used similar buttons to work with my non-verbal students.
@@KPassionate just curious, what goes on in the human brain from a neurobiological level when humans speak? Can you answer me that? What brain regions are involved and what do they do?
@@alisaforster28691 cerebrum, broca’s area, Arcuate fasciculus, Wernicke’s area to name a few. Ranging from hearing to arranging thoughts into organized sentences. Why?
@@KPassionate to make sure you put in the effort to research the statements you make properly and reason properly in your argument. You did not answer the questions: What goes on in the human brain on a neurlogical level when they speak (describe the current model) and what do the involved brain regions do?
@@KPassionate both humans and animals learn by cause and effect and have conditioned reflexes and learnt behaviour. Humans dont work that differently then other animals. We can also say a lot of the things people do are instinct that our brain convinces us it is not. Free will might also be an illusion and our actions are just a creation of our genes, hormones, enviroments and experiences. Just like animals. If you know an action will get you what you want you will do that. And yes, selfless actions count to, giving monrley to a charity can be something to prove your ego, it can make you happy etc etc... most selfless actions are also learnt behaviour, tradition, instinct. All of these animals have. Rescue dogs and the dogs they give to the blind are extremely smart. If a dog understands a command, you communicate with the dig, its a fact. What is communication? Language Therefore animals can learn language. Animals can react to variety of sounds and they can connect a sound to who makes it, is it dangerous, what will happen if i hear this sound... Its obvious animals can make sense of their surroundings and noises, therefore they can and do communicate. We just have faster brains and we are better at convincing ourselves that we are smart. Now ofc our brain is better, we can make sense of complex things and have inner thoughts. I would say its like chess, in chess humans can think ahead multiple moves, animals on the otherhand can only think of 2 moves at most. But the basics of our learning processes and instincst are not different. Also there are multiple very very dumb people. I would say some people are barely smarter then a dog. In fact, i can tell you, lot of people cant solve a puzzle that a crow can. Its kind of insulting how youband lot of ppl downplay animals intelligence and think we are much smarter and different. All I have said are only well known facts.
Billi’s owner is a zoo vet. She also says she isn’t sure if the cat understands or doesn’t, or if the cat knows what she’s communicating. The research is fascinating, however, and I’m happy that an animal care specialist is participating.
I personally am in the other camp, animals have a learning capability, why not use it to associate actions or emotions to a button that makes the sound of that word? I don't see anything inherently wrong with this, since it's just another form of learning like tricks. And for me, I'd stop believing when I see them consistently press buttons that don't represent what I'd imagine a cat with cat wants might say. I watch Billi a lot since it's an almost daily upload, and she seems to successfully use the buttons to direct the humans to her wants, and when they get it wrong she seems to say no or mad, of which seems more to be a catch-all for negative emotions rather then simply anger. I'm interested in what the results the research project Billi and Bunny are in report. It's all pretty cool I think.
The "research" project is conducted by the company that sells the buttons. And participants are required to purchase the buttons. That is highly unethical and a severe conflict of interest. Animals are of course capable of learning things. But these are not capable of language. It has been proven that the foxP2 is needed to understand language and dogs and cats don’t have it.
@@KPassionate false. Again. Cat: Foxp2, 84 amino acids, chromosome a2 Im starting to doubt your status as a scientist. What was the topic of your ph.d thesis? How many publications and citations did you get out of it?
@@alisaforster28691 sorry you are correct. I should have said a specific mutation in the FoxP2 gene is required for language. Not the actual gene itself. Thanks for the correction.
I admit. I anthropomorphize the crap out of everything, but my cat has learned how to meow an impressive human sounding "Good Morning" to me on some mornings. Maybe he does it because it makes me laugh and give him ear skritches. Maybe he's been taking some online courses. Either way, I choose to believe that my cat occasionally greets me with a cheerful "Good morning."
@@KPassionate My Whippet has basically ''Trained'' me... by body language. A specific bored ''Flopp'' means ''I'm wanting to go outtttttt'' Of course she understands what certain words mean, but body language is the only way. Ditto when she {or any other animal} is nervous at the vets, no buttons required . Having a button in the waiting room that says ''Go home!'' would be likely pressed by every animal there if this was true. They are such good readers of human body language that I do think these 'Buttons' are a load of bollocks. The Dog or cat likely hits the buttons that makes the owner respond in the most positive way. Last night, we went to a farm to collect something, with dog off lead .There was a farm cat in the distance that even from 50 metres away looked angry. Dog could tell, and kept back, not advancing.
We learn to imitate animal sounds. Why can't your cat learn to imitate the sound that approximates "good morning" - not because he knows English but because of the situation association of that is the sound heard in the morning and he gets a happy greeting. Your cat has taught you well to cater to his needs.
My cat does that too. When I don’t open my door fast enough in the morning his meows start having an annoyed toned with an upper inflection at the end lol 😁 I choose to believe this!
Just a few minutes in and I gotta say, how is it you watch the least impressive of the lot? lol. I have to admit, when I first started watching them, I was iffy about it. But the MORE you watch, the more its is blatantly obvious, that there animals are talking/communicating with their people. There's one where Billi accidentally steps on a button with her back paw and it said, "want." She almost immediately pressed the "oops" button. Another, she pushed the button for the toy she likes, but "mom" was tired. So then Billi pressed "cuddle" and she cuddled for maybe a minute and then went back to the toy button, lol. It was so evident and "mom" also realized that this was a bargaining attempt, lol. Watch it, babe, watch a lot more of them. Because you're wrong. I just watched this one with a dog. This dog knew that its sister dog needed to go "potty." Sure enough, the other dog went/needed to go, the button-pushing dog did not. I've watched some now that are just incredibly impressive. Again, it's strange that you're somehow missing the impressive stuff. It's also kind of strange that you think your intelligence is so superior to all of these people doing this, that are actually experiencing it day after day. Funnily enough, these people have put in a lot of work (they aren't stupid), and I'm sure they would eventually have lost interest if it hadn't proven very fruitful. Additionally, many of the people watching aren't stupid, and THEY would have lost interest if they hadn't seen some very impressive communications by these animals. Maybe get over yourself just a wee dab? And do some real research on it. That is, watch a lot more videos. Talking Dog Buttons - Funniest, smartest, and BEST moments ua-cam.com/video/PnfnfdVRbU4/v-deo.html Another that comes to mind. Billi pushes "noise"(they use for any sound) and then "water." It had just started to rain. Just a fluke? Um 'kay. How many "flukes" until you realize YOU are wrong.
I watched an episode where Billie learned about Morning, afternoon and night, already showing an understanding of before, after and later. I am 100% convinced this cat has been communicating well after watching many of these videos.
I've been watching Billi videos for the past two weeks and have seen a bunch. I've also owned a number of cats for almost half a century, so I'm well acquainted with cat behavior and body language. Billi started learning buttons when she was 11, (that's late middle age for cats,) and now she's 13 and does use all her buttons. There are 60 now, I believe. For an older kitty, she does an impressive job. She presses "come" when she wants "mom" to come, and she gets upset when she presses the wrong button and will go and press "oops." She sometimes presses "oops" when "mom" gets something wrong. She expresses time with "morning," "afternoon," and "night," and she calls for specific people when she thinks of them, like "dad," "grandma," and "friend." This is not random, but very deliberate. It's obvious that she can't form sentences, but then very few animals can. She does put two words together at times. I've also watched videos where Billi manipulates "mom's" behavior by asking for cuddles, then goes after what she really wants, which is usually a play session. So, yes, the cat is communicating using buttons. I wonder what would happen if you started a cat with buttons as kittens.
You are gullible she stomps on any button for attention and the childless couple then tries to make sense of it in their crazy heads. Then add the fact that these idiots cherry pick these videos for you fools. All I have to say is you should trust what the expert in this video says not your years of being a crazy cat lady.
@@bethturnage7028 Yep, it's very obvious they're doing this IF one actually takes the time to watch several. This girl that is so arrogantly discounting all of this, it's kind of disturbing. Just how close-minded a "scientist" can be, frightening even, that these types of people are so significant to the lives of our people. The close-minded thing doesn't represent a depth of wisdom. And that type of ego/arrogance has gotten a LOT of things wrong. So many of our people have paid the price for it. That aside, I'm stunned by what these animals are doing. It's just so wonderful that they are demonstrating real proof of what I've known intuitively for years. Animals think and they feel, AND they "intuit."(see link I shared above where the one dog knew that its sister dog needed to go "potty"). And you can see how this kind of communication is so helpful for the animal and the owners. Being able to convey when they're ill and such. It's just so amazing and I'm eager to see how it progresses further.
I've been watching the videos for over a year now. I was skeptical, too, at first, but I do think Billi, Bunny, and others are attempting to communicate with varying degrees of success. I think the lesson learned here is that scientists are human, too, and they can fall for biases and preconceptions, just like the rest of us.
This lady just gives crazy cat ladies and childless dog owners a dose of reality they don't want to hear. If only she talked like a caveman they might understand. Realize these videos that still don't make any sense are the best videos they have of a cat that has those buttons filmed constantly. They agree with any button the cat mashes to make their delusional world make sense to them.
I think its worth noting that there was a whole year of time lap between the first and the last BilliSpeaks video shown here. I do think billi might not understand the words in English as we humans. But what is the most fascinating to me is my assumption that she can pack ideas into related words and pronounce them. Specially after seeing how her owner trained her to relate Morning/afternoon/night with the combo of the sense of time later/before/after. The concept of the cat able to communicate the sense of anticipation of passing time on a larger scale was very impressive to me. Do you think its possible that a socialized animal would be able to express in such a way after trainings that would link the animal with the sounds of words to human cultural?
1:14 “what do you smell?” Cat immediately looks down and presses “cuddle.” That question likely interferes with our analysis of Billi’s reaction, hence why Billi later says she doesn’t want to cuddle. I am completely aware KPassionate deliberately ignored the owner’s verbal question because of the assumption that a cat isn’t that smart. To be honest, even the owner herself ignored her own question when responding to Billi’s answer. That seems like reverse confirmation bias by assuming you know what the cat isn’t capable of. - Next video. - 6:55 You overlay right out of the gate that this is a button training. This isn’t a button-training. This is communication. You are watching communication resulting from previous training. - Overall I’m disappointed that KPassionate discounts everything she sees as confirmation bias. It comes across more as disconnected and having a Holier than Thou perspective of arrogance toward the whole process. This isn’t a scientific lab and it isn’t even the training process. The reality appears to be that KPassionate is highly skeptical of talking animals. I was in the camp of people wanting her to change her mind upon seeing Billi’s videos. My takeaway is that hoping someone on a platform will change their perspective to align with the masses is a long-shot. They have an image to capitalize on and momentum on their side. It is very difficult and humiliating for someone to reach a point of vulnerability on their own platform equating to, “I was wrong,” especially if it goes against their image even if admitting they’re wrong would rightfully validate so many in the masses who trust their integrity. It’s just disheartening to realize how deeply we can’t trust authority.
Science and research isn't cast in stone. It changes all the time, hence theories change all the time. So, to outright discount what is happening here should at least give us pause for thought. Whether these animals understand or not doesn't bother me; i find it fascinating because it could lead to other or related discoveries. Also, animals have been able to survive and evolve before humans' intervention/interference through instinct and intelligence and now we want to write them off because science hasn't been able to prove animals' capabilities? Where do medicines come from originally? Nature. And humans have survived how long before modern science? Then modern science discounted all natural medicine simply because they couldn't prove it, yet a lot of natural medicine is still used successfully. Of course I'm not, myself, discounting all the great advances in the sciences but let's not shut our minds off to possibilities. Einstein was written off as a student... One last thing, does the presenter need to be so condescending?
The cat knows to press “ops” after they press the wrong button… coincidence? Maybe. I’m at the very least certain that Billie understand mad because every time she presses it her tail was wagging.
How do you know it’s the wrong button? It is all just interpreted by the owner. So there is literally never a scenario where the cat doesn’t look like it knows what it’s doing because the human is controlling the narrative.
@@KPassionate Because it stepped on it with its hind leg seemingly on accident whilst avoiding the other buttons. Only to then turn around and go for the oopsie button instantly. You make it very obvious that you haven't put a whole lot of time into making an informed video, instead opting to look at two videos without having any context whatsoever. This is very easily demonstrated by you talking about the association training and how it is not happening, when with just a few minutes of research you could've easily found out that and how such training was done with the buttons.
Um… It really seems like you’re going at this whole anti-button-pushing arc with at best, some bias, or at worst, unjustified cynicism. It’s almost like you feel kind of threatened by the possibility that communication is actually happening here? I’m curious as to why you think it’s exceptional for you to analyze if communication is actually happening, based on watching *just* one or two videos… If you were to actually sit down and watch several videos, you would see how foolish you’re being for making such hasty criticisms. When you read books on biology and animal behavior, do you feel that you have a thorough grasp on the concepts of the book by reading one page or one chapter? Sure, this whole button-pushing thing done with animals is atypical and seems even unnatural, but again, if you actually watched more videos or better yet, watched Billie’s mom speak in some of the interviews she’s done on UA-cam, you’d find that a) sometimes pets just don’t take to trying to employ the button communication and b) she and Billie’s lives have actually become more enriched through adding this dimension to their communication, and it doesn’t take away from nonverbal communication. Idk I’m unimpressed, especially considering you *are* supposed to be educated on animal behavior and communication. You tried to poke all of these holes in Billie and her mom’s process without taking a moment to consider the flaws in your own process. It’s just lazy and close-minded. 🤷♀️
My videos are based on two videos just for the simplicity of the editing process. My opinion is based on the research that has been done into this by scientific experiments. There are some links in the description but a google search of "can bunny the dog really talk" will lead you to why scientists everywhere are debunking this.
Have you ever heard of the Milgram experiment ? or the "argument from authority" ? Using the fact that you are a marine biologist first as a way to make your point, doesn't make it automatically correct. Also, using human psychology concepts to debunk experiments after watching a few seconds of footage at random does not seem very scientific either to me. I am sorry but "debunking" something by using "science" while not doing it scientifically does not prove your point. It just proves that you know what types of video title will get you lots of views on a subject that people are passionate about. I have watched A LOT of those videos. And I believe this subject deserves at least to be looked into a little more and with scientific tools. Shutting it down after watching 5min of footage is definitely as unscientific as believing pets are fluent without scientific proof. There is also such a bias as relying on your knowledge to confirm if things are possible or not. Except with that mindset, no new theories and scientific facts would ever be found. Knowledge empowers you. But using it to disbar any theory on the basis that it does not come from a scientist... that's very limiting. Science can come from anywhere. And it's the scientist's job to use the benefit of the doubt to look into things. How many things have been discovered by pure luck ? Anyways, don't take this the wrong way, this is a mere rebuttal. Let's continue this discussion. But I believe scientists are not exempt from their own biases ;)
I literally came here to say the same thing but not quite as eloquently. For someone trying to use her education and title is a reason why we should listen to her, her process is very unscientific and dismissive.
This guy goes to the doctor and says "Just because you're a doctor doesn't mean you are correct about which medicine I should take", then goes home and drinks bleach
My mind isn't really made up either way honestly, but as a recommendation for the future you're probably getting more negative reactions from people in the comments because of the amount of condescension you expressed. I've seen a lot of great videos taking apart a concept they were very straight when talking about the topic and not injecting much personal opinion that were much more convincing because the person explaining didn't come across as immediately biased. If you're trying to get people to change their minds on a topic you probably shouldn't scoff at the videos and act like it's an inconvenience that you have to watch more than one video from the person you are trying to criticize. If you don't want to make a video talking about something then don't.
Billi's owner is actually a veterinarian (she works with exotic animals at a FL park or zoo, saw one video of her explaining the process of replacing part of a toucan's cancerous bill) so I'd think she has some pretty solid scientific credentials as well. You might want to contact her directly and have a discussion, as I'm sure she is familiar with the various possibilities for bias.
No she doesn’t. She’s obviously trying to make sense out of words that don’t go together in the shown videos. Her doing that discredits her completely.
A vet is trained to do physical exams and understand mostly the animal’s biology. This proves nothing about the ability of a person to read the pet’s mind apart from obvious love. But with love can come also some toxicity… we all wish for talking animals and searching storys in their everyday behaviour but there are likely none.
You are a marine biologist behavioral specialist, not a specialist on all animals. You work with MARINE animals, which exhibit totally different types of behavior and respond to humans in a totally different way. I would be surprised if you actually owned a cat or dog. You don’t really seem to understand most dog or cat behavior. ESPECIALLY cats! Nor have you watched enough samples of this one cat, or other cat videos that are using these buttons. If you are a proper scientist, you would bother to do a lot more research before you even made a video like this. Or the one you did about Bunny the dog.
whether or not the animals actually understand what they're doing, only watching a few videos - especially out of order - isn't a good way to get an accurate feel for whether or not they can be trained to use buttons to communicate
additionally, if you look for research about this, it just isn't there. you're operating under your own skepticism bias - you're not consulting linguistic experts, animal behavioral experts, nothing
I wish the author actually responded to critique with something more than a "Thanks for watching" or occasionally snide remarks at worst. Some of the points raised are extremely good: Misunderstanding the cues of a scared cat for those of an angry one, assuming the video is of training, rather than something casual, the lack of actual professionalism. She only reacts to people agreeing with her with actual sentences, further proving that, while Billi's owner might have confirmation bias, KPassionate also has it. I'm disappointed because I expected an actual expert's analysis on those animal videos. This is clearly not it.
Definitely not true. I respond to comments from every different angle. But I don’t take a lot of time to respond to people that already have their mind made up or that are extremely rude.
I will let any stray viewer decide if I am wrong, or if there is a very clear pattern in your responses past few weeks. It doesn't take much scrolling, really.
@@KPassionate There's several comments criticising your metrology that you ignore above this one, none of them are rude _"I don’t take a lot of time to respond to people that already have their mind made up"_ is a nice excuse, but the truth is that you're avoiding criticism, nothing more
@@nadarith1044 I agree with your statements. In fact, I tried to have an intelligent scientific discussion with the lady, and she would not converse beyond her standard one-line answers, and eventually condescendingly told me I should definitely block her channel because there's nothing there that would be of interest to me. I had called her out on her approach to this subject (as many others have), but I wouldn't say I was rude, I was just stating facts. (HA, I'm suddenly reminded of a t-shirt my husband has of Stewie from Family Guy saying "I'm not insulting you, I'm describing you".). :)
To be fair, I remember Billi's owner has a video where she talks about how she trains Billi to associate the various buttons with specific things. And she does seem to have very specific buttons that she likes to press, like the one for her fan toy. So it wouldn't totally surprise me if she's learned to associate a few buttons with a few very specific easy to understand things like the one for food or for her favorite toy. That's not to say she actually is picky about what she actually wants at any given moment, if she pressed the button for food and was shown her toy or given pets she probably wouldn't even care. But it's not out of the realm of possibility that when she actually wants food at a given moment and happens to see the button for food she goes and presses it because she's made that association. An interesting experiment would be to train a pet to fetch specific objects after button presses. I know there are dogs who know enough names of different specific toys that they can fetch individual toys on command, so it doesn't seem like a huge stretch to similarly train them to fetch the toy when they hear the same command from one of these buttons. Then extend that and see if there's a way to, say, give a command for the dog to press a random button, it presses it, and then when it hears the new command from that button fetches the corresponding object. Either way the abstract concept buttons for sure are really dubious, as well as how far ahead the pets are actually thinking when they're pressing the buttons.
