Listen to this episode and find out more about the topics and beings therein at theallusionist.org/lexicat2
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, throw language a bone.
Actually you’ll hear some distant noises of bone-chewing in this episode - it’s dogs, it’s not me - and there are also some sounds of a dog was lolling against the recording equipment - I swear it was a dog, not me. Because, this episode is the second half of the pair about humans and companion animals communicating via buttons programmed with words. In Lexicat part 1 we met science fiction author Mary Robinette Kowal and her cat Elsie, and heard about how they learned to do this, and animal behaviour expert Zazie Todd discussed what animals might be getting from this process of interacting with human language, so I suggest you listen to part 1 before this if you haven’t already heard it.
Note: the Allusionist is not affiliated in any way with any companies that sell communication systems to use with animals, and I have not been paid to feature the people and animals that do use them. I’m just interested in how and why they do it.
Before we get into it, I have a bunch of things to tell you about: it’s the Allusionist’s tenth birthday in January and I’m celebrating with a big live show at the Rio Theatre in Vancouver BC on 12 January 2025, with a special performance of the latest Allusionist live show Souvenirs, about friends and friendship breakups and fonts and the history of the word ‘ass’, plus some special material just for and about Vancouver. I’ve linked to tickets at theallusionist.org/events.
Also go there for dates and times of a special online event this month of December 2024: I’ll be reading the whole of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens over at youtube.com/allusionistshow, I’ll be reading it aloud, you wouldn’t just be watching me quietly turning pages. And this novel is a real banger, it’s so funny, it’s sharp, it’s the “stop hoarding your wealth and ruining lives!” fable for our times, whether or not you’re someone who cares about Christmas. We’re going to have a lot of spooky festive fun. I’d love for you to join me, and the videos will be there for viewing not-live too.
Then for members of the Allusioverse, we’ll be watching the finest film adaptation of A Christmas Carol: The Muppet Christmas Carol, as well as other Winterval-relevant literary adaptations Carol and Die Hard. Yes, Die Hard is a literary adaptation, so there.Also for members of the Allusioverse, Mary Robinette Kowal has agreed to answer your questions about what you hear in this episode and the first part, which is very cool of her, she’s already been in the Allusioverse Discord responding to people. So join this charming and thoughtful community, and watch films and TV with us, and share photos of cookies you’ve made and comics you’ve drawn - or just lurk, basking in the satisfaction of helping to bankroll this independent podcast. You can do any or all of that by going to theallusionist.org/donate.
Content note: this episode contains mentions of Parkinson’s disease, dementia, and death - human and animal death. But no descriptions of death.
On with the show.
HZ: Previously on the Allusionist: Mary Robinette Kowal and her cat Elsie communicate via human language using a system of buttons made by a company called Fluent Pet - no affiliation with this show. The button use is also recorded on camera and in a log. Mary Robinette’s dog Guppy uses the buttons a bit too, mainly to say "outside!" and "friend!" but Elsie has currently 124 word buttons arranged on hexagonal tiles in different colours, each button programmed with Mary Robinette’s voice saying a word in English.
HZ: So while she was learning, while she was acquiring all these buttons - because 120 is a lot, it's a lot to keep track of just in layout - how is she recognizing them? Do you have any idea?
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: We don't know. this is one of the things that's really fascinating and we talk about a lot. Fluent pet in particular, when they started out, the tiles were patterned in order to give the animals an easy way to recognize what was what. And then several people didn't like the patterns, and so they painted their tiles a solid colour, and the animals continued using them with no hesitation.
So then, then we thought, okay, well, it's spatial. It's where the button is in relation to other buttons. But we will rearrange boards and some learners can't handle that, but you can rearrange a board, they will continue to use the buttons. I had the buttons up on the bed once because we were vacuuming, and the tiles were in random sequence, and Elsie said something like, "loud device concerned," and, I mean, reasonable, reasonable; but she found the buttons that she wanted. We thought it might be smell, but I have replaced one button with a new button and she continues using it, so we don't know. And then the other thing that happens, which makes everyone go "We have no idea" is that in the dog community, you'll get a bunch of dogs that will get together where they each have their own boards, and the dogs will begin using each other's boards.
HZ: Hmm. Accurately?
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: Accurately.
