Dr. Holly Molinaro

So I think we have to think about a lot of times people think about dogs as little humans, but dogs are not humans at all.

So we talk to each other for a lot of different reasons, whereas dogs, when they talk to other dogs, it's mostly about smells.

Like they'll leave their pee on the side of the road to leave a note for their fellow passerbyers.

So they don't talk to each other like we talk to each other.

So when it comes to buttons, they're going to use the buttons to talk to humans saying things that they would talk to a human about, which is, I want a treat.

I need to go to the bathroom.

Things like that.

They don't have any need to tell their fellow human about their innermost thoughts.

Yeah.

To us, they would be dumb thoughts because we're like, do you have anything else to say?

But they have such a just a different inner working life than we do.

And so maybe if we don't even probably don't even have the buttons to, you know, create to to understand what they're trying to say or think.

Yeah, parrots, it's a whole different thing.

They're just really good at copying what we say.

And they're also very smart.

Parrots are just, again, you always have to think about animals.

When it comes to animal behavior, you have to think about them in terms of what works for their evolution.

So with parrots, they developed this great repertoire of copying speech to help them out evolutionarily.

Dogs didn't need that.

So they just have a different type of smarts.