@@KPassionate A friend bought a 'Poo bell' that presses like a button and goes Ding~dongggg ..Except her Whippet presses it now whenever she wants to go outside, not just to poo or wee. Because Iris was praised fulsomely each time she pressed the ''Poubelle'' {as we call it, }she knows that pressing it gets a treat and an open door and attention. {All exciting things} If I phone up friend, I can sometimes hear the ''Poubelle' ding donging as Iris presses it when she is excited, and thinks we might be outside. {according to her owner} I'm certain animals press the buttons that their humans react most positively to. There needs to be rigorous testing, but at the moment, I can't see dogs or cats tapping out complex sentences with these buttons.
@@KPassionate Totally agree. Wasn't ''Clever Hans'' the 'Counting' horse responding to tiny visual cues from his master? Animals remember voices, too, from the people in their past life .Was playing a ''Puppy video'' of our Whippet at just six weeks old , The Husband of the person who bred the litter's voice is in the video, and at the sound of his voice, immediately our Whippet looked up intently. I forwarded it to my friend, and her whippet {Same litter} was ears up listening to Tony's voice. I play a lot of videos, and Whippet rarely takes any notice, unless it's a voice she recognises.
Actually, Billi has on several occasions shown that when she presses a certain button, she wants whatever is associated with that button. For example, recently, she pressed the button for “Food”. Kendra gave her a bowl of water which, I think, contained fish oil. I think this is because Billi occasionally has a hard time eating certain types of foods. (I’m sorry. My details are a bit fuzzy.) Anyway, Billi looked at the water, sniffed it, then walked back over to her buttons and pressed “Food” again, as if to reinforce her request.
Please don't take this video serious. This woman's credibility is questionable. I've scoured the comments searching for some potential reliable links to real studies or sources backing any claims of doubt, but all she has provided over and over is a link to an article called 'Talking dogs, really?' its worded as a stupid pop science attention grabber. I wasted my time reading it to give her a chance, and guess what, its trash. It's an actual clickbait article with not a SINGLE source in the entire 'study' to back up any of the claims. She also keeps referring to Dr Mélissa Berthet as her source for credibility, but this mentioned person comes across as unprofessional and fraudulent, her one "source" in her own article she wrote literally links to the exact same article from another website which is another journalistic pop trash media site. She has provided zero sources on any studies whatsoever, its purely an opinionated piece that @KPassionate is treating as actual science backed information.
Here is a published and peer reviewed study that we relied on for this video. www.gesundheitsindustrie-bw.de/en/article/news/why-don-t-dogs-talk And here is some additional material on the topic. Happy reading and thanks for commenting! www.nature.com/articles/news.2009.1079 bigthink.com/life/ape-sign-language/ www.sciencefocus.com/nature/bunny-how-to-speak-dog/ therewiredsoul.medium.com/debunking-the-viral-talking-dog-of-tik-tok-df114625b4d5
This video would have been watchable if not for the scathing, condescending, arrogant tone. Science should never look down on anyone, no matter how foolish you find them.
This was an interesting video having just discovered Billie and only having seen 2 vids of that cat before coming here. I'm not a psychologist, but I do have a bachelors degree in Psychology and have always been interested in how that translates into other fields. I feel that is relevant because I have always had interesting relationships with my pets that include knowing their body language, different meows, patterns, and habits. I don't 100% agree that animals wouldn't be able to communicate with humans using non-traditional means because of 2 main theories: evolution, and adaptation. One dictates that animals change even to a cellular level to fit needs (breeding/cross-breeding for certain traits), the other says that, even if temporarily or in the presence of certain stimuli, we change behaviors in order to be less threatened or better understood. The cat knows the sounds come from the floor in these videos, but looks up to the owner after using them expecting either a treat or a response. The same way my cat yowls in different tones to get my attention to different things, or even learned to turn off the lightswitch because he would get a treat after. Both of these count as learning and can eventually lead to understanding even if the owner isn't 100% revealing all the work that was put in. In the owners mind, I'm sure they believe they are teaching and the cat is learning.
I've checked especially for you. As of half of August 2022 it's: 414 👍 (68,9%) 187 👎 (31,1%) Total views are 8808 which may mean that some people didn't make opinions on that or are returning only to leave some comments (depending on the watch retention and total watch length)
@@dwsel Oh wow, how did you find that out, and can you give us updated stats? I commented a while back that she probably saw how popular button-talking pet videos have become and knew reviewing the subject would get her lots of views, but that I bet it also got a higher than average number of dislikes too. At over 30%, I'd say I was right! She probably wasn't counting on that... she even said she had no idea how many people believed in this stuff! :)
So I watched both this video and the dog video and i find this to be a very interesting discussion topic. For starters, i completely agree tone and body movement are the basic form of communication for an animal. But at the same time, I have seen animal learn simple words. For example, my dog knows the word "WALK". It doesn't matter how i say it, i can be in normal conversation with someone and if that word is at all mentioned, she comes running with a look of anticipation. However, much like was mentioned, were talking simple words here. Mainly verbs and nouns like walk, treat, outside, play, cuddle, etc. Something the animal is constantly hearing. I can see this working on a one word command basis, where the animal does not need to push multiple buttons to form a sentence. An animal might be able to put something simple together like "cuddle tommy" (Tommy being a person) but i can't be sure with out being able to properly test this.
I completely agree. I think as a button to let the human know you would like to go outside or something like that could be useful. But the training for that needs to be consistent and very precise. I just don’t see that happening here.
@@KPassionate because you watch one of 100s of videos. Billi had been training for years. She's closer to the fluent end of the spectrum than just learning 🙄 bias much?
@@jenniepennie14 Yeah I've watched a lot of Billi videos and I don't think this specific section highlights her understanding. Buttons have been moved around and removed before too.
@@KPassionate well, the reason you don't see that here is because that happened in other videos. And you didn't watch those. You chose to form an opinion based on looking at this experiment for 3 minutes.
@@MissAngryAngel my opinion is based on scientific studies which is backed by every button video I have seen. Even the ones you are talking about. Sorry. Appreciate you watching and taking the time to comment
I would tend to disagree. I live with several cats, as I volunteer for a rescue. All my cats but two have some degree of trauma from their time as strays, and so run for cover when the doorbell rings, as they’re anxious of strangers. When they are purely afraid, their body language is furtive, quiet and low to the ground: they’re trying to make themselves as small and quiet as possible to escape without notice. When they are anxious AND angry, e.g. when there’s the occasional inter-cat squabble, that’s when they hiss, arch backs, etc. But those behaviours are absent when they’re just plain afraid. So I think it’s fair to say a cat exhibiting those behaviours is feeling both scared and aggressive/angry.
@@poison_plays You're right, a purely afraid cat does exactly what you said - try to make themselves as small as possible. I see that with ours when there's a stranger visiting sometimes. I think the key difference is that the arched back and hissing is the cat being defensive (the next logical step after fluffing up their tail). I don't think "angry" is the best descriptor for this.
You gave a reasoned argument and made some very good points. I realize in your head, this is no better than Clever Hans, the horse who “did math.” You were still wrong. You demonstrate your own confirmation bias. Let me explain the flaws in your interpretation: -SAMPLING ERROR I understand that this frustrates you, so you don’t want to watch hours of videos. Admittedly, picking the most popular was a decent strategy, but the shorter videos are usually more popular on any channel, and these videos tend to just be a cute conversation for popularity. If you watched more videos, or longer videos, you would see more convincing videos. For example, the video “Does Billi use all these words?” (which is nearly an hour long) shows Billi interrupting activity to communicate reactions, e.g. stopping play to communicate “ouch back” for being hit in the back with a toy, stopping a petting session when “Mom” pats her tummy to say “no tummy” (cat owners know sometimes they want a tummy pat, but sometimes it is just a display of trust and they will react negatively to their tummy being touched). You’ve missed spontaneous/reactive speech. Another good one displaying complexity is the video “do cats miss us when were gone?” where there is a conversation with a follow-up question: Billi asks “where Dad hmm?” (most people use the word “question” for her “hmm”) but he’s on a work trip, and the only words to communicate this is “outside”, which has other associated concepts associated with it; Billi follows up with “When?”, but the only time concepts Billi knows is “soon” (under 15 minutes) and “later” (over 15 minutes), which doesn’t properly explain that Dad will be gone a week. As to your assertion that, if it were language, there would be communication mistakes - there are! One of the buttons is “Oops!” There are examples of Billi accidentally setting off a button needlessly and communicating “oops” to erase, or Billi restarting the phrase after an error. Due to your own bias, you are not taking in a large enough sample to be representative and justify conclusions. -IMPROPER CODING / misidentification I respect that you are an animal behaviourist and there is transferable knowledge, but stick to marine animals. First, your examples of anger are not anger but acute stress response (fear, threat response). The ears pointed backwards in the video where they label it *anger* is more accurate: it is a response to emotions on the frustration-anger spectrum. Second, you need to put it in the context of the available vocabulary. Billi only has 3 emotional words available, one of which is technically a feeling, not an emotion. Billi is technically only trained to express positive emotions (“happy”) and negative emotions (“mad”), but you’re not going to use the words “positive” and “negative” to train a language beginner. Mad is the common negative, and short, though some would teach the word “upset.” While the attribution was anthropomorphism (there’s no evidence cats feel guilt or embarrassment), it is quite possible Billi felt negatively at that moment. The 3rd “emotion” is “love you!”; while the behaviour is commonly referred to as love, to be technical, Billi is trained to use the “love” button to express attachment and trust - a commonly expressed feeling in cats, which are colonial animals. Third, if you watch back in history, you would see how slowly Billi’s vocabulary was built, from concrete actions/objects to (slightly) more complex concepts of location, time, affirmative versus negative responses, etc. Billi’s training involves operant conditioning, and follows a similar path to infant-to-toddler language acquisition. Surely, you are aware of this path being used to help marine animals communicate with us. Fourth, there are videos of Billi, as well as other animals, selecting a word with the owner not in the room, trying to draw the owner into the room for communication. As well, there are examples of responses that could go multiple ways. Billi also doesn’t always look up when composing phrases. These things eliminate is some cases, and at least reduce in others, observer expectancy effect. - METHODOLOGICAL ERRORS The pictures and words on the buttons are for the humans. Billi and other animals demonstrate understanding the oral word, and are usually trained to locate the pre-recorded word by position (some are taught with colour, but that is limiting without their understanding of shades). The location of buttons is recorded so it can be replicated when necessary, such as cleaning the carpet or when they moved residences to the one you saw (there’s a video where Billi keeps asking for a toy that was delayed in the move). Incidentally, they had to replace their system to the one you saw. If you had watched the history, you would have known that the original system used bigger buttons (the size of the “Billi” button you commented on) lined along the wall. The newer system allows more words and expansion. That large “Billi” button was a result of the owner liking the custom sticker someone had given her and not wanting to replace that button. As a behaviourist, surely you have studied behavioural research methodology which, in earlier learning, is usually taught by discussing the flawed methodologies of the past. Methodology improves with time, particularly our understanding of confounding factors. I mean, only in the past few years have we completely re-interpreted the Marshmallow test from the original assertion of delayed gratification to newer understanding of trust, this being the likely explanation for correlations to socioeconomic factors. You must have read the study of the Marine Biological Laboratory adapting the test to cuttlefish; I don’t read the Proceedings of the Royal Society (I rely on science reporting outside my field of human behaviour) but I would imagine it discussed the human experiments in the introduction to outline the premise, much like human behaviour studies reference preceding animal studies. Generally originals are always explained in the intro of adaptation studies in all science fields. Throughout the animal world, we have demonstrated that the old standard for animal intelligence testing was completely flawed - the response to human commands. We are discovering that it is likely more animals have sentience than we give them credit for - including marine life such as dolphins and whales. Cats are one of the animals which have been demonstrated to understand a human command, but chose not to follow it. Given our collective realisation of the intelligence of animals, is it really so far-fetched that an animal that can learn its own name and basic words like “food” and “outside” might be capable of further vocabulary?
I love how 90% of the comments are people saying "I've been watching Billi for a long period of time and truly believe she understands buttons and effectively communicates" and then this woman still answers the same skeptical opinions and can't change her mind even a bit
@@KPassionate If you're implying that Dr. Kendra (she's a vet, fyi) edits her videos to make Billi appear to be doing something she's not, then you owe her a big apology. She deliberately fast-forwards through the boring parts for time's sake, instead of just editing it out, so that people don't think she's just splicing together clips to make it look like a coherent conversation. It also lets people see her thought process and how long it can take her to get a full thought out. That's honesty, not trickery.
„I‘m trying. I‘m really trying, guys“… she says after watching 2 clips and giving statements about things she doesn‘t see or recognises. Like the fact that the cat was about to hop on the lap before she decided against it (hence the title of the vid) or the way the owner confirmed the meaning of what the buttons represent by pressing them in affirmation. You know… affirmation like animal trainers should give… like as in the occupation she said she has. Anyone who has ever had a dog or cat knows that they very easily know what trigger words like ‚treat‘ or ‚walkies‘ mean and how they react to those words, (not) to mention the noumerous papers on word association in animals like birds, dogs and cats, let alone the case of Koko, the gorilla that learned to communicate in sign language as far back as in the late 70s. Go ahead, google it. ;-) She‘s definately right about some bias being involved in here somewhere.
I’m not entirely sure you googled it…it was proven that Koko the gorilla could only understand words and about sentences and language. Animals can make word associations but most cannot understand language and string together words. Their brains are not made for it. They lack the gene needed. Sorry. Thanks for watching though
@@KPassionate Nicely strung together words you did there… almost like you understood what was being said! :-) Yet nothing you ‚said‘ did negate anything I stated. All you did, was casting doubt… just like in your vid. These days, that seems like more than enough to even make a living of, though ;-)
Wait… I get it now! I‘m soooooo sorry! How could I have been soooooooo stupid!!! She really thinks we think this is some Doctor Doolittle sh.. and the rest of the world thinks that all animals have debates behind her back in ‚the queen‘s tongue‘… which, of course, we do… Oooops
I honestly didn't believe the cat could "talk" using buttons , but I gave it a go. The videos usually last a few minutes. Whilst the cat can't speak , I firmly believe the cat has an awareness of what the outcome is by pressing certain buttons. Outside is one she presses then goes to the door before the owner reacts. The buttons are in the same place , but there are so many this can't be by luck , she goes to the same 6 or so buttons which aren't located together. Now there are 24 hours a day and we get a few minutes , there may be hundreds of presses and wrong meanings. However there are too many the cat gets right for it to be confirmation bias , the owner only pushes the buttons to make a sentence, enforcing the training. The cat isn't forced , it often presses the same button a walks around waiting , and presses the same button wanting that response . Fan toy is the popular one , the cat will press it and sit and wait and then play with the owner as if this is what the cat wanted.. I've ever seen the cat reiterate what the owner has said ,, the cat asked for something , the owner said later , the cat asked again and the owner said later , the cat did a lap of the room and presses later. Too many times I've seen too many correct responses. Even if its two or three times a day and the rest are fails. The cat definitely knows and is aware of certain buttons. On top of that what's not funny about a cat waiting for the owner , wait a bit longer , then press MAD two three times 😂 You need to watch lots of them. Even if I've been drawn into believing, I was sceptical but now I think there is something there. But even if there isn't, the cat is cute , she is an older cat and it's just nice to see her interacting , there is no magic to prove to be wrong , its a cat pressing buttons and often getting correct responses, than in itself is clever, my cats still look at my hand when I point and tell them to get a toy , so billi has more intellect than my cats 😂
You need to watch more of the videos, especially seeing how far she has come. The human genuinely isn't sure if she understands the words but she does use them in context. They are also currently participating in a study. I don'tt know if these specificvideoss wererecommendedd or if you selected them but there are better clips. Cats hissing and arched are more defensive/scared than angry. I can tell when my cats are pissed off and Billi displays it the same.
Until the study is published and peer reviewed it literally means nothing. There are thousands of studies every year that fail or go nowhere. The study has also raised several ethical questions that are addressed in this excellent article by Neuroscience News, which is one of the leading journals in the fields of cognition and communication. neurosciencenews.com/animal-communication-18280/
@@KPassionate Which the article use dogs as an exemple. Cats already use different vocalize they invent to "talk" with humans, sometimes even changing the meow depending of who they're asking stuff to. Between cats, only kittens mew to other cats, which means they did already formed a communication system based on vocalize for us when they don't use it themselves. The only others animal they do noise towards are birds, aka an other category of animals with humans using primary vocalize to communicate. And it's called chirping, not meowing, so you have an idea about how THAT sounds. The one big difference between cats and other animals cited is that they *already* adapts their way to communicate with us. Whatever is the result of the study, the fact is that using cats for once, knowing their *already established and proven particularities in communicating with humans* may actually bring better informations than using animals percieved as smart, social or dogs.
this chicks entire personality is larping as a marine biologist and literally shutting people down by saying “that’s not how science works sis” of VIEWERS WHO WATCH HER OWN CHANNEL. cringe, disliked.
Again, there are statements here that are simply not true. 1- The buttons ARE in fact taught by creating associations one by one, paired with actions. That's a very basic part of it which owners tend to show on their channels (based on the methods hungerforwords, the dog owner on that channel who started the whole thing is a speech therapist), with Billi you can see that for example when she teaches her "scratch". 2- The owners often say that the animals are confused or that they are not sure what they are saying. I've seen that with Billi too. Sure, they might make assumptions and have human biases, but saying it never happens simply isn't true. It really just feels like you want to sell people your own conclusions here, while ignoring the facts. Also, of course humans have biases and often project their own thoughts and feelings onto the animals, we see that with nearly any animal videos, buttons or no buttons. But just because the methods or thought process is flawed also doesn't really demonstrate that everything about it is wrong or meaningless. Most of these people aren't scientists, and this isn't some experiment conducted in a lab. Nearly no one approaches these videos like this. I tend to ignore the owner's own interpretation in these video and observe the animal instead. That's the interesting part. Just because there are flaws doesn't mean there's nothing to be learned from these videos. Most people watch these videos with the same approach. You can see it if you take the time to read the comment section. People would debate with each other, or would suggest for example, different possible (emphasis on "possible", obviously not stated as facts, it's a thought exercise) meanings for certain buttons being used, and the owner would sometimes even respond that that is an interesting option. Most of these owners openly talk about their own biases and there's usually a speculative approach to it all by both owners and viewers. You are forgetting that the owners learn by observation too. They are people going through a new and unfamiliar process. And making mistakes is also natural. No one is saying they know with certainty what the animal is trying to express at all times. The problem seems to be that you think people are convinced and claim something with certainty, but nearly no one is doing that. You asked the viewers what would convince them it isn't true, but nearly no one is claiming it is or isn't true. People usually watch these with a curious approach, observing and speculating, not stating much as some known facts. Also, again, there isn't much in this video or the previous one that teaches us anything new, except for fairly well-known definitions. Many people understand concepts such as confirmation bias, but that seems to be all you are basing your views on. As I've said in my comment on the previous video, I approach those animal speech buttons videos fairly objectively, but you seem to add less to the discussion in your videos than the average commenters there.
When Billi's owner refers to Billi's being "angry", she doesn't mean it in the extreme sense where the next thing the cat would do would be to scratch, bite, etc. She means Billi is "miffed", "annoyed". Notice that when Billi wants someone to pay attention to her button push, she wags her tail a lot. When she's miffed, she stops wagging.
