Bunny the Button-Communicating Dog

By Eunice Kim

Cypress High School

I was scrolling on the social media platform, Tiktok, one day when I stumbled across a video of a black and white dog, communicating the message “Please water walk” through a board of single-worded buttons. Immediately fascinated, I looked through the page and realized that groundbreaking science was occurring.

Bunny, a sweet, fifteen-month-old sheepadoodle, and Alexis Devine, her owner, have become an overnight sensation, baffling scientists and the general public. The videos on Devine’s page show Bunny pressing prerecorded buttons that communicate words like “mom”, “beach”, and “ouch”. Bunny’s rise to fame started after Devine saw Christina Hunger, a speech-language pathologist, who had been teaching her dog Stella how to communicate with a board full of prerecorded buttons. Inspired by Hunger’s work, Devine started training Bunny when she was just a puppy. Now Bunny has a mat with over seventy buttons.

Joseph Kim, a freshman at Cypress High School, says “It’s quite scary that a dog knows that much,” and I can’t help but agree. This phenomenon is already captivating at face value, but Bunny’s story taps into a bigger question of animals and their potential sentience. Ever since Bunny has gone viral, researchers at the Cognition Lab at UC San Diego have been researching the science behind the “talking.” The director of the lab, Federico Rossano, started a project to study dogs like Bunny and Stella. Since then, the project has gained traction and expanded to study over 700 participants, which include cats and horses as well. Although there is no conclusive data yet, scientists have set up cameras to document every moment of Bunny’s communication.

Devine speculates that Bunny’s communication is primarily the result of operant conditioning. In Devine’s videos, when Bunny wants to go to the park, Bunny can press the park button and be rewarded with an actual trip. Most recently, Bunny has been experimenting with the concept of time, using words like “tomorrow”, “afternoon”, “morning”, and “yesterday.” It’s unknown whether animals have a grasp over the concept of duration, therefore, this is an especially interesting area of research.

Throughout the research process, it’s important to watch out for confirmation bias as humans may fill in the blanks for Bunny and overestimate her “speech”. For example, when Bunny strings the words “Please water walk”, does that mean that Bunny wants to go to the beach near Devine’s home? Or does this mean that Bunny wants water after his walk? There is lots of ambiguity in the vague words that are available to Bunny.

Perhaps humans can communicate with their canine friends in the near future. Chanah Park, a junior at Cypress High School, and I speculate that further research could bridge the emotional communication gap between humans and animals. But until the research has a scientific conclusion, we can all watch Bunny as she pushes the buttons of science.