Brodie is a 4-year-old mix, who doesn’t really like strangers; however, he is very good at communicating with his family. Whenever he wants something from them, he will often follow them around.

He eats his food at 7 am and pm and knows when those times are and will start to follow his family around close to that time. He also knows the words breakfast and cheese and will start listening and perk up. Also, he will try to get food from another person, when he has already been fed. He will follow his family around when he wants to go out and is able to tell the difference between a walk or a run based on the clothes that his owner is wearing. Brodie also knows when it is time to go to bed, and he makes sure that his family knows it too.

Unlike Sofia, who was a dog test subject in a study, Brodie is not able to communicate with buttons, but he is still able to tell his owners what he wants to do or where he wants to go based on his actions (Rossi & Ades, 2007).

Dogs and humans are able to communicate better than other communication between different species. Dogs understand pointing, where a human is looking and eye contact. Eye contact contributes is an important way that dogs can know whether a human is speaking to them or not (Kaminski et al., 2019).

 

Rossi, A. P., & Ades, C. (2007). A dog at the keyboard: Using arbitrary signs to communicate requests. Animal Cognition,11(2), 329-338. doi:10.1007/s10071-007-0122-3

Kaminski, J., Waller, B. M., Diogo, R., Hartstone-Rose, A., & Burrows, A. M. (2019). Evolution of facial muscle anatomy in dogs. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(29), 14677-14681. doi:10.1073/pnas.1820653116