Yes, the human pushes the buttons to confirm the buttons that Bili pushes, that she heard them. Your view of cat anger is a type of arousal usually involving fear and startlement, not anger as such. And by the way, your assumption that there’s no association is also a huge and unwarranted assumption: with the cat, the buttons have in fact been modelled over and over and over.
With the angry cat thing, her hears were pushed back showing annoyance/ anger. A terrified cat is fur puffed up on back and neck/ If you dont know cat behaviorism dont speak on it ://
In my biased humble opinion...and many years of experience...this is the ideas of someone who can't think outside the box...the box being what her education has told her is the way animals think...domestic animals have for a long time learned to understand us and communicate ...and we have sought to train and work these beings...there has to be more and this research is just the beginning..I maintain an open mind yet am able to analyze behaviors with both the animals and humans involved...I think we need to give this more time and research, but frankly we will be surprised...thankfully I don't listen to people like this..ever...but I have to read some of the comments left by people that watch this and am not impressed
I'm a child behaviorist with bcba/aba and what this cat is doing is the same thing children do when learning language- it's communicating. I work with non verbal children and this is how we teach them to start communicating. With toddlers, parents will know what they are trying to communicate. It may take several times to realize what they want. For instance a child may say "milk" and point to their belly. Or say "car..fast..no".... do they mean car isn't moving fast? Or they don't like when car goes fast? You have to continue trying to understand what they are wanting to say.
@@jrmckim I have experience with both non-verbal and verbal autistic children and adults and that is something I have sensed this in the interactions with the fluent pet and button animals...we are just beginning to understand and thankfully animals are smart enough to go along with our attempts to communicate
I have a couple of buttons for my cat. Specifically, “litter” and “all done”. I have one cat who definitely understands what they mean. If I put on her harness when she doesn’t want it, she’ll go to the other room to press “all done”. If I turn on the tap for her to watch, she’ll hit “all done” when she’s finished). The “litter” button gets used as a replacement for her just sitting in front of the litter box and yelling at me when she wants it scooped, which I appreciate.
@@Zowiezo101 but that's pretty much the definition of spoken communication. If I say food I get food. Thus "food" means food. If I say play someone might play with me. Thus "play" means play. Like, language at its core is just that. Understanding that a word "results" in something, associating "something" with that word, that IS understanding the meaning.
@@steviejonak448 I would advise against a treat button, because treats aren't something you ask for and get, it's something to be played around or trained with. Or, I guess I don't know how you use treats, but I wouldn't add it. My cat uses "play" + "food" for treats, which means we do a little game like toss the treat for her to chase, or give paw, or hide treat etc. Play is a really good word though, I recommend it :)
I think you are wrong about Billi. She takes her time and she is able to ask for particular toys, food, and people. she can’t put together entire sentences because she’s a cat - no surprise there. But she does associate that some buttons make certain things she wants to appear.
I agree. I didn't see her as changing her mind. I saw "cuddle" as "oops." Billi has used an "oops" button, too. The music/Hamilton video shows Billi does get what she's doing. I think in the first video it's not recognized that Kendra used buttons to reinforce use and meaning. Billi, after all, has a lot of buttons.
@@KPassionate i mean you are just speculating as well seeing as you are not doing a research experiment either or haven't watched all the videos. Basically you watched what at the most an hour of videos and that is being generous 🙃 😅 and then what edited your own video. You probably spent more time on your video than you actually spent researching the pet footage. So your speculating as well. Kinda ironic that the animals actually spent more time on the research than you a "professional " 🤣🤣
@@KPassionate did you research 🤔 on your own? Study more than one cat? I am following your lead in what u said in your video and basing my entire opinion of your research on your most popular videos 🤣 My point is that you really can't know can you from watching a few videos. Its definitely not accurate or scientific. I mean unless we are counting youtube scientists
A couple years ago, I told my 6 year old cat Lily a very specific command as a joke. We were upstairs and I said to her, "Lily, I have to go to downstairs in my office. If you need me, jump over the baby gate and meow or paw at the door." I kinda laughed as I walked away. About 1 hour later she was at the door downstairs meowing!!! Not a joke, she had never done that before, but I knew she was the only cat that knew how to jump over the gate. I was astonished and picked her up, petted her, gave her treats and called my wife to tell her how smart Lily is. Having said that, I think there is something to the buttons thing, however teaching them the buttons takes training. Perhaps testing with basic ones like food, petting, outside, water, litter is enough at 1st.
It happens, Billi also has an "Oops" button. There is another video called "Fantoy" where she wants to play with the Fantoy but gets frustrated not having a button for it at the time. She has one now.
How do you know she was frustrated? Because the owner told you she was!! Power of suggestion! What is the "oops" button supposed to indicate? A cst has no concept of "oops"!! I would have a far easier time with this if the buttons were all based on concepts that would be in a cats realm....things...nouns....toy, scritches, food....not ridiculous things like "oops" and "ummmm"
I get where you are coming from here with the having to create a sentence from the words that the cat is pushing. However, adults do the same thing with children and adults with communication difficulties. What is that difference there? Also we know that primates can use ASL to communicate so is it that far of a stretch to say that a cat or dog could be taught through operant conditioning to use buttons? The reason that the human pushes the buttons it to help the cat learn the meaning of the buttons but providing an example and when I looked into Bili and her use of the word MAD I learned that Bilis owner taught her the word mad by pushing it when she did things like telling Bili she had to wait for food or couldn't go outside or moving her from her lap which are things that I can tell make my cat mad and he doesn't even have any buttons. Animals feel emotions so why is it not possible to express them using buttons? They can learn so many other tricks so I just don't really get it?
Primates using ASL to form sentences has actually been disproven over and over in studies. They understand some words. But it was just humans putting meaning where there wasn’t any. I understand that the human thinks this is how training works but it is not. I am an expert in operant conditioning. I think it would be very beneficial for anyone with animals to research animal behavior. It’s also super fun! In my nerdy biology opinion anyway.
Exactly. Before the 1960s when William Stoke proved that ASL was a full and complete language, people assumed (erroneously) that it was just gibberish or *English* on the hands. Communication exists in multiple modalities... -signed a teacher of the Deaf
You see zero evidence because you decided to not really look. With the cat, it is a far more complex situation than you characterise it. For example you assume “no modelling” and you are just plain wrong about that. Also “it never happens in these videos” is also factually wrong. You cherrypicked the ones that amused or impressed the general public most - so what do you expect? As far as I am concerned it is very clear that the cat absolutely can associate specific items and events with specific words/buttons, and the jury is out on the rest. You do yourself as a scientist no credit with your sloppy
Ok I totally get the criticism about Bunny the dog that seems to just press buttons randomly and then the owner tries to make sentences with that but, I really don't have that feeling with Billi. Let me be clear, I am not saying that Billi has exactly the same concept behind the words as for us humans but I think that he kinda approaches some form of sense of language that lets him express what he wants.Also of course this is not a scientific experiment, just a overzealous owner with a lot of time that wants to littery have conversations with her a cat and therefore it would be a big stretch to say that this is evidence that we can learn cats how to talk. But I think Billi’s case would deserve a bit more attention and maybe an expert that would try actual tests to prove or disprove that Billi is understanding what he is doing. I don’t know, it feels to me that this video is super dismissive, like when the cat says he is mad and his ears are backwards with crazy eyes and you say that he doesn”t seem mad putting examples of super hungry cats to prove your point. So maybe that “mad” is a strong word in this case, but Billi seems kinda annoyed. So yeah “mad’ wouldn’t be the exact word but you're being fussy.
Great observation about the mad face. Anyone who spends more than a day with a cat learns those expressions. I don't understand the purpose of this video besides clicks and attention.
Again, it seems you're cherry picking videos, leading to a serious case of skepticism bias. If you had, say, watched a series of videos spanning a few weeks rather than just jumping around her page watching just "most popular" stuff, I suspect your opinion would be vastly different. It seems your overall opinion is that animals are dumb. I pity the ones you work with.
This is the fallacy of people who believe in this. You somehow equate language to being "more advanced" or more intelligent. Dogs and cats are incredibly smart and they don’t need language in their lives and that’s why they never evolved it. Evolution is not linear. We only evolve the skills that we need to pass on our genes. Just as humans didn’t evolve the complex olfactory senses of dogs and cats. Or how dolphins can’t smell at all. This doesn’t make one better than the other. Just different.
I guess you are not really familiar with cats? Because when a cat wants something, you definitely can't give them just anything and they will be happy with it. They are usually very specific about what they want!
I agree. I have cats and "just anything" definitely won't cut it. It's usually only one or two things that they want (and sometimes it's quite clear that one of them will accept scratches/pets for a while, but then resumes his demand for food).
To be honest, your assessment of the buttons is as unscientific as the viral videos themselves. You have not looked into the theory behind it, what the owners do and why, what methods they use to teach associations... And yet you completely deny pets can use buttons successfully to communicate things (which is not "speaking English", but it's still communication). Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of speculation and bias from owners, and treating pets as humans, but a few viral videos are far from representative of how this communication tool is being used; yet you are presenting your opinion on these videos as fact.
"Dogs has you as its pack leaders.....Cats have you as their SERVANTS."........... ........So Servant I dont know what those buttons you are pressing mean but FEED ME!
It’s not about the videos it about you throwing your credentials around as if that makes this any less of another person just giving an opinion by watching curated clips. You intro yourself as an expert and back nothing up with actual research specific to the animal your reviewing in an attempt to debunk. Then scoff at these people judgmentally as if your doing actual research. What you described is a cat in fear. That’s basic cat body language. Usually specifically if it feels scared or threatened not angry.
In all fairness, I think you're bias. If you watched the videos, she's come quite far and does express ideas. Maybe marine animals can't, or even most cats can't, but Billi can communicate Also she DID exactly what you mention with showing and reinforcing. The bottoms have changed over time. Also they have pictures on them. The human in the videos is a Vet. So she knows what she's doing
I'm a recent fan of BilliSpeaks in the sense that I discovered their channel about 2 weeks ago and I view their content as entertainment. I also genuinely think Billi and her owners have a great relationship. I suspect that's why this video of yours popped up on my feed. Personally I'm not a scientist so I'm not going to argue with that. If peer-reviewed and thoroughly vetted modern scientific research conclusively or near-conclusively determines a given thing, we can't really expect random youtuber #9,001 to just make an off-the-cuff armchair comment and suddenly debunk all of that. What I do think however is that you seem to have an agenda beyond merely disproving the "cats and dogs can speak with buttons" theory. It seems to me your beef is actually with fluentpet and other related companies that, in your words, "profit by taking advantage of people." This is a noble endeavor, that I agree with on principle. But shouldn't your time and effort be focused more towards fighting the cause instead of treating the symptom? Billispeaks and others might be contributing (albeit possibly unintentionally) towards the problem but they are NOT the problem. The problem is fluentpets, not the alleged fools they rope in. Less reacting to Billispeaks, more calling out Leo Trottier. Again, assuming your goal is altruistic.
Thanks for the feedback. My original goal was to empower people to have meaningful communication with their animals using scientifically proven and effective means. I. E. Learning to understand their pet better rather than trying to get them to accomplish an impossible task. I only found out about the corruption behind the company after doing research for the video. I will put a video about the unethical nature of the company on my list of videos to potentially make in the future! Thanks.
I think you just came into this video with a bias, otherwise I don't know where you're finding a hidden agenda. If you just listen to what this woman is saying, you'll find this is more common sense stuff than it is some super complex scientific phenomenon.
@@MrRichManGuy Declining to comment on the science is not the same thing as disagreeing with said science. I'm simply pointing out that a video discussing potential peer review of the alleged scientists behind fluentpets will do FAR more, both in terms of protecting gullible people AND also preserving scientific integrity of the field, than putting up a couple react videos debunking some pet owners.
@@Vamooso yes and I truly doubt you ever will see any peer reviewed research journal articles on this....same as there never was regarding Koko the gorilla...
The same problem with this as the dog video is that you are deliberately not watching the videos in which the actual training happens, you’re watching one or two videos, not from the beginning of their training or from more recent videos and assuming that you understand and know everything about that animal or their situation. You’re doing exactly what you claim that the owners are doing with their animals.
Perhaps you should communicate with the speech and language pathologist who originated the buttons, Bili's mom who is a veterinarian and the University that is working with Bunny's mom before drawing a firm conclusion.
My sister in law is a SLP professor at an area University (She has a doctorate and specializes in augmentative communication) and a few of her students have been working on training their dogs to do this
I was obviously unimpressed by Billi Speaks. However, I was completely blown away by the Navy's dolphin program. I interviewed one of their trainers here → ua-cam.com/video/sdFCZOIbh4A/v-deo.html
Your really not a good biologist huh I beat me a literal child knows more about animals than you 🤣
Why are you even talking about cats I mostly see you talking about aquatic mammals not cats and dogs lol
you really just linked this video... lol not the original video
Hi, do you make videos about "calming signals" with different animals? I Work with horses, and get to see how little people actually looks at their pets. They miss a lot of signals, wich often leads to animals "talking loud" with their bodylangage. And then gets misunderstood as dumb, aggressive and so on.
@@CICADA____ i see no reason why a marine biologist can't debunk "talking" cat claims . the real question is: why are such videos so popular?
So, a couple things worth pointing out. You were talking about pushing the button and showing the item or whatever to create association. This is how the training begins. You then expressed confusion at the owner pressing buttons. It's a repetition before the association, usually. In other words, if the cat presses the outside button, when you get a moment to do that thing, you press the button, then go outside, confirming the association. I would also point at the moments where I'm picking up expectation on the cat's part, after a button. That said, I haven't really got a clue how the abstract stuff comes in.
It's also worth noting that the animals are definitely not "learning English". They're learning uninformed relationships, only.
yeah the owner has to press the buttons or Billi would never be able to understand what associates with what buttons
Not true. Bunny most definitely knows the meaning of the word "is", which is why she was able to confirm the meaning of "dream" by making sure that "dream is night talk", and which is why sentences about "is" are the only sentences in which Bunny's word order is always correct.
I highly disagree that they are not “learning English”. I have two cats who perfectly understand what I’m saying and are able respond appropriately. But with cats it will be on their terms and in their own timing.
If I were to introduce the buttons in would be based on the long list of words they already know. But of course receptive and productive are two different things. You might know and understand a word in your second language but everytime you need it, you can’t think of it.
My cats are happy with the language we’ve come up with over the years.
Cat: Ears back, neck tight, tail lashes
Marine Biologist: that's not an angry cat.
Me: ... Well, maybe that's why she's a MARINE Biologist...
She's splitting hairs, because the cat was definitely peeved, which is a less intense version of anger.
Yeah it seemed like an odd point to make. The cat wasn’t extremely angry but definitely looked mildly irritated lol
Exactly my thoughts… by this logic a human can only be angry when they’re screaming and throwing punches
That was my thought too, maybe there's bias on the biologists part as well. 😉 Or at least they struggle with nuance - the cat isn't literally ANGRY as in raging out, but cats do have more subtle signs of annoyance/agitation much before they get to the point to where they're arching/clawing/hissing. Airplane ears, tail wiggles, and all of the other things you mentioned is like the cat version of rolling ones eyes, while the biologist is expecting kitty to be having a full blown melt down.
wait, shes a MARINE biologist and scoffing at Billi Speak videos judging them as far-fetched???
this woman is pretentious and only wants attention. I must definitely thank her for wasting my time.
I'm also a biologist and also a huge skeptic of owners when they anthropomorphize their pets. But that being said, there's something about Billi's button pushing that I suspect would satisfy any significance testing you'd like to throw at it. And, at 13, she's not a spring chicken so this isn't just a curious kitten investigating buttons. There's plethora videos of Billi reacting to noises (which she hates) or actually trying to formulate rudimentary expressions. Basically, this cat warrants further observations.
And last time you made your mind up after one video... To be fair, you didn't just pick one video this time, you seem to have picked 2. So, kudos on doubling the effort (insofaras watching 3 minutes of 2 videos can be classified as "effort") but maybe you could step outside of your preconceptions (read: refutation bias) and actually watch a few more before jumping to a conclusion?
Well said, thank you! :)
this right here super well put
Lolz did you get your biology degree from a cereal box. This cat just steps on buttons for attention as it makes the owner excited as a pig in shit.
@@etemytradel4509 yes. The cereal box is called UCSD. And the degree is called "Cellular Biology and Biochemistry". While my studies would have only given me a familiarity with BF Skinner, I also minored in Psychology. So that helped...
But since you asked for my CV, where did you get your degree?
I haven't tried ucsd cereal it must have lots of sugar as it has rotted your brain. Maybe you should take up a conversation with a cat or dog I'm way to smart for you.
While I think it’s hard for Billi to completely understand what the buttons mean and how to use it, I think she understands to some extent. There was one video where she accidentally hit a button with her hind leg while walking, and she turned around to press the “oops” button. If she really didn’t have ANY idea of what the buttons meant, she wouldn’t have pressed “oops” since she had no reason to. I think this video shows concrete proof that Billi understands she made a mistake, and turns around to press a button to tell her owner.
Link to the video: ua-cam.com/video/CENVRHdnMl4/v-deo.html
Honestly I understand where you’re coming from, people do extrapolate, but I am sure that you can’t 100% deny that Billi is capable of communication with her owner. It’s obvious she understands somewhat, and I don’t see how “impossible” it is for an animal to learn what a button means and how to use it. If animals can learn to come when called (they can learn their own name), or to perform tricks, then why can’t they learn a word and use it themselves?
THIS VIDEO EXACTLY is one that really further proves Billi DOES, at the very very least, have some understand of what the buttons mean.
But Billi also accidentally hit the same button twice in this vid as she walked away, and didn’t say oops so i dont rly think that means much
5:00 Cat owners know what an angry cat looks like and it IS this. Billi's not that angry, 'annoyed' would be more accurate. You go on and on about body language and behavioral cues, but you miss the dead giveaway of those ears rotated back. BEFORE the word 'anger' came onscreen, i looked at her and thought "welp now she's annoyed." Although sometimes cats ears will do this when not annoyed, more often than not whenever my cats did this it was because they were irritated
My cat does the same thing when I can't figure out what she wants 😂 They're very expressive, the cartoon anger poses are reserved for the post-vet cone adjustment period.
Yes, I thought that too. As if a cat only knows hissing and raised fur to express negative feelings. Bet she never spent time with a cat.
It’s obvious Billi used the mad button because there’s no button for her to express her irritation, only mad is available. She’s visibly annoyed
@@chocoearly I think the tendency to notice these emotions in cats: irritation, annoyed, mad, etc is because cats go out of their way to make it clear if they aren't pleased. Add to that the obvious fact that the cat IS trying to learn the use of the buttons to communicate deliberately repeating itself. I can almost believe that the cat is trying to teach the human what cats do to express displeasure (i.e. the tail flicking back and forth, the ears back) at he same time so the human will learn also.
There was a video where she was hissing at and visibly combative with another cat and then selected the "mad" button.