HZ: All these buttons are labeled, so the obvious explanation is that the dogs and cats can read.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: Clearly. Clearly that's the only possible explanation.
HZ: I did witness this very thing happening shortly after: that evening, two dogs, Parker and Bastian - and their humans Sascha and Joelle - came to visit, and Parker immediately ran over to Elsie's button board and started using it without hesitation.
SASCHA CRASNOW: So not all dogs will talk in front of everyone - and cats as well - and not all will use each other's boards. But Parker sees every new board as an expansion pack, as an opportunity to try out new buttons. So she walked in and pressed "frustrated" a whole bunch. And once she's pressed it once, she clearly knows that that's where that word is, and that's a word she has on her board, so she knows that word. And then she found the "outside" button, so then she was pressing "frustrated outside". After she pressed frustrated outside, she walked to the door in the room that was closed. She didn't know it was on the other side, but she sees a closed door, and she thinks, "this probably leads to outside." She's incorrect; but the idea that she's pressing these buttons and learning where they are on a new board and also hearing words she's familiar with and then responding to them as such, even though it's not her board.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: Yeah.
ZAZIE TODD: That's amazing. Yeah, I would have loved to have seen that.
HZ: That’s animal behaviour expert Zazie Todd; we’ll be hearing more from her in a bit.
HZ: So I've got a gentle soundtrack of dogs chewing on the chews. And I have three dog friends, and two new humans.
JOELLE ANDRES: My name is Joelle Andres, and this is my puppy Bastian.
SASCHA CRASNOW: And I'm Sascha Crasnow, and this is my dog Parker.
HZ: How long have each of you been communicating with human language with the dogs in the ways that you do?
SASCHA CRASNOW: So Parker has been using buttons to communicate for about two and a half years, since she was six months old.
JOELLE ANDRES: And Bastian has been learning since June 2020, so we're approaching his fourth year. He was two when we started.
HZ: Now that he's been learning for four years, what kinds of things are you teaching him now?
JOELLE ANDRES: His newest buttons: we just gave him, actually, colours. We gave him yellow and blue, which are two of the colours he was learning to discern earlier later last year.
[An animal hits a couple of word buttons; people laugh.]
Last year was talking about places, stores, restaurants, things like that; now I want to get more into specifically describing objects or activities.
HZ: What kinds of conversations do you have with him about restaurants?
JOELLE ANDRES: It's usually us communicating that we're going to go to a restaurant with him, and then sometimes he'll opt in or out of that, if he knows that he doesn't want to go out. The other night we were out in Nashville and we were having a conversation about going out, and we asked him if he wanted to go and he hit "bed" several times, so we left him home that night.
HZ: It's very relatable.
JOELLE ANDRES: Yeah. I mean Nashville's very loud and "quiet", "sound" and "bed" were his big themes in Nashville.
HZ: And Parker can do jokes, right?
SASCHA CRASNOW: Yeah, she's definitely got a sense of humour. Her favourite button is "poop". And she uses it a variety of ways, including making jokes. She has some comedic timing. If there's kind of a pause, she'll press it for a laugh and kind of look at you. So we've definitely had her do that a few times.
HZ: Classic.
SASCHA CRASNOW: I recently gave her an “ugh” button to try and get her to stop using "poop" in that way, but for example, if I'm doing something in the other room, like making some noise hanging like a picture and she doesn't like it, she'll press "poop" to express her dissatisfaction. Or if I keep saying no that we can't do something that she wants, she'll sometimes press “poop” again to to say she's none too thrilled.
HZ: I find that generally the dogs I've known are quite good at indicating when they're excited to go for a walk or when they want to go outside. So, what kinds of things have you learnt that you wouldn't have expected to know just from spending time with your dog and knowing their personality? What does them communicating using English words add for you?
JOELLE ANDRES: I think it's more of the timing of things. We were feeding Bastian on a schedule, and we found that when we let him advocate for when he wanted to eat, he was asking for food at different times. So we changed his feeding schedule.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: Yeah, I'll say that Elsie also, I changed her feeding schedule because of buttons.
JOELLE ANDRES: I also found out that he really likes ice cream trucks, which I probably wouldn't have known. So the things that he comes home and talks about are things that I may not have put together. So the ice cream truck came about because we heard an ice cream truck going down the block and he hit "fridge car" - and I wouldn't have known what he was listening for at that moment. So we ended up taking him to get a little pup cup.
