As some of you may know, I’ve been away from Pet Pal for the past month or so while recovering from surgery. During this time, I’ve gotten to spend a lot of time with my parents’ 1-year-old yellow lab name Cooper and I’ve been wondering just how much of what we say he actually understands. It seems as though he comprehends just about everything we say, but I think every pet owner probably says that about their furry friend. So, with all of this free time on my hands now, I decided to do some research on this topic and share what I’ve learned with all of you.
Pet owners all over the world use words to get their pets to perform commands and, although they can't speak in the human sense, dogs and cats do display varying degrees of understanding and they associate our verbal sounds with actions. It's not so much what we say but how we say it. Cats and dogs don’t actually understand the meaning or content of individual words; they learn through operant conditioning which is a method of learning through rewards and punishments for different behaviors. Associations are made between a particular behavior and the consequence of that behavior. They simply hear a sound and know that a certain response is required. Animals respond more to the energy of the person speaking than to what they’re actually saying. For example, you could yell “good boy” in an angry-sounding tone and your dog would think you’re mad at him, or you could say “naughty girl” while holding a piece of fish and your cat would think she’s being rewarded.
With that said, our pets can learn to identify and understand many common words used in training exercises. On average, dogs can learn about 100 words whereas cats can understand about 25 to 35 words. This often leads people to believe that dogs are smarter than cats, which would be wrong if you only base their intelligence on understanding. Some people believe cats understand plenty, but choose to ignore us anyway. Maybe cats are just frustrated because their humans don’t listen very well! Cats have been proven to be pretty wordy too when they feel like it!
Here is what we all need to know about the difference between dogs and cats and their communication skills. Dogs might be better listeners and capable of grasping more words, but cats are better talkers and capable of communicating more with their human friends. Dogs may know 100 words, but they can only vocalize about 15 different sounds. Cats may only understand 25 to 35 words, but they can make about 100 different vocalizations. Perhaps cats are desperately trying to make first contact with us, as they only make these sounds around their human friends and not around other cats. And since very few of us even try to train our cats, how do we know what they are truly capable of?
Interestingly, cats and dogs are also entirely capable of understanding more than one language. For example, dogs may be required to understand commands in more than one language if they are to have more than one handler. In military scenarios, dogs are required to understand commands in more than one language. In fact, many English-speaking handlers choose to teach their dogs in German because the language contains more hard consonants than English. Using different languages is also a neat way to differentiate between work and play for the dog.
So I guess it’s a combination of training our pets and really listening to what they are trying to say to us that will help us best connect with them. They are certainly trying to understand our language, so we need to listen more and try to understand their “language” a little better too! And speaking of listening to and understanding our pets, I’m understanding that Mr. Cooper is ready for some playtime now as he’s bringing toy after toy to me and dropping them at my feet! Guess I can’t really miss that hint!
Happy tails to you until we meet again!
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