You need to watch the most recent and go backwards. Some are popular because of their titles but not the best example - Billi is learning and expanding her vocabulary- I’m a speech and language pathologist- I believe what is seen is her growing in understanding what these random sounds mean. B) Cats express things like annoyance and anger much more subtlety than the fierce often scared / defensive poses you call anger. C) my cats know not to eat or Harass my birds, miniature chickens, and even little chicks - while they try to hunt other birds. They can distinguish between the “owned birds” and the “wild birds.” 10:20 cats can discriminate much more subtly than you give credit to D) the human is a Zoo Keeper and there ARE videos about repetition and how and why buttons are taught and expanded on. Your lack of research and jumping to assumptions make me wonder how scientific you are E) can you really compare your knowledge of marine life to an animal like a cat? You don’t seem aware of the subtleties of feline expression. So how much expression does coral have? A parrot fish? Even a dolphin? I just could go on. And yes in the beginning I was dubious however - watching Billi run to the door when her owner comes home - greets her - and then deliberately crosses the room, picks her way over other buttons and very firmly pressed HELLO. Makes me feel, as a specialist in language acquisition,) that as I have seen for myself the owner spoke/modeled the use of “sound” we call the word Hello in English - Billi gets its use as a greeting. And as is natural expands her receptive vocabulary into an expressive one.
I doubt if I’ll ever watch another if your videos based on such random pseudo science you employed. If you are going to talk as a subject matter expert then research and become throughly knowledgeable of your subject. P.S. I’m not even a “cat” person but can tell when a cat is mad or frustrated- I don’t need to put it into the extreme expressions - and expressions most usually used by cats to communicate fear, dominance, ferocity to OTHER CATS. People for example can show annoyance through many subtle muscles in our face - they don’t need to yell at you. But I suppose mangrove snappers aren’t like that? Do you get scratched a lot by cats?
I am also a specialist on Bi-lingual language acquisition and use versus a deficit in the a brains ability to learn language or it’s nuances. Such as what we mean when we say idioms like the “ Judge threw the book at him.” And I see Billi learning and trying out language the way an English speaker might try Japanese.” Or an African language with clicking. Or Chinese when a words meaning can change simply depending on tone.
Ugh. I’ll stop but boy did you ever completely make up assumptions, did not look for a quantitive sample, watch the experiment’s timeline. I have made my own assumptions - it’s click hairy if you, not any kind of true reporting and I’m betting you know little about communication in advanced land mammals.
Forgive my typos everyone, typing with one finger on a small phone when I’m very tired. I was just so taken a back by the trash value of the video I just watched - I had to make my first negative comment to a UA-cam video.
I wish I could like your comment a million times. You've said what I wanted to say so much better than I could. Billi is amazing. There are so many more examples that she is really communicating and understands. I was pretty sure before watching this video that it would only express its makers confirmation bias. I hoped she'd be more open minded about Billi than Bunny. I, at least, have learned one thing, I never need to watch this channel again.
Great post, with great points, by someone qualified to make them! Thanks for taking the time to type that with 1 finger on a small phone while tired! (I can relate... I'm a 1-finger typer on a small tablet and unfortunately I'm almost always tired!) But anyway, yes, this woman didn't do any of her homework on Billi, Bunny, the research study, the training methods (she didn't even recognize modeling!) their marked progress, the way they begin to use words in new ways they weren't trained for (like Bunny's "big upstairs bird" = airplane), etc, etc. She thinks she already knows it all and we have nothing left to learn from animals on this subject, which is a very unscientific attitude, and she's condescending about it too. Why would I ever want to watch any of her other videos, if this is the way she approaches her subjects? I mean, what if it's a subject I don't already know a lot about and therefore didn't know any better than to take her word for it? She's doing the public a great disservice here, for profit... she knew the growing popularity of the talking buttons would equate to lots of clicks/views... but I bet they received a higher than average percentage of dislikes too! :P
BTW, I tried to have a discussion the other day with this marine biologist lady, and she told me to block her channel! LOL :P
@@TieDyeVikki showing her true colors then. I was already skeptical when she decided to choose from the most popular videos instead of the most recent. Not only is a more recent video more representative of Billi's capacity for understanding, I would not say most people are animal behavior/language acquisition experts and are more impressed by cute or funny videos than they are of Billi's understanding of language, not to mention that older videos with more views are more likely to be recommended to people who watch similar content. The first video she sampled was a very, very old one, Billi was more prone to mistakes earlier in his training, and this sets her expectations for the next video. She is overestimating her understanding of all life as an alleged expert in marine life. I highly doubt she is even going into this with the belief that animals understanding even rudimentary speech is possible, she has likely only worked with giving marine mammals commands.
Nope. Your cats are stupid.
love this marine biologist getting cat behavior wrong
lol you guys keep bringing up her being a marine biologist like you are ANY kind of expert in ANYTHING
Why did you only watch videos from the first year of her training? Her newer videos are much better. Billi is very deliberate with her words so it's much easier to know what she wants.
All I can say is, if that cat didn't look upset to you, I'm not sure you know cat body language.
for real. Gotta dislike this vid
She was super annoyed. It was also probably because of the noise in the background noise
You guys are nuts you stretch everything to fit your view of what’s happening
A cat doesn't need to be hissing or puffed to be angry... mines tail twitches when she's angry. I think these behaviorist are bringing their own bias and not considering different personalities and body language
Her tail was twitching HEAVILY!
Billie, Bunny, and around 700 other animals are enrolled in a study at the Comparative Cognition Lab at UC San Diego are numerous animals involved in the study . It all started when Christina Hunger, a speech language pathologist , decided to employ an AAC device , typically used by nonverbal people to communicate without speech.
These videos are just for entertainment , maybe you could look up a teaching video at the University to explain the protocols and procedures defined in the study.
My 14 year old cat doesn’t have buttons but clearly understands a large amount of English. I also believe Billi is purposely communicating and I have watched almost all of her videos.
What does "noise" "all done" mean then?
@@plursocksBilli knows a little English. She's not exactly a fluent English speaker
@@plursocksNoise stopped? Thats easy bruh
You said that you don't see the owner back up and say "Okay, the pet is confused" but Bili's owner does that constantly and waits for her to reassess- sometimes for tens of minutes in sped-up footage. It's also worth noting that while Bili's owner tries to hide her identity, she is clearly some sort of veterinarian with years of experience and a deep understanding of operant conditioning.
She might not be perfect, but dismissing her efforts as delusional after watching 3-5 minutes of videos she posted for views seems a little reductive.
She just hating cause she doesn't understand modeling words and the thought pattern with animals
I don't think you've watched enough Billi. That cat is a trip and I believe she understands a lot. Maybe not everything, but way more than you give her credit for. *Mad*
The only confirmation bias I see around here is coming from you, K.
Confirmation bias and Strawman fallacy.
I see your communication in the comments section here and I see your responses in the video itself, and it's pretty clear.
You have no idea what you're talking about because you're basing your opinion on very little information.
You evidently formed your own opinions in advance, and are busy looking for signs that support your theory, without giving any serious consideration to what you're actually watching (if you could even call it "watching", considering how often you're stopping the videos so that you can scoff and huff and puff).
The cat, for example, remembers the LOCATION of the buttons and that's how it knows what each button means. NOT based on the drawing or text on it or even the sound that it makes. If you'd have watched more videos you'd see how most of the time the cat doesn't even look at the buttons when pressing, and sometimes even presses on them using its hind legs while 'casually walking past', even though the meaning of the button pressed makes perfect sense within the context of the interaction. If the owner had moved the buttons around, it would cause a lot of confusion for the cat, and maybe thrown months or even years of training into the trash.
The owner can be seen TRAINING the cat in these videos by REINFORCING the use of the buttons by pressing on them and verbalizing them.
This is TRAINING and must be not much different than the sort of training you should be familiar with as a marine biologist (such as hand signals and vocal commands and whatnot).
This is training by association and repetition and it takes a lot of time.
No one said that these pets "learn language" or that they're capable of "constructing complex sentences" or that they're "pet philosophers". You're completely missing the point.
These buttons are simply a tool of communication for them, reinforced through months and years of training and repetition.
The intellect of these pets doesn't reach much higher than that of a 3yo toddler. But it's still very impressive.
Again: These buttons are TOOLS of COMMUNICATION. The pet learns their meaning by repetition and association.
It's nothing fancy, but also definitely nothing to scoff at.
Anyways, based on how you've interacted with other "negative" comments here, you're probably going to dismiss what I say with some pretentious hand-wavey response that supposedly shows how much better you are than me. I don't mind. I'm not here for my ego. I just had to get this off my chest because it is an insult to science to see the way you behave here.
Somebody had to say this to you.
Have a great week.
Thanks for watching!
Great post! And a predictable response! :)
💯💯💯💯💯💯👏 PERFECTLY SAID! @EitanBluminAfterHours
The one video I watched with the dad being gone and the cat keep asking for him seems pretty telling to me. To many coincidences to not be a pattern.
I think the point she's trying to make here is that cat's don't comprehend language and so these button presses are very basic learned behaviors rather than sophisticated communication. Personally I think she's being unrealistically harsh. Yes, point out that it's not what it seems but it feels like she's totally dismissing that the cats have any intention in pressing these buttons. I'm also less impressed by the "full sentence" button layouts because at that point it becomes superfluous and far too anthropomorphistic but having a handful of buttons with noun/verb associations can be good. "play", "litter", "food", those are all phrases I use myself to talk to my cats and they will talk back to me and get excited because they've already come to associate that term with the feeding right, so it's no different. She's pretty cynical in this video imo.
Billi's latest video is fascinating. Her mum is on a conference call and ignoring Billi so Billi selects the buttons "all done" and "TV." TV isn't a button she uses often and you see her actually sniffing the buttons and looking at them to try and find the one she wanted. Also the fact that she called her mum's laptop "TV" is absolutely impressive!
Complete nonsense. Definition of confirmation bias
@KPassionate have you actually watched the rest of her videos? Are you also aware that they are participating in a study to gather whether Billi actually understands or not? Her mum says herself she doesn't completely know if she is just pressing random buttons but the longer she carries on and the more words she uses, it is getting harder for her to stay cynical. Overall though Billi gets enrichment from this activity and this is what counts.
I'd love to see you on a video with Kendra so you can explain your definition bias to her in person while watching Billi use the buttons, rather than just spouting it here from one video or an explanation of a video. That would be a really good experiment and I'd love to see you elaborate more on your conclusion over more instances of Billi using the buttons. This is not a criticism, I'm just someone who likes thorough investigation and explanation.
@@MsWesty81 I have watched so many videos. They are all the same. I will be checking out the "study" once it is out but currently all of the extensive research on the topic backs me. And their study will do the same
@KPassionate can you give me a link to the research please as I'd be interested to read it? Thank you. Also which videos in particular have you watched as they all differ in my opinion.
[1] www.nature.com/articles/news.2009.1079
[2] bigthink.com/life/ape-sign-language/
[3] www.gesundheitsindustrie-bw.de/en/article/news/why-don-t-dogs-talk
These are just a few examples. I also strongly recommend this excellent article published in Neuroscience News, the leading journal in the fields of cognition and communication. It was written by Mélissa Berthet, a PhD researching Primatology, Bioacoustics, Semantics, and Animal linguistics.
neurosciencenews.com/animal-communication-18280/
Sorry, but I have to jump in here: I'm a Vet and a cat owner and these"airplane" ears are a definite expression of annoyance/ negative emotion/ anger. The pictures you showed depict scared and belligerent cats. Big difference.
WHAT?! Your "research" was ONE VIDEO?! Please get the phrase "scientific method" out of your mouth. You only watched ONE "talking dog" video, used it to generate the hypothesis that dogs can't use syntax and everyone is full of nothing but confirmation bias, and just... Called it a wrap and smugly made a video without testing your hypothesis? Um... If you don't see the irony, I think we need to take away the big words like confirmation bias until you're ready for them. We've all heard the Clever Hans lecture, so thank God we didn't get that, I guess
I didn’t do any research. The scientists in countless studies did. I linked one in the descriptions and many more in the comments. Happy reading
There’s not a single link to a peer reviewed study in her description. Not one. But the dolphin trainer keeps saying there is 🤔
@@KPassionate That's the problem. You didn't do any research and you base your opinion on "somebody said something about it and he is well know"... Somebody also said that the earth was flat and he was well know as well, do you belive everybody just because they are scientists ? According to you a scientist cannot be wrong ? Especially that with pets there is hundreds and thousands of studies that says everything and it's contrary almost every day. A cat for example can understand up to 10 words. A dog, more. A crow is as intelligent as a 7yo child. How do i know that ? Because i educate myself, i search because i am interested and i am not even a "marine specialist" or whatever. In any case it's nearly impossible that you are or ever will be a cat or a dog owner. One last thing, an opinion is based on a lot of points of view, yours is based on what, 2 at best ? It's like reacting on a mechanic video while you are a commercial for a tools brand...
Lmao scientific method? And now are these “researchers” applying it exactly?
This is a very unscientific analysis of something you’re claiming isn’t scientific.
I wouldn't have said Billi was angry, but she did look annoyed. With her ears back like that, she was either annoyed or there was a sound behind her that caught her attention.
Right, cats arch their back and hiss when they are deeply threatened. I've seen my cat do that maybe once. When he is just irritated with me he might cry. There is a difference between mild irritation and utter rage.
@@vetavelveeta absolutely! And her trying to say that hissing and arched back is the only way a cat shows they're angry is deeply disengenous
As someone who has taught my dog to use talking buttons I would like to remark specifically on your comment about the videos just being of animals hitting a bunch of buttons on a board and that if we wanted to teach our animals that a specific button had specific meaning we would place that button next to its meaning. I get that you are responding to random videos that followers told you to watch so just so you know.. there are days and days and weeks of a single button next to its intended purpose before an animal gets a board. We started by modeling potty by the front door and each individual button has been introduced on its own before being added to a board which grows over time. As far as humans having to read into what the animal wants based on the button pressing.. what would you have us do..? When a two year old strings a group of words together you have to figure it out as best you can right? From what I understand dogs specifically have the equivalent mind of about a two year old. If the plan is to give them a different way of communicating to accompany the non verbal communication they already show then should we just ignore them unless they string together a perfect and complete sentence..? Would that help a 2 year old human learn? It’s been proven scientifically through MRI scans of dogs brains that they experience similar emotions to humans, you’ve said yourself that they are smart so I don’t see why it’s such a leap to attempt to communicate with them in a different way than just reading their body language. Also in your first video where bunny pushes “hungry” after eating. By your logic I should give my dog food every time he begs but anyone who studies dog behavior knows that a dog will continue begging for food long past the point of being full bc evolution has ingrained in them from years of hunting and only eating once a day and then not for several at times that they should eat at any given opportunity for survival not just when they are hungry. Sometimes what they want and what they need are different things unfortunately. I would love to give my 15lb dog as many treats as he wants whenever he wants but you know.. obesity.. So yes, they can press what they want all day but it doesn’t always get them what they want. Also, no one knows their specific pet better than their owner. I may not be able to tell you how someone else’s pet shows anger or sadness or not wanting to be bothered unless it’s super obvious like you said hissing or nipping but I can tell you what you can do to avoid those things with my specific dog. Yes all animals have a non verbal way of communicating but not all animals are the same.
Having followed this channel for months now and watched close to all the videos, I can say that this cat can and does use the buttons to communicate. The videos show progression over more than a year during which time the cat becomes more capable with the buttons. The owner is a vet, working for a zoo. My specialty is child development. The cat is using the buttons at a level equivalent to an 18 month to 2 yr old child. Therefore, you will see mostly short, one or two button, sequences. They primarily express the cat's wishes - generally food or playtime. As with child/adult communication, plenty must be interpolated by the owner. I have seen as many as five button sequences, but these are rare. The cat seems able to put buttons together to express a concept she does not have a button for. Again, not a daily occurrance. The cat remains a cat. Therefore, frequent occasions of manipulation (offering cuddle and then quickly changing to food) which is not surprising to those who know cats. Is the cat's thinking equivalent to that of the toddler? Probably not. But I find it clear that some cats are capable, given the tools, of fairly complex communication.
I am immensely skeptical about this - putting words together to formulate meaning is an extremely difficult thing to do even for small humans. All we are seeing in these videos are the moments that make us think there is deeper meaning behind what the cat was pressing.
For example "where before?" as from the video has so many concepts in itself that we should wonder why other cats didnt start writing down their thoughts and let us buy their philosophy books.
First of all: Its in relation to what the cat was "thinking" that the owner took a long time. The concept of time and time passing might be an easy one but that is then combined with the concept of "making someone wait" or "having something else to do" - now that means the cat doesnt just "ask" (another concept that is by the way inherently human - understanding that someone can give you information by asking them) why it has to wait in the sense of "why do I need to wait when I call you" - no its asking for the particular reason for a situation that is gone already.
Or lets assume just for a second that the cat associates the buttons with good things and ask ourselves if this could explain the cats behaviour better. Such associations could be attention, food, play example. It presses them randomly to get something out of it because it learned that pressing buttons will do something. It will probably learn aswell that just pressing the food button doesnt give the cat more food - it has to press various buttons to get something and usually the more buttons it presses the better will be the reward.
Another thing that is kind of interesting is how we are anthropomorphizing the communication between cat and owner. The cat presses a button and looks at the owner like its deeply listening to its owner and what they have to say. Why though? Why would it care about why the owner was late and what it was doing - those concepts dont make sense from a cats point of view and frankly even children dont do this until they are older. What if the cat just looks at their owner because it wants something - something that makes sense in the cats world like pets, food, play.
animals can recognize "words" "sounds" and associate them with a things and object based meanings and feelings. like "food", "treat", "walk" "their name" the names of family etc. it doesnt mean that this animal "knows the brittanic definition of the word" but recognizes the associated noise with meaning, they can even recognize tone and emotion. i think its equally incredulously biased to think that animals CANT percieve words and associate them with things. surely they are not on parr with us and our linguistic capabilities BUT they do have rudimentary communicative abilities. so much so that cats and dogs from different regions and linguistic human cultures cannot understand commands given in foreign languages. also im so pissed that she said "this cat isnt angry" there are different levels of "anger" and the cat doesnt know/have a word for "frustrated" or "irritated" so billie uses "mad". emotion is a complex spectrum in which they can conflict and coincide. when you get mad you have levels. you dont start at hackles raised teeth bared... even psychologically stable HUMANS dont start out at 100% aggression. it builds. i can be absolutely mad at an asshole who dinged my car and drove off or mad that i dropped a perfectly uneaten peeled banana but am i going to come out fists raised teeth clentched and scream like a maniac in fight or flight? NO. because thats not how anger works. also you can be angry and sad. angry and scared. angry but motivated. there is no one default expression of anger. weve even shown that dogs EVOLVED to mirror our expressions to better imprint on us as we domesticated them.
post edit: also its amazing if you research how a dogs facial muscles evolved/were selected to be able to nonverbally communicate with us
Wow. You and I have similar backgrounds! And came to identical conclusions - but yours was well written and professional. Thank you.
Derp I saw videos online and can confirm hard science from it derp....you, that's you.
@@geelee1977 your scientific claim to provide hard science is to say derp twice and tell us you’ve watched videos? 👏🏼... 👏🏼... 👏🏼…. 👍🏼 😂
Honestly, it sounds like KPassionate is bias and a bit proud of her professional skills in working with animals. Giving animals buttons is another form of communication and isn't hurting anyone. Simply saying it's just button mashing and confirmation bias is discounting the intelligence of other animals. KPassionate also seems to be a bit condensing and harsh with her judgement.
I do say multiple times that if you want to spend money on buttons then feel free. Just know that they don’t work as advertised. And there are many better ways to communicate with your pets.