SASCHA CRASNOW: Parker, she just gets more agency over kind of what her life looks like. She also likes to know the names of people and things. She has asked the name of my dad before; she has asked what yarn is before. She chooses her next buttons sometimes by just asking me what the name for things are. So the fact that she just cares about those things are things I wouldn't know otherwise - she's particularly fond of my parents, and she will ask about them. She loves my dad and asked his name before he had a “dad” button when he was around, and asked about him after he left. She sometime last year also asked to FaceTime my mom, and she said "mom device". And “device” is things like the phone, anything electronic. And so I FaceTimed my mom and she came and said hello. The fact that they think about people and other animals when they're not there, whether they're kind of permanently gone or just temporarily gone, is really interesting and also very much, I think, serves to debunk this idea that they only live in the present.
HZ: Or that they're only food-motivated.
SASCHA CRASNOW: Also that, right? They care about things other than food. The things she's talking about are so much more expansive than food. And that's the thing about, even with 120-odd words, it's still only 120 words, right, for a language that we use extensively more than that on a daily basis.
HZ: Yeah, I suppose they've got to get very creative to use 120 words in so many different ways.
SASCHA CRASNOW: And they are. They're really creative. That's also something that's so fascinating, is just how how innovative they are at figuring out ways to talk about their world with the limited words that they do have.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: Yeah, one of my favoUrite Elsie stories is: you know how cats like the reflective - so my cell phone was reflecting on the ceiling, and she jumps up onto the back of the chair, bats at it, jumps down and is like, "want" and jumps back on the chair, bats at it, then comes back down and says, "Laser bird." And, and I'm like, "Yes, that's a great thing to call it."
JOELLE ANDRES: For us it was the word "fridge" and "water". We would reinforce the word "water" by taking the water out of the fridge and refilling Bastian's water bowl, and he began asking for "water treats". And I was like, I don't know what a water treat is, is it ice cream? Is it something liquid? I have no idea. So I would go and try to find things and he wasn't interested in any of them. And eventually after his persistence, I realized that he was calling the fridge "water" because that's where the water was coming out of. Every time he hit "water" I went to the fridge and took out the water. And we have these like venison jerky bits from this local farm, then when we open the package, it has to be refrigerated and they're his absolute favourite. So that became the start of our “fridge” button. So then he stopped hitting "water" when he had a fridge button and he asked for "fridge treats."
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: Yeah, that's one of the things that always fascinates me, is that you can see that they've made a connection, but like, which piece of it is important to them is the piece that I'm like, I don't know why this is the important part to you.
SASCHA CRASNOW: Yeah, yeah.
HZ: Animal behaviour expert Zazie Todd:
ZAZIE TODD: I think it gives us lots of really interesting questions to ask about what they understand exactly from these words. But at the same time, of course, they are communicating with us with body language all the time, and it would be nice if we were better at understanding what they're trying to tell us with that too.
HZ: Yeah, what's a good way to learn about that? Because what if all this time they've been wagging their tails and we're like, “Oh, they're happy!” and they're like, "No, that's not it! You're missing it!"
ZAZIE TODD: But sometimes we are missing it! It's not necessarily a happy sign. So a tail wag would be a happy sign if it's really wide and loose, and especially if they're wiggling their body with it. But if it's kind of an upright, narrow tail wag, then that's not happy at all. That's actually perhaps they don't like you and they might even be thinking of seeing you off. It could be seen as a threat. So it's important to pay attention, and the more we pay attention, the more we learn. It really helps to look at other people's pets. Like if I'm out and about on the street and I see a dog, I'm always looking at that dog to see: is that dog happy? What is that dog kind of thinking, as far as I can tell? So I think we learn a lot from watching other animals that aren't our own as well.
And it takes practice. It does take practice. And I think it's easy for people to recognize when the animal is happy. And it's not so easy to spot the signs that they're stressed or unhappy or showing signs of discontent in some way.
HZ: Yes. Are there some common signs of stress or discomfort that we should be looking out for and may not know about?
