Bunny (born c. August 2019) is a sheepadoodle who has reportedly learned 92 words using a set of soundboard buttons, made by FluentPet, to "talk". Bunny first rose to prominence when she went viral on video-sharing platform

TikTok TikTok, known in mainland China and Hong Kong as Douyin (), is a social media and Short-form content, short-form online video platform owned by Chinese Internet company ByteDance. It hosts user-submitted videos, which may range in duration f ...

. Bunny has 8 million followers on TikTok as of September 2022. Bunny is currently the subject of scientific study by researchers at the

University of California The University of California (UC) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university, research university system in the U.S. state of California. Headquartered in Oakland, California, Oakland, the system is co ...

San Diego San Diego ( , ) is a city on the Pacific coast of Southern California, adjacent to the Mexico–United States border. With a population of over 1.4 million, it is the List of United States cities by population, eighth-most populous city in t ...

. She is part of the TheyCanTalk study, and is monitored by cameras placed in the living room of her owner Alexis Devine.

Biography

Bunny was born around August 2019. Her exact date of birth remains unknown. She is a sheepadoodle mix. Her owner, Alexis Devine, always planned for Bunny to learn how to talk. She researched communication and

cognition Cognition is the "mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses". It encompasses all aspects of intellectual functions and processes such as: perception, attention, thought, ...

in canines, as well as

dog training Dog training is a type of animal training, the Applied behavior analysis, application of behavior analysis which uses the environmental events of antecedents (trigger for a behavior) and consequences to modify the dog behavior, either for it to a ...

. Devine also cited the work of Christina Hunger, a speech pathologist, who had been teaching her dog to speak using

augmentative and alternative communication Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) encompasses the communication methods used to supplement or replace speech or writing for those with impairments in the production or comprehension of spoken or written language. AAC is used by t ...

. Hunger used programmable buttons that her dog, Stella, could then press to press in succession together to form "

sentences The ''Sentences'' (. ) is a compendium of Christian theology written by Peter Lombard around 1150. It was the most important religious textbook of the Middle Ages. Background The sentence genre emerged from works like Prosper of Aquitaine's ...

", and used words such as "outside", "Stella", and "good". This prompted Devine to have her own button when she received Bunny in October 2019 for the word "outside", which Bunny learned to use with ease. Six months after Bunny had mastered the use of her "outside" button, Leo Trottier, a cognitive scientist, reached out and asked if Devine would team up to use his product called FluentPet, an augmentative and alternative form of communication that utilized a word board with programmed buttons. Devine accepted, and the two then teamed up with researchers from

. Bunny is the subject of a research project by the university's Comparative Cognition Lab, which has received funding from Trottier's dog game console startup CleverPet.

TikTok

Bunny has a TikTok account run by her owner that showcases videos of Bunny using her "keyboard" to speak. Her account currently has over 8 million followers, and over 210 million likes. One video posted on her account, of Bunny discussing her owner's missing cat, has exceeded 17.8 million views on the platform.

Use of language

Bunny uses augmentative and alternative communication. She presses buttons on a mat, each programmed with a recording of a specific word, such as "Bunny", "walk", and "bye". Whenever these buttons are pressed, they play the words they are programmed to, similar to the Fitzgerald Key, a method used to teach

deaf Deafness has varying definitions in cultural and medical contexts. In medical contexts, the meaning of deafness is hearing loss that precludes a person from understanding spoken language, an audiological condition. In this context it is written ...

children

sentence structure In linguistics, syntax ( ) is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituency) ...

. Bunny can reportedly string at least four words together in broken sentences, such as "ouch", followed by "stranger, paw", a sentence that her owner interpreted as Bunny's paw being hurt.

References

{{reflist Dog training Dog behavior Animal intelligence Human–animal communication Individual dogs in the United States 2019 animal births Animals on the Internet

Biography

TikTok

Use of language

See also

References