@@KPassionate I think issue I'm seeing here is that you're dismissive of the idea that companion animals can communicate with the buttons. The buttons don't take away from body language, and verbal communication. Learning to use the buttons to communicate takes time and consistency, just least learning a second language does for humans. Making mistakes is part of the learning process. It appears that you're simply laughing at it and dismissing the possibility that they could be understanding that the buttons are a form of communication. The first person to teach their dog to use the buttons is a speech therapist who saw similarities in the way her puppy was communicating and the way non-verbal children communicate. Further research is needed to determine how much they understand, but you don't seem to be open to it.
@@Jamie-813 the research has been done and companion animals can’t string together words to form meaning. A study on one border collie showed he could learn more than a thousand words! Super cool stuff, but he was never consistently successful in stringing together words to form meaning. That is with years of training from professional animal trainers. The buttons could be used if you had one for outside or something like that. But the people in these videos are either intentionally misleading people for money, or simply not educated about animal training, biology, and communication. I am dismissive of the videos because every one I have ever seen is utter nonsense and the science is clear. However, I do wish I hadn’t been so rude in the video. So that feedback is valuable and I have incorporated it into subsequent content. Thanks!
Billee's mom does train her on each button. There are videos showing how she introduces new buttons to the cat. And, yes, there are times when Billie is confused.
This person may have never seen a cat before, lol she's used to marine mammals.
Are you suggesting cats are more able to understand language than dolphins?
No. We’re saying stay in your lane. Stick with what you know. You know marine biology. Good for you.
I’m an animal behavior expert. 😂
You obviously don't know cat body language as many commenters have pointed out. When you have to brag about your so called expertise, it just makes you look foolish and arrogant.
"OMG the animals are not constructing full sentences, this is a failure, shut it down." More cherry picking and another biased review. Maybe you are deflecting because this goes against what you were taught in college and on the job, which I saw a lot during my studies. Students and professors refusing to give up on old theories. After watching 30 hours of these types of videos, I believe the animals are actually communicating.
The example of the "angry cat" is really just an annoyed cat, and doesn't disprove the cat being mad, because mad could be annoyed or angry. These buttons group words together to make them easier to learn, and you as a human have to unbox their meaning. Animals are not going to construct full sentences, communication can be simplified, which is partly how we read body language. Sure, you can just read body language, but that doesn't limit other forms of communication.
Thanks for watching!
Cats are one of the only animals that has developed sounds ONLY for human communication. Cats don't meow at each other yet cats have been shown to produce over 30+ different meows only used towards humans.
correction, cats DO meow at each other, very often in fact
Yeah cats do actually meow at each other sometimes
Correction they actually don't. Kittens meow at older cats but mature cats DONT meoooww at each other. Fkn use ya stumpy lil fingers and google it lol
@@matschrepf The only cat I ever had that meow to other is my actual one.
Who is disabled and will fall trying to communicate normally (as the tail is also used in the balance he is lacking XD) (the balance, not the tail. Don't cut animal body part unless it's neutering or life/death situation for them)
@@matschrepf YES THEY DO!
Many of us have seen cats fighting or about to and they are extremely vocal.
They also make a number of little noises to communicate as well, Mostly to show intention.
Sorry, but being a behaviour expert and saying a cat needs to have a high back/puffed out fur as the only way to communicate as angry is very surprising.
Billie turned her ears back. It was very clear she was irritated. The human putting "angry" there is logical.
A cat only pulls out the high back when she feels endangered and/or truly furious (it tries to intimidated by looking bigger, to seem less like an easy prey).
You're very, very biased. I'm aware of the bias theories and have done peer reviewed researches using the scientific method. What you're doing here isn't it.
Also, you're association argument: the animals already learned what buttons are associated with what action. The video's you've shown are every day use video's, not training video's.
Sorry to disagree with you. Thanks for watching!
She did this in the dog video, too. She said dogs only wag their tails if they’re happy. Oh, Patricia McConnell would have some words with this dolphin trainer!
@@CamiloAcosta1 def didn’t say that 😂
@@KPassionate I think "angry" was the wrong word to use. "Highly annoyed and disapproving" would be more accurate.
im starting to question her status as a "scientist" too. there have been too many mistakes in such small parts regarding the genetics that throws up red flag. What was your ph.D topic about and how many publications & citations have you got? what is your publication list?
The training videos show how the associations are made between the button word and the concept. The Instagram videos are for viewer entertainment not to train or show what the words mean. I agree that you showed examples of confirmation bias, but I don't agree with your overall assessment. I think you have to watch over a period of time to get that each critter develops their own use of words with their people. I don't see why it's so difficult to believe. I mean are you also suggesting that Koko the gorilla was unable to sign? Any pet owner knows that their pets learn some English words. You say "leash" and the dog grabs the leash, you say "sit" and the dog sits. Why wouldn't the inverse be true? Why is it such a stretch that a dog might press a "walk" button rather than grabbing the leash and dragging it out to the living room and barking? For example, my rabbit reversed Pavlov on me and trained me to feed him when he rings a bell. I started feeding him because I assumed he was hungry when I heard it and he started ringing the darn thing at 5am every morning. Is there such a difference between him ringing a bell and pressing a "food" button? If you really want to disprove this phenomenon, try teaching an animal to use speech buttons. See what happens if you provide something other than what they request. Most of the animals on these social media channels respond by going back and repeatedly pressing the button for the item they wanted or by pressing a negative emotion button like "mad."
@KPassionate I know you are busy but I agree here that you should try to teach a cat to use buttons and see what happens when you present them with a different item then asked for. And if you aren't able too maybe you have some colleges that would be interested in doing the experiment applying the scientific method. We know animals are intelligent and I myself wish I had a meow translator so I could tell exactly what my kitten wants. He is a munchkin and because it's hard for him to get up and down the bed we give him elevator rides. But sometimes his meow didn't mean he wanted down and we feel bad while he struggles to pull himself back up. It would be nice if he could tell me by pressing a button so if he didn't press it and was meowing then I would know it was something else he wanted. I hope that if you are unable to conduct an experiment to prove the button pressing true or false that someone in the scientific community will see this and do so. They would gain some fame maybe even some television appearances no matter the outcome. And then we call all stop arguing if it's true or not. I do agree that there is no way the dog is forming complex sentences and the owner is reaching. But I think cats are smarter than dogs so of course I would think that.
I couldn't have said it better myself
"You are goddamn right"
Haha they wouldn’t dare actually respond to a reasonable criticism.
@@buddybearcslv cat button training is a perfect animal behavior graduate student research proposal. However, to have a rigorous study, the researcher would need a healthy sample population of cats of different breeds/ages to not only test skill uptake, but to also serve as a control - eg. To only use word intonation and vary the words to see if it's the tone or the words the cat understands. Animal behavior is a tricky science to prove data, so I understand why KPassion has doubts about the talking buttons being used to convey complex ideas and emotions.
@@buddybearcslv these studies have been done. Look them up. Even the CIA tried it. It doesn't work.
Just because someone revived a dead thing from 70 years ago and claims it works doesn't mean no one ever tried before. It didn't work then and doesn't work now.
Arched back, hissing and puffed-up hair are signs of a scared cat, not an angry one.
While some bias is most likely present in the talking pets' owner's perspective, here it seems there is a case of skepticism bias.
To follow the scientific method properly, you need to let go of biases not only for the theory but also against it.
Hard agree. You can see the bias is in effect in how she only watched two videos and reacted to seconds at a time without waiting to see how any incident played out. She said that ears back with wide eyes is not "mad" when anyone who's ever had a cat knows that ears back is the first sign that you need to stop what you are doing if you don't want to get scratched or bitten. I've definitely been bitten after ignoring ears back and tail thumping, but I've never made a cat arch it's back or raise it's fur---because I'm not an abusive piece of shit, as being abusive is what it would take to incite that behavior.
Do I think that Billi's mom is always correct in her interpretation of the buttons Billi presses? No! Do I think that the buttons are only being used as a means to an end by Billi? Well, she often does use the buttons this way, but sometimes she just will summarize what had just happened. I guess the argument is that she's just wanting attention when she uses the buttons that way. I guess maybe? But you can really say the same for a lot of human utterances. Even art created by humans could be argued as something done for attention.
IDK, this really rubs me the wrong way...the editing--music choices, the choice of clips...you can really see a contrast when you compare it with her video on otter intelligence. When she talks about her success training otters and how smart they are, there's uplifting music. Getting into the trainer's pockets is touted as a sign of intelligence but it's probably just that the otter has seen the trainer take treats out of that pocket hundreds of times before. It would be more convincing if she used the same skepticism as she did with Billi, sarcastically saying, "maaayyyybee the otters I train are smart, or maybe they just know that if they do the behaviors I want, they get food!" But she won't do that, because in doing so she would be attacking her own profession and pointing out how meaningless it arguably is. I'm playing devils advocate, I don't think otters are stupid or that all work with marine animals is useless, but I think being able to understand one's pet better would be more useful to the vast majority of people.
Yeah, tail swish is mad. Hissing is scared.
@@AriKitae Yeah. I don't think it's 'speech' as humans use it. But I think it's more interesting how the button use has progressed over time...an evolution of how this cat and this owner communicate. And for pure entertainment value MAD & Billi 4th wall breaks are hilarious.
@@acatnamedm4529 I have absolutely no problem with anyone saying the word buttons aren't language or that the scientific method isn't in place here. Kendra isn't claiming either of these things. I have a problem with KPassionate pretending that Billi isn't attempting to communicate with Kendra.
Agreed, I spotted the bias from the reactor before she even played the first video. But she is just human. Not perfect like a cat. 😁
Just crossing over to this video from the other video from your comment. As someone whose career it includes a whole lot of sitting down and reading rather biased and often low quality research papers (even at journals and conferences!) to sift through the crap and debias the authors' intents from the actual results themselves -- it's hard for me to absorb the arguments made here. There's a lot of logical fallacies here, including appeal to possibility/probability.
There's also a lot of bias and it seems pretty clear that you already have made up your mind on a topic before approaching it, because the evidence presented is already interpreted through that entropy-collapsed lense of personal bias (which is a huge red flag to me in any paper/presentation -- I need data, not personal beliefs). I hope this doesn't feel like an attack or deep personal criticism from what it may feel like the other video was doing -- but it is a stern statement of discomfort in terms of methodology and approach, and I'm doing a much lighter job of sugarcoating it than I usually do. I came here hoping for a video that was a little more neutral in terms of looking at the evidence (Todd Grande comes to mind stylistically), and I think I see myself honestly watching videos in the future that you could make on this, so there's some personal selfish gain for me to be had in potentially moving the needle with how neutral your presentations may or may not be. That's one personal bias on my side, and I hope to check in in the future and see some more scientific detachment from these issue in those videos (and I think that much of your audience could too!)
In any case, back to the matter at hand -- I think good discussion on both sides is helpful, but this is a pretty biased perspective I think that doesn't keep the benefit of the doubt in mind, and thus I think creates a separate camp disjoint from the people with observational biases with these pets (and that does little to answer the underlying question).
We have good tools for debiasing these things, and I think if we're making arguments that this is just attention-mediated behavior, then I think putting it forward as a hypothesis rather than a one-and-done "here's the solution" video helps expand the argument a bit better. I just get frustrated watching this because I think we can do better, if we're scientists, let's please present our information in a scientific manner.
Best of care --
FB&co.
Thank you
>'you already have made up your mind on a topic before approaching it'
I totally agree with that point. TS says she tried but it's clear she didn't bother.
The whole point in her video was that buttons are not needed and that they are pressed randomly, even though in comments she agrees that some buttons (1-5) can be used for mutual understanding and the animal can actually understand what happens after they press them. Okay, so why not let the pet learn something? And if you can push it to ten or more buttons, why not? Yes, sure these 'animal parents' read the signs wrongly and read too much, but, well, TS does the same (but she doesn't understand hoomans, which is less understandable).
For example. Billi is *angry*. It's obvious, that this word is used just for meme. People make content for others to watch and to have fun. Obviously, they use memetic words and constructions. Also, the button 'mad' is used as the opposite of 'happy' (if one watches the beginning of Billi's training, it is quite obvious to see), as the animal does not need many complex emotions, it needs one to describe happiness and one to say that something is not ok. So the system of buttons is actually done so pets wouldn't need to construct difficult sentences. And that's exactly what we see there.
Also, these pets do not use complex words much, but there IS difference for them, how you respond for their need. I don't know about dogs, but if your cat wants to cuddle and you start playing with it, it wil reject you indignantly. I am astonished that 'behavior scientist' will say that it doesn't matter for them. It's just strange.
So, honestly, I am disappointed in this 'scientist', she's just hyping here imo.
Lol she ignored your comment but liked and commented on everything else 😆
@@mintgardener To be fair, it is some solid criticism from me, and I've been in a similar position on the other side of the table so I can empathize.
I think something here in this whole conversation has hit a personal nerve for the author and it's causing a fair bit of suffering (once again as someone who's been through this loop too), so there's loop of needing to make another thing to prove and show that the thing being attacked really is true, and so on and so on into infinity.
I don't think it's anything too terribly wrong just the ideological equivalent of the cold or the flu. Every single one of us gets our whole core humanity, personhood, and etc wrapped up in one issue or another at some point. So who might I be to judge that, haha. But I think the eternal traintrack run from criticism could be de-scarified by slowly dismantling that foundation of self that gets threatened by criticism.
Once again I'm incredibly verbose but that's just how I talk, haha. Thanks for your comment, it was validating and I greatly appreciated it. Much love and hopefully not foul to anyone involved here, ❤️🥰🤗😍☺️😮🦢🦆😁👍,
Best of care --
F.B.&co.
@@fernbear3950 I get hundreds of comments and can’t possibly respond to them all. I made the cat button video simply because it was requested several times. It was actually very painful to sit through so not really done for pleasure lol.
I have put together all of my experience in animal behavior and behavior modification and done research into the topic. Based on what I have found these dog buttons in the way they portray them in these videos is fantasy. If you believe something else that is of course fine.
Cheers
@@cassiereno114 Very good point, thanks for sharing that. 👍
Those of us who have followed Billi over the years have seen how her communication has actually developed over time. when you watch it daily you see that she is communicating with more precision than what you seem to be finding. Your skepticism can't counteract the interactions I've observed daily for over a year.
The definition of confirmation bias
@@KPassionate Ok, but at this point no one can be right. I agree partially with you, but I think you also have strong bias. To be a scientific hypothesis, you need to accept that it could be wrong. There is clearly a lack of studies about it. If someone show you something you just always say it's a confirmation bias which is hard to argue against because you cannot be proved wrong because in your point a view : everyone that think differently is in denial and its always a confirmation bias even if other behavorial specialist, speech pathologist or a vet says something different. I am a biologist myself and I am fully aware of the confirmation bias and other bias. I see some animals as the same intelligence level as some very young child (numbers of studies show problem solving skills of monkey, cats, dogs, crows compared to humans and they can do sometime as good as some child) which can give me anthropomorphic bias.. but I can argue that some of my esteem collegues have another very old bias common in biology, the opposite of anthropomorphizing which was vastly present in biology research like for a while researchers thought babies cant feel pain, non-human vertebrates cant feel pain, dogs cant feel love (they have oxytocin too), animals cant do probem solving or learn, aniamals cant use tools to do things or solve their problems and basically thinking animals are far more further that us that they really are. Bias are everwhere!!. Basically, it's like both side refuse to hear or accept the other side and tell the other one they are in denial and have confirmation bias. Exemple : you see a video of the cat making no sense : confirmation bias on your part too because it confirms what you already think, but do you remember the number of times toddlers makes non sense and we have to do extrapolation or the time of the video or if it's a recent one where billi is not very good and making more mistakes? or if it"s a new button arrives that he doesnt know and has to learn what it means ? Also, in Neuroscience news, they say rat can press a lever without actually understanding that it is a word or understanding the word... Very young children may not not know that and human's learning is strongly attached to association and behavorial link (If I do or say this, then this happen)... The thing is pets (dogs, cats, birds) can differentiate words like their names from others words. Dogs knows commands even from other people and to the disctinction from other words if they are listening and knows when we do "baby talk by example" we are trying to communicate with them. Why not words like walk or food from a button and then expressing the need for food or water by pressing the button that said that word. We know that if some word are too close to each other, they have trouble understand it in a command but not if they are rellat distinctive! Even bees can learn and likes to play! Bias are everwhere and discerning the truth from what we think it should be or our perception is really hard!! I dont have the time to link all the studies but they are pretty mainstream in biology world (I learned them in the first year..)! I also agree with you that some dogs owners or cat owners are extrapolating way too much for sentences that I dont think the cat or the dog understand and some words are really complex to learn. Sorry for my english, french is my first language... Also, you mixed the "mad, ready to attack", "scared" and "frustrated' behavior in cats.. Also, you are not a specialist in language from animals, its far more complex than juste one gene and the discovery (2001) is pretty recent. There is a lot we dont know so it's better to be careful (what are the other genes ? are non-human animals have them ? How they relate to understand word, expressing them, intelligence ?)... Also FOXP2 is linked to speech and not necessarily to understanding (even tho in human some mutations of it is linked to low IQ and difficulty to understand) but it does not mean that having few in the genome, or every mutations means no understanding of verbal words... www.embopress.org/doi/full/10.15252/embr.201847618?cookieSet=1 www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0959438805001546 www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1364661303001049
@@esbeelavallee2568 I think you are misunderstanding scientific principles. When you perform a test on a hypothesis you are not testing to check if your hypothesis was wrong or right your checking to test if it was supported or not supported. As of now there have been no scientific experiments that remove the potential confounding variables like body language from owners, as an example a cat may learn ohh when I stomp on the buttons my human looks happy, lets step on these buttons to get more positive attention. As such we must use previous research as was done on chimps and gorillas to inform ourselves. We can state the current literature on animal’s understanding of human language does not support the notion that animals can process human language past associations with single words. With this knowledge in mind we can state that until research shows otherwise we can not conclude this cat is processing language and using it in multi word sentences. Science is not about making hard statements like this is wrong or this right, but about creating theories and building off previous research. What the person who made the video is trying to say is that these “experiments” are not valid evidence to support the notion that they really understand what the words on the buttons mean. As a biologist you should know that we make inferences based on previous research, does Clever Hans the horse or KoKo the gorilla ring any bells. The research has been done this is just round 4 of trying to teach animals language, and guess what this is not even a real science experiment.
@@KPassionate the irony is so rich, noone has the definitive answer to this question yet, you assert your position is correct. *cough* *cough* isnt there a term for this? 🤔
@@KPassionate which is what you have, as well. More studies need to be completed. When you say "there is nothing here. Like NOTHING here" That is confirmation basis. The cat is clearly communicating something. Perhaps the owners interpretration is wrong, but that doesn't negate the possibility that something COULD be there. I think we need to see more of this.
I think everyone who watches animals use word buttons understands that there is possible confirmation bias, but also can't completely rule out the possibility of the sequence of buttons having at least some meaning.
"Dream is night talk."
"Bunny is dog."
"Oops."
There are many instances of direct PROOF, including proof of the word "is".