ZAZIE TODD: For a dog, some of the signs of stress might be a low posture; they might be licking their lips and there's not food coming; they might be yawning - they're not tired, they're actually stressed, but people often think that they're tired. Or they might be looking away or trying to move their body away; or they might lift one paw, especially in a little dog they'll kind of lift one paw and it's almost as if they're asking for your help to resolve a situation for them.
Cats, you can get a lip lick in cats too. The tail is a good one to pay attention to in cats because the more the tail swishes, the more aroused the cat is. Like if you're petting the cat and the cat starts staring at you, that's not a good sign. If they're staring at your hand, they might be about to bite your hand next to make you stop, for example, and the skin rippling can be a sign of arousal as well. And the more kind of tight and enclosed the body language, the more stressed they're likely to be. So a relaxed cat will be perhaps spread on their side: you can see their tummy; the tail is away from their body. And if they're stressed they'll be really tucked up tight and close with the tail in close to the body and the paws tucked in too.
HZ: Always feel like it's kind of an honour when a cat shows me its tummy.
ZAZIE TODD: Yes. Unfortunately many people make the common mistake of thinking that the cat wants their tummy to be petted and this is not what they want.
HZ: They just want you to look.
ZAZIE TODD: Yes!
HZ: They're like, "I'm proud of this. Check this out."
HZ: Is there a particular grammar or word order that you use, or is it just dependent on how the respective animal ends up using the buttons?
JOELLE ANDRES: For a while, we introduced the “ouch” button to Bastian, and if I called it "belly ouch", he would start to, like, ears back, lick his lips, even if he had a stomach ache, I think that he started to get a visceral reaction from just the phrase. And I found that eventually it transferred to the word "belly" as well. And one of the animal trainers that I've worked with said, "You know, you should flip it like they do in the romance languages. Do 'ouch belly' so that the ‘ouch’ is in the forefront and it helps them not generalize the word belly with pain." And I've only been doing it maybe for the last few months, but it took a while to undo the triggers that came from the word "belly."
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: I also noticed that Elsie tends to - not always, but what I think she is doing is the important word and then modifiers to try to get more specific about it. So I would say "loud sound" and she is much more likely to say "sound loud". Unless she's just mad at you and then she just goes straight to "loud".
HZ: How do you tell if she's hit a button by accident?
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: The motion for an intentional press versus not an intentional press is very different. Most of the time with Elsie, the accidents are back foot. She has this bum leg and she doesn't always have control of where she's putting it down. She has done the occasional intentional back foot press, but it's really clear because she's standing in place, she's not moving and she's feeling with the back foot and then presses. But it's usually, you can see her moving across the board and picking a button. Sometimes, because she doesn't really have a backspace, I have given her an “oops” button, which is not actually working right now - oops - ironically. Sometimes if she presses a button and then presses another one that's right next to it fairly there'll be like an ear flick back, like, no, that wasn't what I meant.
ZAZIE TODD: I guess if you want a couple of other cat body language signals: cats have something called the tail up, which is when the cat is stuck up, and usually it's kind of like a little curl at the end, so it's like a question mark. And they put their tail up like that when they're approaching another cat who they like or a human who they like. So that's a nice affiliative signal from a cat. And another nice affiliative signal is when they do a slow blink, just a really slow blink and then often it's followed by a little look away.
And what's really nice about this is that scientists tested what happens if they slow blink at cats. And so for a lot of people who work with cats in shelter and rescue, you get used to going into the room and you see the cat, and you know that you mustn't stare at the cat because they don't like it, so you do a little slow blink and look away and hope that it will tell the cat that you're being friendly to them. So it's really nice that scientists actually went and studied this, and they slow blinked at lots of cats and they got slow blinked back.
HZ: So you can you can exchange the slow blink, but it's harder for a human to do the tail thing back at them.
ZAZIE TODD: Yeah, we can't do that one at all.
HZ: Aah! Useless!
HZ: What I'm noticing from the language buttons is they give the animals some tools for training their humans. Knowing that they can hit a button or combination of buttons to elicit specific responses from the humans is a power Elsie has harnessed to tell lies.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: Elsie does lie. I had just given her the "sleepy" button and I was in the kitchen. I was making lunch, and she goes to the button board and she says, "bedroom, sleepy, lie down." I'm like, "What a great contextual use. Yes, absolutely. Let's go take a little nap," and walk into the bedroom. And my cat doesn't come in, and I come back - and she's eating my cheese sandwich. And she has, multiple times, tried to send me out of the room in order to get my food. So when I'm making lunch and she starts talking to me and it's something like, “Go check the litter box” or something like that, food goes into the microwave and then I investigate whatever's happening.
