Sunday 12 July 2020 
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This Girl Taught Her Dog to Talk by Using a Special Soundboard
Ben Pobjie
It’s pretty obvious to us that once dogs learn how to talk, it’s only a matter of time before they rise up and overthrow their human masters, taking their rightful place atop the social ladder. And now, that day has dawned.
Well, OK, it’s only one dog. And whether it’s really “talking” might be debatable. But you can’t deny it’s a disturbing and/or adorable development.
Speech pathologist Christina Hunger – great name – has trained her dog Stella to communicate using human language, a pretty neat trick in anyone’s book. Hunger achieved the momentous feat by designing a special soundboard for her pooch. On the board is an array of big buttons that Stella can press with her paw, each one of which plays a different word, spoken in Hunger or her fiance’s voice. Pressing the buttons to play words like “ball”, “water”, “park”, “want”, and even “happy” and “mad”, Stella can let Hunger know what she wants and how she feels.
It’s a pretty major breakthrough in human-dog relations, and if canine talk hasn’t quite yet reached a Scrappy-Doo level of sophistication, Hunger has already massively surpassed the Lassie model of communication – if they’d had the soundboard back then, Timmy would’ve been rescued from the well so much faster every week.