What you described as a cat being angry is NOT what a cat is like when they’re angry. Upset behavior in cats is presented with ears pulled back, tail flicking, sometimes they’ll vocalize or growl. What you’re describing is a cat who is experiencing pain or fear and is lashing out in aggression. It’s kind of obvious you just googled angry cat behavior because I got the exact same description you mentioned from just googling it. Just because you’re a marine biologist, doesn’t mean you understand domestic animal behavior. Look, it’s fine to be skeptical about this because it seems like there needs to be research into it. I’m not going to dismiss it outright until we have more evidence. As a fellow scientist you should be open to the possibility there’s something more going on. It seems like maybe you should check your own biases. This is classic Dunning-Kruger.
That's an annoyed cat, that's what they look like.
After watching this video, my conclusion is that you really are not a cat behaviour expert.
A cat behavior expert isn’t a scientist, so.
I have watched a lot of Billi. Over time the communication has developed. The first video wasn't meant as a demonstration of great communication between them, it was a cats are moody/selfish joke. So you really only watched 1 video about the concept. Cuddle is actually something that Billi shows as wanting, I think that was the prompt for the video's meme title.
Her owners model the behaviour, and press the buttons when communicating too. That makes sense.
The notations are coming from the owners knowledge of their pet, in this case "anger" might have been a bit hyperbolic, but not so much. This isn't a documentary, it's a record of their journey.
There have been many where there have been very contextual button presses.
I was very sceptic early on, but over time there has been progression and depth in Billi's communication.
There are videos where there is confusion on both parts, as you would expect at times.
I don't think the animals are learning "to speak english" per se. But they are learning to communicate in a way that allows for more clarity as they learning to associate different buttons with different concepts.
And Billi's owner is a veterinarian. She is not ignorant of animal behaviours. She doesn't make outlandish claims. If you read the about page on their website she acknowledges that they don't know the full depth of comprehension and meaning being achieved and that research is ongoing and not conclusive. It was also something started without any firm goals. They tried it out and it seems to be working.
I wouldn't agree that the most popular videos are the ones that "most represent their case" because the most popular videos are short and funny, they'e not about "proving" anything. Bunny's human mentioned that the full video data gets sent to the research team they work with, although I don't think their conclusions would change people's interest either way. Christina Hunger, who pioneered the buttons with her dog Stella, emphasizes that the goal is better communication, even if you don't use buttons - paying to how they're already communicating with us.
There is one episode where the cat presses the “love you” and then gives the slow blink. I don’t know if that was just awesome timing or what.
I'm a child behaviorist and early education teacher and what you said about "recreating the words to make a sentence" is exactly how children learn language. I've worked with many non-verbal children and this is how they communicate.
I'm not saying that this animals are speaking a language... only that they are communicating.
Some children may say "car.. fast." or "milk" and point to their belly. They aren't creating sentences but they are communicating.
I've actually used similar buttons to work with my non-verbal students.
Human brains are structured differently than dog brains
@@KPassionate just curious, what goes on in the human brain from a neurobiological level when humans speak? Can you answer me that? What brain regions are involved and what do they do?
@@alisaforster28691 cerebrum, broca’s area, Arcuate fasciculus, Wernicke’s area to name a few. Ranging from hearing to arranging thoughts into organized sentences. Why?
@@KPassionate to make sure you put in the effort to research the statements you make properly and reason properly in your argument.
You did not answer the questions:
What goes on in the human brain on a neurlogical level when they speak (describe the current model) and what do the involved brain regions do?
@@KPassionate both humans and animals learn by cause and effect and have conditioned reflexes and learnt behaviour. Humans dont work that differently then other animals.
We can also say a lot of the things people do are instinct that our brain convinces us it is not.
Free will might also be an illusion and our actions are just a creation of our genes, hormones, enviroments and experiences. Just like animals.
If you know an action will get you what you want you will do that. And yes, selfless actions count to, giving monrley to a charity can be something to prove your ego, it can make you happy etc etc... most selfless actions are also learnt behaviour, tradition, instinct. All of these animals have.
Rescue dogs and the dogs they give to the blind are extremely smart. If a dog understands a command, you communicate with the dig, its a fact. What is communication? Language
Therefore animals can learn language. Animals can react to variety of sounds and they can connect a sound to who makes it, is it dangerous, what will happen if i hear this sound...
Its obvious animals can make sense of their surroundings and noises, therefore they can and do communicate.
We just have faster brains and we are better at convincing ourselves that we are smart. Now ofc our brain is better, we can make sense of complex things and have inner thoughts.
I would say its like chess, in chess humans can think ahead multiple moves, animals on the otherhand can only think of 2 moves at most. But the basics of our learning processes and instincst are not different.
Also there are multiple very very dumb people. I would say some people are barely smarter then a dog. In fact, i can tell you, lot of people cant solve a puzzle that a crow can.
Its kind of insulting how youband lot of ppl downplay animals intelligence and think we are much smarter and different.
All I have said are only well known facts.
Billi’s owner is a zoo vet. She also says she isn’t sure if the cat understands or doesn’t, or if the cat knows what she’s communicating. The research is fascinating, however, and I’m happy that an animal care specialist is participating.
I personally am in the other camp, animals have a learning capability, why not use it to associate actions or emotions to a button that makes the sound of that word? I don't see anything inherently wrong with this, since it's just another form of learning like tricks.
And for me, I'd stop believing when I see them consistently press buttons that don't represent what I'd imagine a cat with cat wants might say. I watch Billi a lot since it's an almost daily upload, and she seems to successfully use the buttons to direct the humans to her wants, and when they get it wrong she seems to say no or mad, of which seems more to be a catch-all for negative emotions rather then simply anger.
I'm interested in what the results the research project Billi and Bunny are in report. It's all pretty cool I think.
The "research" project is conducted by the company that sells the buttons. And participants are required to purchase the buttons. That is highly unethical and a severe conflict of interest.
Animals are of course capable of learning things. But these are not capable of language. It has been proven that the foxP2 is needed to understand language and dogs and cats don’t have it.
@@KPassionate false. Again. Cat: Foxp2, 84 amino acids, chromosome a2
Im starting to doubt your status as a scientist. What was the topic of your ph.d thesis? How many publications and citations did you get out of it?
@@KPassionate wait.. what.. all animals have the foxhead box p2 gene.....
@@KPassionate It's funny how you ignore comments proving you wrong
@@alisaforster28691 sorry you are correct. I should have said a specific mutation in the FoxP2 gene is required for language. Not the actual gene itself. Thanks for the correction.
I admit. I anthropomorphize the crap out of everything, but my cat has learned how to meow an impressive human sounding "Good Morning" to me on some mornings. Maybe he does it because it makes me laugh and give him ear skritches. Maybe he's been taking some online courses. Either way, I choose to believe that my cat occasionally greets me with a cheerful "Good morning."
We all anthropomorphize! It’s important that we recognize when we are doing it.
@@KPassionate My Whippet has basically ''Trained'' me... by body language.
A specific bored ''Flopp'' means ''I'm wanting to go outtttttt'' Of course she understands what certain words mean, but body language is the only way.
Ditto when she {or any other animal} is nervous at the vets, no buttons required .
Having a button in the waiting room that says ''Go home!'' would be likely pressed by every animal there if this was true.
They are such good readers of human body language that I do think these 'Buttons' are a load of bollocks.
The Dog or cat likely hits the buttons that makes the owner respond in the most positive way.
Last night, we went to a farm to collect something, with dog off lead .There was a farm cat in the distance that even from 50 metres away looked angry.
Dog could tell, and kept back, not advancing.
@@Oakleaf700 I agree! Great observations.
We learn to imitate animal sounds. Why can't your cat learn to imitate the sound that approximates "good morning" - not because he knows English but because of the situation association of that is the sound heard in the morning and he gets a happy greeting. Your cat has taught you well to cater to his needs.
My cat does that too. When I don’t open my door fast enough in the morning his meows start having an annoyed toned with an upper inflection at the end lol 😁 I choose to believe this!
Just a few minutes in and I gotta say, how is it you watch the least impressive of the lot? lol. I have to admit, when I first started watching them, I was iffy about it. But the MORE you watch, the more its is blatantly obvious, that there animals are talking/communicating with their people. There's one where Billi accidentally steps on a button with her back paw and it said, "want." She almost immediately pressed the "oops" button. Another, she pushed the button for the toy she likes, but "mom" was tired. So then Billi pressed "cuddle" and she cuddled for maybe a minute and then went back to the toy button, lol. It was so evident and "mom" also realized that this was a bargaining attempt, lol. Watch it, babe, watch a lot more of them. Because you're wrong. I just watched this one with a dog. This dog knew that its sister dog needed to go "potty." Sure enough, the other dog went/needed to go, the button-pushing dog did not. I've watched some now that are just incredibly impressive. Again, it's strange that you're somehow missing the impressive stuff. It's also kind of strange that you think your intelligence is so superior to all of these people doing this, that are actually experiencing it day after day. Funnily enough, these people have put in a lot of work (they aren't stupid), and I'm sure they would eventually have lost interest if it hadn't proven very fruitful. Additionally, many of the people watching aren't stupid, and THEY would have lost interest if they hadn't seen some very impressive communications by these animals. Maybe get over yourself just a wee dab? And do some real research on it. That is, watch a lot more videos.
Talking Dog Buttons - Funniest, smartest, and BEST moments
ua-cam.com/video/PnfnfdVRbU4/v-deo.html
Another that comes to mind. Billi pushes "noise"(they use for any sound) and then "water." It had just started to rain. Just a fluke? Um 'kay. How many "flukes" until you realize YOU are wrong.
I watched an episode where Billie learned about Morning, afternoon and night, already showing an understanding of before, after and later.
I am 100% convinced this cat has been communicating well after watching many of these videos.
I've been watching Billi videos for the past two weeks and have seen a bunch. I've also owned a number of cats for almost half a century, so I'm well acquainted with cat behavior and body language. Billi started learning buttons when she was 11, (that's late middle age for cats,) and now she's 13 and does use all her buttons. There are 60 now, I believe. For an older kitty, she does an impressive job. She presses "come" when she wants "mom" to come, and she gets upset when she presses the wrong button and will go and press "oops." She sometimes presses "oops" when "mom" gets something wrong. She expresses time with "morning," "afternoon," and "night," and she calls for specific people when she thinks of them, like "dad," "grandma," and "friend." This is not random, but very deliberate. It's obvious that she can't form sentences, but then very few animals can. She does put two words together at times. I've also watched videos where Billi manipulates "mom's" behavior by asking for cuddles, then goes after what she really wants, which is usually a play session. So, yes, the cat is communicating using buttons. I wonder what would happen if you started a cat with buttons as kittens.
You are gullible she stomps on any button for attention and the childless couple then tries to make sense of it in their crazy heads. Then add the fact that these idiots cherry pick these videos for you fools. All I have to say is you should trust what the expert in this video says not your years of being a crazy cat lady.
@@bethturnage7028 Yep, it's very obvious they're doing this IF one actually takes the time to watch several. This girl that is so arrogantly discounting all of this, it's kind of disturbing. Just how close-minded a "scientist" can be, frightening even, that these types of people are so significant to the lives of our people. The close-minded thing doesn't represent a depth of wisdom. And that type of ego/arrogance has gotten a LOT of things wrong. So many of our people have paid the price for it. That aside, I'm stunned by what these animals are doing. It's just so wonderful that they are demonstrating real proof of what I've known intuitively for years. Animals think and they feel, AND they "intuit."(see link I shared above where the one dog knew that its sister dog needed to go "potty"). And you can see how this kind of communication is so helpful for the animal and the owners. Being able to convey when they're ill and such. It's just so amazing and I'm eager to see how it progresses further.
I've been watching the videos for over a year now. I was skeptical, too, at first, but I do think Billi, Bunny, and others are attempting to communicate with varying degrees of success.
I think the lesson learned here is that scientists are human, too, and they can fall for biases and preconceptions, just like the rest of us.
This lady just gives crazy cat ladies and childless dog owners a dose of reality they don't want to hear. If only she talked like a caveman they might understand. Realize these videos that still don't make any sense are the best videos they have of a cat that has those buttons filmed constantly. They agree with any button the cat mashes to make their delusional world make sense to them.
Idk this cat pretty much acts exactly how I imagine a cat to act if it could talk. Nothing good will ever come from that 😂😂
I think its worth noting that there was a whole year of time lap between the first and the last BilliSpeaks video shown here. I do think billi might not understand the words in English as we humans. But what is the most fascinating to me is my assumption that she can pack ideas into related words and pronounce them. Specially after seeing how her owner trained her to relate Morning/afternoon/night with the combo of the sense of time later/before/after. The concept of the cat able to communicate the sense of anticipation of passing time on a larger scale was very impressive to me. Do you think its possible that a socialized animal would be able to express in such a way after trainings that would link the animal with the sounds of words to human cultural?
No
1:14 “what do you smell?”
Cat immediately looks down and presses “cuddle.”
That question likely interferes with our analysis of Billi’s reaction, hence why Billi later says she doesn’t want to cuddle.
I am completely aware KPassionate deliberately ignored the owner’s verbal question because of the assumption that a cat isn’t that smart. To be honest, even the owner herself ignored her own question when responding to Billi’s answer. That seems like reverse confirmation bias by assuming you know what the cat isn’t capable of.
-
Next video.
-
6:55 You overlay right out of the gate that this is a button training. This isn’t a button-training. This is communication. You are watching communication resulting from previous training.
-
Overall I’m disappointed that KPassionate discounts everything she sees as confirmation bias. It comes across more as disconnected and having a Holier than Thou perspective of arrogance toward the whole process. This isn’t a scientific lab and it isn’t even the training process.
The reality appears to be that KPassionate is highly skeptical of talking animals. I was in the camp of people wanting her to change her mind upon seeing Billi’s videos. My takeaway is that hoping someone on a platform will change their perspective to align with the masses is a long-shot. They have an image to capitalize on and momentum on their side. It is very difficult and humiliating for someone to reach a point of vulnerability on their own platform equating to, “I was wrong,” especially if it goes against their image even if admitting they’re wrong would rightfully validate so many in the masses who trust their integrity. It’s just disheartening to realize how deeply we can’t trust authority.
Science and research isn't cast in stone. It changes all the time, hence theories change all the time. So, to outright discount what is happening here should at least give us pause for thought. Whether these animals understand or not doesn't bother me; i find it fascinating because it could lead to other or related discoveries. Also, animals have been able to survive and evolve before humans' intervention/interference through instinct and intelligence and now we want to write them off because science hasn't been able to prove animals' capabilities?
Where do medicines come from originally? Nature. And humans have survived how long before modern science? Then modern science discounted all natural medicine simply because they couldn't prove it, yet a lot of natural medicine is still used successfully. Of course I'm not, myself, discounting all the great advances in the sciences but let's not shut our minds off to possibilities.
Einstein was written off as a student...
One last thing, does the presenter need to be so condescending?
Billi: "Outside."
Bunny: "Dream is sleep talk".
Dick in video: Cats have more language ability then digs but both still definitely have zero!
The cat does have an "oops" button, and she has pushed it after she had pushed the wrong button by mistake. The owner realised it too.
The cat knows to press “ops” after they press the wrong button… coincidence? Maybe.
I’m at the very least certain that Billie understand mad because every time she presses it her tail was wagging.
How do you know it’s the wrong button? It is all just interpreted by the owner. So there is literally never a scenario where the cat doesn’t look like it knows what it’s doing because the human is controlling the narrative.
@@KPassionate Because it stepped on it with its hind leg seemingly on accident whilst avoiding the other buttons. Only to then turn around and go for the oopsie button instantly.
You make it very obvious that you haven't put a whole lot of time into making an informed video, instead opting to look at two videos without having any context whatsoever. This is very easily demonstrated by you talking about the association training and how it is not happening, when with just a few minutes of research you could've easily found out that and how such training was done with the buttons.
so the cat was annoyed and not 'angry' as per your definition........
Um… It really seems like you’re going at this whole anti-button-pushing arc with at best, some bias, or at worst, unjustified cynicism. It’s almost like you feel kind of threatened by the possibility that communication is actually happening here?
I’m curious as to why you think it’s exceptional for you to analyze if communication is actually happening, based on watching *just* one or two videos… If you were to actually sit down and watch several videos, you would see how foolish you’re being for making such hasty criticisms. When you read books on biology and animal behavior, do you feel that you have a thorough grasp on the concepts of the book by reading one page or one chapter?
Sure, this whole button-pushing thing done with animals is atypical and seems even unnatural, but again, if you actually watched more videos or better yet, watched Billie’s mom speak in some of the interviews she’s done on UA-cam, you’d find that a) sometimes pets just don’t take to trying to employ the button communication and b) she and Billie’s lives have actually become more enriched through adding this dimension to their communication, and it doesn’t take away from nonverbal communication.
Idk I’m unimpressed, especially considering you *are* supposed to be educated on animal behavior and communication. You tried to poke all of these holes in Billie and her mom’s process without taking a moment to consider the flaws in your own process. It’s just lazy and close-minded. 🤷♀️
My videos are based on two videos just for the simplicity of the editing process. My opinion is based on the research that has been done into this by scientific experiments. There are some links in the description but a google search of "can bunny the dog really talk" will lead you to why scientists everywhere are debunking this.
Have you ever heard of the Milgram experiment ? or the "argument from authority" ? Using the fact that you are a marine biologist first as a way to make your point, doesn't make it automatically correct. Also, using human psychology concepts to debunk experiments after watching a few seconds of footage at random does not seem very scientific either to me.
I am sorry but "debunking" something by using "science" while not doing it scientifically does not prove your point. It just proves that you know what types of video title will get you lots of views on a subject that people are passionate about.
I have watched A LOT of those videos. And I believe this subject deserves at least to be looked into a little more and with scientific tools. Shutting it down after watching 5min of footage is definitely as unscientific as believing pets are fluent without scientific proof.
There is also such a bias as relying on your knowledge to confirm if things are possible or not. Except with that mindset, no new theories and scientific facts would ever be found. Knowledge empowers you. But using it to disbar any theory on the basis that it does not come from a scientist... that's very limiting. Science can come from anywhere. And it's the scientist's job to use the benefit of the doubt to look into things. How many things have been discovered by pure luck ?
Anyways, don't take this the wrong way, this is a mere rebuttal. Let's continue this discussion. But I believe scientists are not exempt from their own biases ;)
I literally came here to say the same thing but not quite as eloquently. For someone trying to use her education and title is a reason why we should listen to her, her process is very unscientific and dismissive.
I'm child behaviorist. And what the cat and dog are doing is the same as children who learn to talk. They may not "speak" but they are communicating.
This guy goes to the doctor and says "Just because you're a doctor doesn't mean you are correct about which medicine I should take", then goes home and drinks bleach
@@AdityaNema This is such a pathetic attempt at poisoning the well that it's sad, you understood nothing of what he said
My mind isn't really made up either way honestly, but as a recommendation for the future you're probably getting more negative reactions from people in the comments because of the amount of condescension you expressed. I've seen a lot of great videos taking apart a concept they were very straight when talking about the topic and not injecting much personal opinion that were much more convincing because the person explaining didn't come across as immediately biased. If you're trying to get people to change their minds on a topic you probably shouldn't scoff at the videos and act like it's an inconvenience that you have to watch more than one video from the person you are trying to criticize. If you don't want to make a video talking about something then don't.
Thank you!! You put my thoughts into perfect words!!
Billi's owner is actually a veterinarian (she works with exotic animals at a FL park or zoo, saw one video of her explaining the process of replacing part of a toucan's cancerous bill) so I'd think she has some pretty solid scientific credentials as well. You might want to contact her directly and have a discussion, as I'm sure she is familiar with the various possibilities for bias.