HZ: How did that make you feel? You're like, I can never trust her again?
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: I don't know. I was like, oh, right. Cat.
SASCHA CRASNOW: Parker will definitely ask me to do things that she doesn't necessarily want, to get me to get up and engage with her. And the way I can usually tell, she'll ask me to do something and then she'll just pick up a toy and look over her shoulder, she runs away, like, "Uh, while you're up, maybe we… play some chase?"
HZ: What kinds of reactions do you get from people when they learn that you've taught your animal friends to use the buttons?
SASCHA CRASNOW: It's a range of things. Some people are just really excited and - well I would say a lot of people are really excited by it and find it interesting, if not unbelievable. A lot of people say, "Oh your dog must be like smart” or like something particular or special about your dog. “My dog would just ask for food constantly,” “My dog would nag me all the time,” “My dog manipulates me enough as it is," which I'm just kind of like, well, if your dog is already doing that, then this isn't going to make it worse. It's just going to make it more specific, and also create a two way street, right? When you're first teaching it, yeah, you're doing everything every single time to reinforce it, but then it's not like an on demand system. It's it's a way to communicate. So if it's, “I want this now,” it's like, "Well, right now we can't do that right right now. I'm busy, but we can do it later," or "we can do something else instead." And so it's, you know, It's a conversation. Parker when she was a puppy would always drag books off the shelf, to get my attention when she was frustrated, and now she just tantrums on the buttons if she's frustrated, which is much more productive because we can at least have a conversation about it and I can give her something else to satisfy her. And so I think the idea that the buttons like can create behaviour is a misunderstanding of what's going on. It can, I think, mediate behaviour.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: It doesn't change their personality.
SASCHA CRASNOW: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
JOELLE ANDRES: I'm just thinking about what you're talking about and how many things I thought Bastian enjoyed until we got the buttons. And I was like, "I'm doing this great thing, I'm taking him camping!" And I was convinced he loved camping. And the first time we took the buttons camping, he was asking about the fridge. He was like, "where's the fridge? " I'm like, “We didn't pack it!” And he was like, "Where's home?" And I'm like, “We also didn't pack that.” And it became very evident that he does not like camping.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: Most people are incredulous. some people are immediately into it. Other people think that it's much more of a, "Oh, your cat presses buttons on command." I'm like, "have you - have you met a cat?"
HZ: Typically obedient animals.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: And I think one of the big differences with a cat versus a dog is that people know that dogs can be trained to do things and people assume that cats cannot, even though Elsie actually has more tricks than Guppy does. So when you hear that a cat is doing a thing, they're like, "Oh, that is something that cat is definitely choosing to engage in." One of my favorite research papers talked about how they had 12 cats engaged in the study originally, but one of them escaped through the ceiling. So you know that if a cat is doing a thing, it is their choice and it is fully intentional. And when I start talking about the kinds of things that Elsie says, I think I get more buy-in than I would if I were talking about a dog doing the same thing. I noticed that I don't get the kinds of comments that I see people getting on the dog accounts, like, "Oh, you just trained the cat to do this. This is all fake." Obviously if you've ever met a cat, you know that this is -
JOELLE ANDRES: Much less biddable.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: Yes. The negative comments that I get are that it's just random, and that I am seeing patterns that aren't there. We had someone over and they were interested in the buttons. They were like, "Oh, that's really cool. That's really neat that you've got that," and we were talking, and Elsie had not said anything, but she just looked at them both, went to the button board, made eye contact with one of them in particular and said, "Loud.”
HZ: Scathing!
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: And then just walked away. And they were like, "Oh, I do actually get told all the time that I have a very loud voice," and like lowered their voice. Her husband said, "That is the moment when I became a believer."
HZ: I don't know why indictments like that feel worse coming from animals than humans.
SASCHA CRASNOW: Because you know that they're not going - well, I shouldn't say they're not going to lie, clearly Elsie...
HZ: They're not going to lie to make us feel better.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: No, no, that's correct.