No she doesn’t. She’s obviously trying to make sense out of words that don’t go together in the shown videos. Her doing that discredits her completely.
Vets are not cat psychologists.
A vet is trained to do physical exams and understand mostly the animal’s biology. This proves nothing about the ability of a person to read the pet’s mind apart from obvious love. But with love can come also some toxicity… we all wish for talking animals and searching storys in their everyday behaviour but there are likely none.
@@Silversumirethey are if they want to keep their blood on the inside
You are a marine biologist behavioral specialist, not a specialist on all animals. You work with MARINE animals, which exhibit totally different types of behavior and respond to humans in a totally different way.
I would be surprised if you actually owned a cat or dog. You don’t really seem to understand most dog or cat behavior. ESPECIALLY cats!
Nor have you watched enough samples of this one cat, or other cat videos that are using these buttons. If you are a proper scientist, you would bother to do a lot more research before you even made a video like this. Or the one you did about Bunny the dog.
Wait wait wait ...you devised an entire "hypothesis" off of one video (regarding Bunny)!!?!
No. I read research papers. Unfortunately also watched several videos 😂
@@KPassionate that's not what you say in the video but ok. Do you.
Do you not know what a hypothesis is or
@@ruthie8785 great come back...a year later.
She acts like they just threw a bunch of buttons out there and the cat started talking. It took a long time and a lot of training.
Sorry this isn’t training
whether or not the animals actually understand what they're doing, only watching a few videos - especially out of order - isn't a good way to get an accurate feel for whether or not they can be trained to use buttons to communicate
additionally, if you look for research about this, it just isn't there. you're operating under your own skepticism bias - you're not consulting linguistic experts, animal behavioral experts, nothing
@@larissafae2135 she is an animal behaviour expert
I wish the author actually responded to critique with something more than a "Thanks for watching" or occasionally snide remarks at worst. Some of the points raised are extremely good: Misunderstanding the cues of a scared cat for those of an angry one, assuming the video is of training, rather than something casual, the lack of actual professionalism.
She only reacts to people agreeing with her with actual sentences, further proving that, while Billi's owner might have confirmation bias, KPassionate also has it.
I'm disappointed because I expected an actual expert's analysis on those animal videos. This is clearly not it.
Definitely not true. I respond to comments from every different angle. But I don’t take a lot of time to respond to people that already have their mind made up or that are extremely rude.
I will let any stray viewer decide if I am wrong, or if there is a very clear pattern in your responses past few weeks. It doesn't take much scrolling, really.
@@KPassionate There's several comments criticising your metrology that you ignore above this one, none of them are rude
_"I don’t take a lot of time to respond to people that already have their mind made up"_ is a nice excuse, but the truth is that you're avoiding criticism, nothing more
@@Quilveor Stray viewer here, and you definitely are not wrong, and many others have said the same thing! :)
@@nadarith1044 I agree with your statements. In fact, I tried to have an intelligent scientific discussion with the lady, and she would not converse beyond her standard one-line answers, and eventually condescendingly told me I should definitely block her channel because there's nothing there that would be of interest to me. I had called her out on her approach to this subject (as many others have), but I wouldn't say I was rude, I was just stating facts. (HA, I'm suddenly reminded of a t-shirt my husband has of Stewie from Family Guy saying "I'm not insulting you, I'm describing you".). :)
To be fair, I remember Billi's owner has a video where she talks about how she trains Billi to associate the various buttons with specific things. And she does seem to have very specific buttons that she likes to press, like the one for her fan toy. So it wouldn't totally surprise me if she's learned to associate a few buttons with a few very specific easy to understand things like the one for food or for her favorite toy.
That's not to say she actually is picky about what she actually wants at any given moment, if she pressed the button for food and was shown her toy or given pets she probably wouldn't even care. But it's not out of the realm of possibility that when she actually wants food at a given moment and happens to see the button for food she goes and presses it because she's made that association.
An interesting experiment would be to train a pet to fetch specific objects after button presses. I know there are dogs who know enough names of different specific toys that they can fetch individual toys on command, so it doesn't seem like a huge stretch to similarly train them to fetch the toy when they hear the same command from one of these buttons. Then extend that and see if there's a way to, say, give a command for the dog to press a random button, it presses it, and then when it hears the new command from that button fetches the corresponding object.
Either way the abstract concept buttons for sure are really dubious, as well as how far ahead the pets are actually thinking when they're pressing the buttons.
I agree. A few buttons with very specific associations could be useful.
@@KPassionate A friend bought a 'Poo bell' that presses like a button and goes Ding~dongggg ..Except her Whippet presses it now whenever she wants to go outside, not just to poo or wee.
Because Iris was praised fulsomely each time she pressed the ''Poubelle'' {as we call it, }she knows that pressing it gets a treat and an open door and attention. {All exciting things}
If I phone up friend, I can sometimes hear the ''Poubelle' ding donging as Iris presses it when she is excited, and thinks we might be outside. {according to her owner}
I'm certain animals press the buttons that their humans react most positively to.
There needs to be rigorous testing, but at the moment, I can't see dogs or cats tapping out complex sentences with these buttons.
@@Oakleaf700 agreed! And a poo bell is a perfect use for these buttons. As long as people don’t buy into the full sentence nonsense
@@KPassionate Totally agree.
Wasn't ''Clever Hans'' the 'Counting' horse responding to tiny visual cues from his master?
Animals remember voices, too, from the people in their past life
.Was playing a ''Puppy video'' of our Whippet at just six weeks old ,
The Husband of the person who bred the litter's voice is in the video, and at the sound of his voice, immediately our Whippet looked up intently.
I forwarded it to my friend, and her whippet {Same litter} was ears up listening to Tony's voice.
I play a lot of videos, and Whippet rarely takes any notice, unless it's a voice she recognises.
Actually, Billi has on several occasions shown that when she presses a certain button, she wants whatever is associated with that button. For example, recently, she pressed the button for “Food”. Kendra gave her a bowl of water which, I think, contained fish oil. I think this is because Billi occasionally has a hard time eating certain types of foods. (I’m sorry. My details are a bit fuzzy.)
Anyway, Billi looked at the water, sniffed it, then walked back over to her buttons and pressed “Food” again, as if to reinforce her request.
You need to watch more of her videos. Especially ones involving her dad. I am eager to hear your take on those.
I suggested the same thing and she told me she has watched so many of them and they're all the same 😅
@@MsWesty81 lol she's obviously lying
Please don't take this video serious. This woman's credibility is questionable. I've scoured the comments searching for some potential reliable links to real studies or sources backing any claims of doubt, but all she has provided over and over is a link to an article called 'Talking dogs, really?' its worded as a stupid pop science attention grabber. I wasted my time reading it to give her a chance, and guess what, its trash. It's an actual clickbait article with not a SINGLE source in the entire 'study' to back up any of the claims. She also keeps referring to Dr Mélissa Berthet as her source for credibility, but this mentioned person comes across as unprofessional and fraudulent, her one "source" in her own article she wrote literally links to the exact same article from another website which is another journalistic pop trash media site. She has provided zero sources on any studies whatsoever, its purely an opinionated piece that @KPassionate is treating as actual science backed information.
Here is a published and peer reviewed study that we relied on for this video.
www.gesundheitsindustrie-bw.de/en/article/news/why-don-t-dogs-talk
And here is some additional material on the topic. Happy reading and thanks for commenting!
www.nature.com/articles/news.2009.1079
bigthink.com/life/ape-sign-language/
www.sciencefocus.com/nature/bunny-how-to-speak-dog/
therewiredsoul.medium.com/debunking-the-viral-talking-dog-of-tik-tok-df114625b4d5
This video would have been watchable if not for the scathing, condescending, arrogant tone. Science should never look down on anyone, no matter how foolish you find them.
That’s fair criticism. It is a change that I have made since making these videos. Thanks for the feedback.
Damn you’re really bitching
This was an interesting video having just discovered Billie and only having seen 2 vids of that cat before coming here. I'm not a psychologist, but I do have a bachelors degree in Psychology and have always been interested in how that translates into other fields. I feel that is relevant because I have always had interesting relationships with my pets that include knowing their body language, different meows, patterns, and habits. I don't 100% agree that animals wouldn't be able to communicate with humans using non-traditional means because of 2 main theories: evolution, and adaptation. One dictates that animals change even to a cellular level to fit needs (breeding/cross-breeding for certain traits), the other says that, even if temporarily or in the presence of certain stimuli, we change behaviors in order to be less threatened or better understood.
The cat knows the sounds come from the floor in these videos, but looks up to the owner after using them expecting either a treat or a response. The same way my cat yowls in different tones to get my attention to different things, or even learned to turn off the lightswitch because he would get a treat after. Both of these count as learning and can eventually lead to understanding even if the owner isn't 100% revealing all the work that was put in. In the owners mind, I'm sure they believe they are teaching and the cat is learning.
I wonder how many dislikes this video got?
I've checked especially for you.
As of half of August 2022 it's: 414 👍 (68,9%) 187 👎 (31,1%)
Total views are 8808 which may mean that some people didn't make opinions on that or are returning only to leave some comments (depending on the watch retention and total watch length)
@@dwsel Oh wow, how did you find that out, and can you give us updated stats? I commented a while back that she probably saw how popular button-talking pet videos have become and knew reviewing the subject would get her lots of views, but that I bet it also got a higher than average number of dislikes too. At over 30%, I'd say I was right! She probably wasn't counting on that... she even said she had no idea how many people believed in this stuff! :)
So I watched both this video and the dog video and i find this to be a very interesting discussion topic. For starters, i completely agree tone and body movement are the basic form of communication for an animal. But at the same time, I have seen animal learn simple words. For example, my dog knows the word "WALK". It doesn't matter how i say it, i can be in normal conversation with someone and if that word is at all mentioned, she comes running with a look of anticipation.
However, much like was mentioned, were talking simple words here. Mainly verbs and nouns like walk, treat, outside, play, cuddle, etc. Something the animal is constantly hearing.
I can see this working on a one word command basis, where the animal does not need to push multiple buttons to form a sentence. An animal might be able to put something simple together like "cuddle tommy" (Tommy being a person) but i can't be sure with out being able to properly test this.
I completely agree. I think as a button to let the human know you would like to go outside or something like that could be useful. But the training for that needs to be consistent and very precise. I just don’t see that happening here.
@@KPassionate because you watch one of 100s of videos. Billi had been training for years. She's closer to the fluent end of the spectrum than just learning 🙄 bias much?
@@jenniepennie14 Yeah I've watched a lot of Billi videos and I don't think this specific section highlights her understanding. Buttons have been moved around and removed before too.
@@KPassionate well, the reason you don't see that here is because that happened in other videos. And you didn't watch those. You chose to form an opinion based on looking at this experiment for 3 minutes.
@@MissAngryAngel my opinion is based on scientific studies which is backed by every button video I have seen. Even the ones you are talking about. Sorry. Appreciate you watching and taking the time to comment
An angry cat isn't the same as a scared cat.
Exactly! The examples she gave of an "angry" cat are actually one that is feeling highly threatened and gone into defense mode.
I would tend to disagree. I live with several cats, as I volunteer for a rescue. All my cats but two have some degree of trauma from their time as strays, and so run for cover when the doorbell rings, as they’re anxious of strangers. When they are purely afraid, their body language is furtive, quiet and low to the ground: they’re trying to make themselves as small and quiet as possible to escape without notice.
When they are anxious AND angry, e.g. when there’s the occasional inter-cat squabble, that’s when they hiss, arch backs, etc. But those behaviours are absent when they’re just plain afraid. So I think it’s fair to say a cat exhibiting those behaviours is feeling both scared and aggressive/angry.
@@poison_plays You're right, a purely afraid cat does exactly what you said - try to make themselves as small as possible. I see that with ours when there's a stranger visiting sometimes.
I think the key difference is that the arched back and hissing is the cat being defensive (the next logical step after fluffing up their tail). I don't think "angry" is the best descriptor for this.
You gave a reasoned argument and made some very good points. I realize in your head, this is no better than Clever Hans, the horse who “did math.”
You were still wrong. You demonstrate your own confirmation bias. Let me explain the flaws in your interpretation:
-SAMPLING ERROR
I understand that this frustrates you, so you don’t want to watch hours of videos. Admittedly, picking the most popular was a decent strategy, but the shorter videos are usually more popular on any channel, and these videos tend to just be a cute conversation for popularity.
If you watched more videos, or longer videos, you would see more convincing videos. For example, the video “Does Billi use all these words?” (which is nearly an hour long) shows Billi interrupting activity to communicate reactions, e.g. stopping play to communicate “ouch back” for being hit in the back with a toy, stopping a petting session when “Mom” pats her tummy to say “no tummy” (cat owners know sometimes they want a tummy pat, but sometimes it is just a display of trust and they will react negatively to their tummy being touched). You’ve missed spontaneous/reactive speech.
Another good one displaying complexity is the video “do cats miss us when were gone?” where there is a conversation with a follow-up question: Billi asks “where Dad hmm?” (most people use the word “question” for her “hmm”) but he’s on a work trip, and the only words to communicate this is “outside”, which has other associated concepts associated with it; Billi follows up with “When?”, but the only time concepts Billi knows is “soon” (under 15 minutes) and “later” (over 15 minutes), which doesn’t properly explain that Dad will be gone a week.
As to your assertion that, if it were language, there would be communication mistakes - there are! One of the buttons is “Oops!” There are examples of Billi accidentally setting off a button needlessly and communicating “oops” to erase, or Billi restarting the phrase after an error.
Due to your own bias, you are not taking in a large enough sample to be representative and justify conclusions.
-IMPROPER CODING / misidentification
I respect that you are an animal behaviourist and there is transferable knowledge, but stick to marine animals. First, your examples of anger are not anger but acute stress response (fear, threat response). The ears pointed backwards in the video where they label it *anger* is more accurate: it is a response to emotions on the frustration-anger spectrum.
Second, you need to put it in the context of the available vocabulary. Billi only has 3 emotional words available, one of which is technically a feeling, not an emotion. Billi is technically only trained to express positive emotions (“happy”) and negative emotions (“mad”), but you’re not going to use the words “positive” and “negative” to train a language beginner. Mad is the common negative, and short, though some would teach the word “upset.” While the attribution was anthropomorphism (there’s no evidence cats feel guilt or embarrassment), it is quite possible Billi felt negatively at that moment. The 3rd “emotion” is “love you!”; while the behaviour is commonly referred to as love, to be technical, Billi is trained to use the “love” button to express attachment and trust - a commonly expressed feeling in cats, which are colonial animals.
Third, if you watch back in history, you would see how slowly Billi’s vocabulary was built, from concrete actions/objects to (slightly) more complex concepts of location, time, affirmative versus negative responses, etc. Billi’s training involves operant conditioning, and follows a similar path to infant-to-toddler language acquisition. Surely, you are aware of this path being used to help marine animals communicate with us.
Fourth, there are videos of Billi, as well as other animals, selecting a word with the owner not in the room, trying to draw the owner into the room for communication. As well, there are examples of responses that could go multiple ways. Billi also doesn’t always look up when composing phrases. These things eliminate is some cases, and at least reduce in others, observer expectancy effect.
- METHODOLOGICAL ERRORS
The pictures and words on the buttons are for the humans. Billi and other animals demonstrate understanding the oral word, and are usually trained to locate the pre-recorded word by position (some are taught with colour, but that is limiting without their understanding of shades). The location of buttons is recorded so it can be replicated when necessary, such as cleaning the carpet or when they moved residences to the one you saw (there’s a video where Billi keeps asking for a toy that was delayed in the move).
Incidentally, they had to replace their system to the one you saw. If you had watched the history, you would have known that the original system used bigger buttons (the size of the “Billi” button you commented on) lined along the wall. The newer system allows more words and expansion. That large “Billi” button was a result of the owner liking the custom sticker someone had given her and not wanting to replace that button.
As a behaviourist, surely you have studied behavioural research methodology which, in earlier learning, is usually taught by discussing the flawed methodologies of the past. Methodology improves with time, particularly our understanding of confounding factors. I mean, only in the past few years have we completely re-interpreted the Marshmallow test from the original assertion of delayed gratification to newer understanding of trust, this being the likely explanation for correlations to socioeconomic factors. You must have read the study of the Marine Biological Laboratory adapting the test to cuttlefish; I don’t read the Proceedings of the Royal Society (I rely on science reporting outside my field of human behaviour) but I would imagine it discussed the human experiments in the introduction to outline the premise, much like human behaviour studies reference preceding animal studies. Generally originals are always explained in the intro of adaptation studies in all science fields.
Throughout the animal world, we have demonstrated that the old standard for animal intelligence testing was completely flawed - the response to human commands. We are discovering that it is likely more animals have sentience than we give them credit for - including marine life such as dolphins and whales. Cats are one of the animals which have been demonstrated to understand a human command, but chose not to follow it. Given our collective realisation of the intelligence of animals, is it really so far-fetched that an animal that can learn its own name and basic words like “food” and “outside” might be capable of further vocabulary?
Thanks for watching!
I love how 90% of the comments are people saying "I've been watching Billi for a long period of time and truly believe she understands buttons and effectively communicates" and then this woman still answers the same skeptical opinions and can't change her mind even a bit
Heavily edited UA-cam videos are not evidence 🤷♀️
oh god she keeps going on😂
@@KPassionate Like your video? Opinions are not evidence either.
@@KPassionate If you're implying that Dr. Kendra (she's a vet, fyi) edits her videos to make Billi appear to be doing something she's not, then you owe her a big apology. She deliberately fast-forwards through the boring parts for time's sake, instead of just editing it out, so that people don't think she's just splicing together clips to make it look like a coherent conversation. It also lets people see her thought process and how long it can take her to get a full thought out. That's honesty, not trickery.
@@TieDyeVikki I’m implying that UA-cam videos are not evidence and all studies with actual evidence are clear on the topic.
„I‘m trying. I‘m really trying, guys“… she says after watching 2 clips and giving statements about things she doesn‘t see or recognises. Like the fact that the cat was about to hop on the lap before she decided against it (hence the title of the vid) or the way the owner confirmed the meaning of what the buttons represent by pressing them in affirmation. You know… affirmation like animal trainers should give… like as in the occupation she said she has.
Anyone who has ever had a dog or cat knows that they very easily know what trigger words like ‚treat‘ or ‚walkies‘ mean and how they react to those words, (not) to mention the noumerous papers on word association in animals like birds, dogs and cats, let alone the case of Koko, the gorilla that learned to communicate in sign language as far back as in the late 70s.
Go ahead, google it.
;-) She‘s definately right about some bias being involved in here somewhere.
I’m not entirely sure you googled it…it was proven that Koko the gorilla could only understand words and about sentences and language. Animals can make word associations but most cannot understand language and string together words. Their brains are not made for it. They lack the gene needed. Sorry. Thanks for watching though
@@KPassionate Nicely strung together words you did there… almost like you understood what was being said! :-)
Yet nothing you ‚said‘ did negate anything I stated. All you did, was casting doubt… just like in your vid. These days, that seems like more than enough to even make a living of, though ;-)
Wait… I get it now! I‘m soooooo sorry! How could I have been soooooooo stupid!!!
She really thinks we think this is some Doctor Doolittle sh.. and the rest of the world thinks that all animals have debates behind her back in ‚the queen‘s tongue‘… which, of course, we do…
Oooops
I honestly didn't believe the cat could "talk" using buttons , but I gave it a go.
The videos usually last a few minutes.
Whilst the cat can't speak , I firmly believe the cat has an awareness of what the outcome is by pressing certain buttons.
Outside is one she presses then goes to the door before the owner reacts.
The buttons are in the same place , but there are so many this can't be by luck , she goes to the same 6 or so buttons which aren't located together.
Now there are 24 hours a day and we get a few minutes , there may be hundreds of presses and wrong meanings.
However there are too many the cat gets right for it to be confirmation bias , the owner only pushes the buttons to make a sentence, enforcing the training.
The cat isn't forced , it often presses the same button a walks around waiting , and presses the same button wanting that response .
Fan toy is the popular one , the cat will press it and sit and wait and then play with the owner as if this is what the cat wanted..
I've ever seen the cat reiterate what the owner has said ,, the cat asked for something , the owner said later , the cat asked again and the owner said later , the cat did a lap of the room and presses later.
Too many times I've seen too many correct responses.
Even if its two or three times a day and the rest are fails.
The cat definitely knows and is aware of certain buttons.
On top of that what's not funny about a cat waiting for the owner , wait a bit longer , then press MAD two three times 😂
You need to watch lots of them.
Even if I've been drawn into believing, I was sceptical but now I think there is something there. But even if there isn't, the cat is cute , she is an older cat and it's just nice to see her interacting , there is no magic to prove to be wrong , its a cat pressing buttons and often getting correct responses, than in itself is clever, my cats still look at my hand when I point and tell them to get a toy , so billi has more intellect than my cats 😂
You need to watch more of the videos, especially seeing how far she has come. The human genuinely isn't sure if she understands the words but she does use them in context. They are also currently participating in a study.
I don'tt know if these specificvideoss wererecommendedd or if you selected them but there are better clips.
Cats hissing and arched are more defensive/scared than angry. I can tell when my cats are pissed off and Billi displays it the same.
Until the study is published and peer reviewed it literally means nothing. There are thousands of studies every year that fail or go nowhere. The study has also raised several ethical questions that are addressed in this excellent article by Neuroscience News, which is one of the leading journals in the fields of cognition and communication.
neurosciencenews.com/animal-communication-18280/
@@KPassionate Which the article use dogs as an exemple. Cats already use different vocalize they invent to "talk" with humans, sometimes even changing the meow depending of who they're asking stuff to.
Between cats, only kittens mew to other cats, which means they did already formed a communication system based on vocalize for us when they don't use it themselves.
The only others animal they do noise towards are birds, aka an other category of animals with humans using primary vocalize to communicate. And it's called chirping, not meowing, so you have an idea about how THAT sounds.
The one big difference between cats and other animals cited is that they *already* adapts their way to communicate with us.
Whatever is the result of the study, the fact is that using cats for once, knowing their *already established and proven particularities in communicating with humans* may actually bring better informations than using animals percieved as smart, social or dogs.
this chicks entire personality is larping as a marine biologist and literally shutting people down by saying “that’s not how science works sis” of VIEWERS WHO WATCH HER OWN CHANNEL.
cringe, disliked.
Again, there are statements here that are simply not true.
1- The buttons ARE in fact taught by creating associations one by one, paired with actions. That's a very basic part of it which owners tend to show on their channels (based on the methods hungerforwords, the dog owner on that channel who started the whole thing is a speech therapist), with Billi you can see that for example when she teaches her "scratch".
2- The owners often say that the animals are confused or that they are not sure what they are saying. I've seen that with Billi too. Sure, they might make assumptions and have human biases, but saying it never happens simply isn't true.
It really just feels like you want to sell people your own conclusions here, while ignoring the facts.
Also, of course humans have biases and often project their own thoughts and feelings onto the animals, we see that with nearly any animal videos, buttons or no buttons. But just because the methods or thought process is flawed also doesn't really demonstrate that everything about it is wrong or meaningless. Most of these people aren't scientists, and this isn't some experiment conducted in a lab. Nearly no one approaches these videos like this. I tend to ignore the owner's own interpretation in these video and observe the animal instead. That's the interesting part. Just because there are flaws doesn't mean there's nothing to be learned from these videos.
Most people watch these videos with the same approach. You can see it if you take the time to read the comment section.
People would debate with each other, or would suggest for example, different possible (emphasis on "possible", obviously not stated as facts, it's a thought exercise) meanings for certain buttons being used, and the owner would sometimes even respond that that is an interesting option.
Most of these owners openly talk about their own biases and there's usually a speculative approach to it all by both owners and viewers. You are forgetting that the owners learn by observation too. They are people going through a new and unfamiliar process. And making mistakes is also natural.
No one is saying they know with certainty what the animal is trying to express at all times.
The problem seems to be that you think people are convinced and claim something with certainty, but nearly no one is doing that. You asked the viewers what would convince them it isn't true, but nearly no one is claiming it is or isn't true. People usually watch these with a curious approach, observing and speculating, not stating much as some known facts.
Also, again, there isn't much in this video or the previous one that teaches us anything new, except for fairly well-known definitions. Many people understand concepts such as confirmation bias, but that seems to be all you are basing your views on.
As I've said in my comment on the previous video, I approach those animal speech buttons videos fairly objectively, but you seem to add less to the discussion in your videos than the average commenters there.
When Billi's owner refers to Billi's being "angry", she doesn't mean it in the extreme sense where the next thing the cat would do would be to scratch, bite, etc. She means Billi is "miffed", "annoyed".
Notice that when Billi wants someone to pay attention to her button push, she wags her tail a lot. When she's miffed, she stops wagging.
Yes, the human pushes the buttons to confirm the buttons that Bili pushes, that she heard them. Your view of cat anger is a type of arousal usually involving fear and startlement, not anger as such. And by the way, your assumption that there’s no association is also a huge and unwarranted assumption: with the cat, the buttons have in fact been modelled over and over and over.
You really want to believe
With the angry cat thing, her hears were pushed back showing annoyance/ anger.
A terrified cat is fur puffed up on back and neck/
If you dont know cat behaviorism dont speak on it ://
In my biased humble opinion...and many years of experience...this is the ideas of someone who can't think outside the box...the box being what her education has told her is the way animals think...domestic animals have for a long time learned to understand us and communicate ...and we have sought to train and work these beings...there has to be more and this research is just the beginning..I maintain an open mind yet am able to analyze behaviors with both the animals and humans involved...I think we need to give this more time and research, but frankly we will be surprised...thankfully I don't listen to people like this..ever...but I have to read some of the comments left by people that watch this and am not impressed
I'm a child behaviorist with bcba/aba and what this cat is doing is the same thing children do when learning language- it's communicating. I work with non verbal children and this is how we teach them to start communicating. With toddlers, parents will know what they are trying to communicate. It may take several times to realize what they want. For instance a child may say "milk" and point to their belly. Or say "car..fast..no"....
do they mean car isn't moving fast? Or they don't like when car goes fast? You have to continue trying to understand what they are wanting to say.
@@jrmckim I have experience with both non-verbal and verbal autistic children and adults and that is something I have sensed this in the interactions with the fluent pet and button animals...we are just beginning to understand and thankfully animals are smart enough to go along with our attempts to communicate
I have a couple of buttons for my cat. Specifically, “litter” and “all done”. I have one cat who definitely understands what they mean. If I put on her harness when she doesn’t want it, she’ll go to the other room to press “all done”. If I turn on the tap for her to watch, she’ll hit “all done” when she’s finished). The “litter” button gets used as a replacement for her just sitting in front of the litter box and yelling at me when she wants it scooped, which I appreciate.
I think a few buttons in certain circumstances, like "outside" for example, are a good and effective use for this tool.
Same here, I know our cat understands what certain words can result in (but not the meaning itself) and when used she reacts accordingly
@@Zowiezo101 but that's pretty much the definition of spoken communication. If I say food I get food. Thus "food" means food. If I say play someone might play with me. Thus "play" means play. Like, language at its core is just that. Understanding that a word "results" in something, associating "something" with that word, that IS understanding the meaning.
I really only want a few buttons too. I just need a way for me to know what she wants like food, attention, water, treats.
@@steviejonak448 I would advise against a treat button, because treats aren't something you ask for and get, it's something to be played around or trained with. Or, I guess I don't know how you use treats, but I wouldn't add it. My cat uses "play" + "food" for treats, which means we do a little game like toss the treat for her to chase, or give paw, or hide treat etc. Play is a really good word though, I recommend it :)
I think you are wrong about Billi. She takes her time and she is able to ask for particular toys, food, and people. she can’t put together entire sentences because she’s a cat - no surprise there. But she does associate that some buttons make certain things she wants to appear.
Unfortunately that is just pure speculation. I think it’s possible with a few buttons. But not at all in the way the owner is trying to suggest
I agree. I didn't see her as changing her mind. I saw "cuddle" as "oops." Billi has used an "oops" button, too. The music/Hamilton video shows Billi does get what she's doing. I think in the first video it's not recognized that Kendra used buttons to reinforce use and meaning. Billi, after all, has a lot of buttons.
@@KPassionate i mean you are just speculating as well seeing as you are not doing a research experiment either or haven't watched all the videos. Basically you watched what at the most an hour of videos and that is being generous 🙃 😅 and then what edited your own video. You probably spent more time on your video than you actually spent researching the pet footage. So your speculating as well. Kinda ironic that the animals actually spent more time on the research than you a "professional " 🤣🤣
@@cesheph some of the research is linked in the description. Feel free to peruse at your leisure
@@KPassionate did you research 🤔 on your own? Study more than one cat? I am following your lead in what u said in your video and basing my entire opinion of your research on your most popular videos 🤣
My point is that you really can't know can you from watching a few videos. Its definitely not accurate or scientific. I mean unless we are counting youtube scientists
A couple years ago, I told my 6 year old cat Lily a very specific command as a joke. We were upstairs and I said to her, "Lily, I have to go to downstairs in my office. If you need me, jump over the baby gate and meow or paw at the door." I kinda laughed as I walked away.
About 1 hour later she was at the door downstairs meowing!!! Not a joke, she had never done that before, but I knew she was the only cat that knew how to jump over the gate. I was astonished and picked her up, petted her, gave her treats and called my wife to tell her how smart Lily is.
Having said that, I think there is something to the buttons thing, however teaching them the buttons takes training. Perhaps testing with basic ones like food, petting, outside, water, litter is enough at 1st.
It happens, Billi also has an "Oops" button. There is another video called "Fantoy" where she wants to play with the Fantoy but gets frustrated not having a button for it at the time. She has one now.
😂😂😂😂 you guys are incredible
@@taviiiiii Anyone spamming laughing emojis before they talk should be instantly assumed a retard
How do you know she was frustrated? Because the owner told you she was!! Power of suggestion! What is the "oops" button supposed to indicate? A cst has no concept of "oops"!! I would have a far easier time with this if the buttons were all based on concepts that would be in a cats realm....things...nouns....toy, scritches, food....not ridiculous things like "oops" and "ummmm"
I get where you are coming from here with the having to create a sentence from the words that the cat is pushing. However, adults do the same thing with children and adults with communication difficulties. What is that difference there? Also we know that primates can use ASL to communicate so is it that far of a stretch to say that a cat or dog could be taught through operant conditioning to use buttons? The reason that the human pushes the buttons it to help the cat learn the meaning of the buttons but providing an example and when I looked into Bili and her use of the word MAD I learned that Bilis owner taught her the word mad by pushing it when she did things like telling Bili she had to wait for food or couldn't go outside or moving her from her lap which are things that I can tell make my cat mad and he doesn't even have any buttons. Animals feel emotions so why is it not possible to express them using buttons? They can learn so many other tricks so I just don't really get it?
Primates using ASL to form sentences has actually been disproven over and over in studies. They understand some words. But it was just humans putting meaning where there wasn’t any. I understand that the human thinks this is how training works but it is not. I am an expert in operant conditioning. I think it would be very beneficial for anyone with animals to research animal behavior. It’s also super fun! In my nerdy biology opinion anyway.
Exactly. Before the 1960s when William Stoke proved that ASL was a full and complete language, people assumed (erroneously) that it was just gibberish or *English* on the hands. Communication exists in multiple modalities...
-signed a teacher of the Deaf
oh boy you fully misunderstood Billy... nuff said.
seriously though, this cat seems to truly interact with his owner
You see zero evidence because you decided to not really look. With the cat, it is a far more complex situation than you characterise it. For example you assume “no modelling” and you are just plain wrong about that. Also “it never happens in these videos” is also factually wrong. You cherrypicked the ones that amused or impressed the general public most - so what do you expect? As far as I am concerned it is very clear that the cat absolutely can associate specific items and events with specific words/buttons, and the jury is out on the rest. You do yourself as a scientist no credit with your sloppy
-with your sloppy, patchy approach, your condescension and your firm preconceptions.
Ok I totally get the criticism about Bunny the dog that seems to just press buttons randomly and then the owner tries to make sentences with that but, I really don't have that feeling with Billi.
Let me be clear, I am not saying that Billi has exactly the same concept behind the words as for us humans but I think that he kinda approaches some form of sense of language that lets him express what he wants.Also of course this is not a scientific experiment, just a overzealous owner with a lot of time that wants to littery have conversations with her a cat and therefore it would be a big stretch to say that this is evidence that we can learn cats how to talk. But I think Billi’s case would deserve a bit more attention and maybe an expert that would try actual tests to prove or disprove that Billi is understanding what he is doing. I don’t know, it feels to me that this video is super dismissive, like when the cat says he is mad and his ears are backwards with crazy eyes and you say that he doesn”t seem mad putting examples of super hungry cats to prove your point. So maybe that “mad” is a strong word in this case, but Billi seems kinda annoyed. So yeah “mad’ wouldn’t be the exact word but you're being fussy.
Great observation about the mad face. Anyone who spends more than a day with a cat learns those expressions. I don't understand the purpose of this video besides clicks and attention.
Agreed. Maybe not "MAD", but really, super annoyed at how dumb her human is.
Again, it seems you're cherry picking videos, leading to a serious case of skepticism bias. If you had, say, watched a series of videos spanning a few weeks rather than just jumping around her page watching just "most popular" stuff, I suspect your opinion would be vastly different.
It seems your overall opinion is that animals are dumb. I pity the ones you work with.
This is the fallacy of people who believe in this. You somehow equate language to being "more advanced" or more intelligent. Dogs and cats are incredibly smart and they don’t need language in their lives and that’s why they never evolved it. Evolution is not linear. We only evolve the skills that we need to pass on our genes. Just as humans didn’t evolve the complex olfactory senses of dogs and cats. Or how dolphins can’t smell at all. This doesn’t make one better than the other. Just different.
I guess you are not really familiar with cats? Because when a cat wants something, you definitely can't give them just anything and they will be happy with it. They are usually very specific about what they want!
I agree. I have cats and "just anything" definitely won't cut it. It's usually only one or two things that they want (and sometimes it's quite clear that one of them will accept scratches/pets for a while, but then resumes his demand for food).
To be honest, your assessment of the buttons is as unscientific as the viral videos themselves. You have not looked into the theory behind it, what the owners do and why, what methods they use to teach associations... And yet you completely deny pets can use buttons successfully to communicate things (which is not "speaking English", but it's still communication). Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of speculation and bias from owners, and treating pets as humans, but a few viral videos are far from representative of how this communication tool is being used; yet you are presenting your opinion on these videos as fact.
Dogs has you as its pack leaders.....Cats have you as their SERVANTS.
Lol
100%
"Dogs has you as its pack leaders.....Cats have you as their SERVANTS."...........
........So Servant I dont know what those buttons you are pressing mean but FEED ME!
…no
she started her cat on just a few buttons, like for food, simple stuff
It’s not about the videos it about you throwing your credentials around as if that makes this any less of another person just giving an opinion by watching curated clips. You intro yourself as an expert and back nothing up with actual research specific to the animal your reviewing in an attempt to debunk. Then scoff at these people judgmentally as if your doing actual research. What you described is a cat in fear. That’s basic cat body language. Usually specifically if it feels scared or threatened not angry.
In all fairness, I think you're bias. If you watched the videos, she's come quite far and does express ideas. Maybe marine animals can't, or even most cats can't, but Billi can communicate
Also she DID exactly what you mention with showing and reinforcing. The bottoms have changed over time. Also they have pictures on them. The human in the videos is a Vet. So she knows what she's doing
Sorry have to disagree. But thanks for watching.
I'm a recent fan of BilliSpeaks in the sense that I discovered their channel about 2 weeks ago and I view their content as entertainment. I also genuinely think Billi and her owners have a great relationship. I suspect that's why this video of yours popped up on my feed.
Personally I'm not a scientist so I'm not going to argue with that. If peer-reviewed and thoroughly vetted modern scientific research conclusively or near-conclusively determines a given thing, we can't really expect random youtuber #9,001 to just make an off-the-cuff armchair comment and suddenly debunk all of that.
What I do think however is that you seem to have an agenda beyond merely disproving the "cats and dogs can speak with buttons" theory. It seems to me your beef is actually with fluentpet and other related companies that, in your words, "profit by taking advantage of people."
This is a noble endeavor, that I agree with on principle. But shouldn't your time and effort be focused more towards fighting the cause instead of treating the symptom? Billispeaks and others might be contributing (albeit possibly unintentionally) towards the problem but they are NOT the problem. The problem is fluentpets, not the alleged fools they rope in.
Less reacting to Billispeaks, more calling out Leo Trottier. Again, assuming your goal is altruistic.
Thanks for the feedback. My original goal was to empower people to have meaningful communication with their animals using scientifically proven and effective means. I. E. Learning to understand their pet better rather than trying to get them to accomplish an impossible task. I only found out about the corruption behind the company after doing research for the video. I will put a video about the unethical nature of the company on my list of videos to potentially make in the future! Thanks.
I think you just came into this video with a bias, otherwise I don't know where you're finding a hidden agenda. If you just listen to what this woman is saying, you'll find this is more common sense stuff than it is some super complex scientific phenomenon.
@@MrRichManGuy Declining to comment on the science is not the same thing as disagreeing with said science. I'm simply pointing out that a video discussing potential peer review of the alleged scientists behind fluentpets will do FAR more, both in terms of protecting gullible people AND also preserving scientific integrity of the field, than putting up a couple react videos debunking some pet owners.
@@Dimlhugion They haven't released any research papers yet, they're still collecting data as far as I know
@@Vamooso yes and I truly doubt you ever will see any peer reviewed research journal articles on this....same as there never was regarding Koko the gorilla...
The same problem with this as the dog video is that you are deliberately not watching the videos in which the actual training happens, you’re watching one or two videos, not from the beginning of their training or from more recent videos and assuming that you understand and know everything about that animal or their situation. You’re doing exactly what you claim that the owners are doing with their animals.
Billi is clearly searching for the "I'm just a cat. Please stop trying to make me internet-famous" button 🤣
Baaahahahaha!
Perhaps you should communicate with the speech and language pathologist who originated the buttons, Bili's mom who is a veterinarian and the University that is working with Bunny's mom before drawing a firm conclusion.
My sister in law is a SLP professor at an area University (She has a doctorate and specializes in augmentative communication) and a few of her students have been working on training their dogs to do this
I agree. This place is totally a bubble of "appeal to authority fallacy", and the channel owner enables it greatly. Very unscientific.
I tried to see if she’s published and teaching but no luck. Dangerous explanation of confirmation bias. Dangerous.