JOELLE ANDRES: I think that there's always going to be skeptics. I'm more than happy to engage in conversation with someone that has healthy skepticim, because there's always room for improvement in what we're doing. But it's when you get people, they're just nasty for the sake of being nasty. My kitty Hallie, when she passed, the day before she passed, she hit "All done now, bye". and people are on the internet telling me that I staged it, I was abusing my cat and all kinds of things. No one was even home at the time.
SASCHA CRASNOW: What's so frustrating about folks that are creating content that is just for fun, because they're not creating content as if this is genuine communication, they're using something that's made for greater agency and actually denying that opportunity to those animals for the sake of making content that is, you know, quote unquote “funny”. Most of the time it's misogynist and curse words and things like that. I personally think a lot of those accounts are just cheap jokes.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: When you are living with this, there's a lot of ways that you're like, oh, this is obviously not a real thing, especially when there's a punchline and lots of cutting. It's like this is obviously a scripted content.
SASCHA CRASNOW: I don't think it's that funny, but then it's also doing harm with this tool that is really giving animals that live in our lives as captive animals more agency, and instead using it as like a tool to gain internet fame.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: If they had spent the same amount of time teaching their animal to communicate with the buttons as to press them for funsies, they could have this deeper relationship with their animal. And, I feel a little bit mad, but mostly I feel sad.
There's a lot of nuance that I didn't know existed. And not just talking about like, Oh, I can't read the way they move their tail - I'm talking about those things where I would have, based on her body language, thought that she was adjusted and happy, and then she says something with the buttons that is counter to that. Like we had another cat, Helix, and when he died, she started talking about him and using emotion words that she hadn't used. And I wouldn't have guessed that she was that attached to Helix before, or that she was grieving as much as she was. There were some sounds that she made right after he was gone - she was alone in the apartment, so there's no human, she's not responding, she's not going from a cue - and she just went to her button board and pressed "sad." And then went and lay down in the sun. And I was like, "Oh, I'm never leaving home again!" But it was that kind of thing, which, just looking at her body language without the buttons, I would be like, “oh, look, there's my cat, and she's lying down in the sun. What a lovely, pleasant day for her.” And with the buttons, I'm like, “Oh, no, she's, she's lonely.”
HZ: She's feeling stuff.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: Yeah. She asks about people who are not here.
ZAZIE TODD: Animals seem to grieve their companions, and cats do miss their companions when they're not there. And I love those stories actually. I think animals do have a sense of time. I used to use the word "soon" with my dog Bodger, and I used to feel like he knew what that meant. So I might say, "We'll go for a walk soon," if he was looking expectant for a walk, and I felt like he knew what that meant. Or if we had people coming round who he knew, I would say their names and say "soon" and he would go to the window as if he was waiting for them. So I felt like he knew what it meant. But of course, to prove it scientifically is another matter. And quite difficult to show exactly what his concept of soon was and what length of time it might be.
And there was even a time when we had to be out of the house for longer than we'd intended to be, so we were actually coming back quite late, and I was a bit worried about him being home on his own. So when we were ten minutes away from home, I actually rang and spoke to the answerphone and said, "Bodger, we'll be home soon!" And I felt when we came home, like he was different than I thought he would have been with us being away for that length of time, so I felt like he understood - but I can't prove it. And it may simply be that he heard my voice and he liked hearing my voice and it didn't make him feel alone. But, I mean, we know that they have a sense of time because if you take your dog for a walk at the same time every day, they will start coming and looking for you at that time or they will even bring you the leash. So they do have a sense of time.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: I have been told, I don't know how many times, that cats have like a five minute memory, or something ridiculous like that. Which is obviously, obviously very false, and like this person has never spent time with a cat - because they can hold a grudge.
I knew that they had emotions; I knew that they had opinions; I knew that they could feel sad; they could feel angry. But I didn't know that they had like this inner life where they were thinking about things like after after you all left yesterday, Elsie came out and was like “delicious quiet”, like, “Oh, baby…” Even with this lifelong love of animals, I had absolutely bought into the thing of, oh, once the immediate stimulus is passed, they're fine - and hadn't thought about the way things linger and they continue to think about it.
JOELLE ANDRES: Bastian's my first dog, and a lot of just learning about dog behaviour in general has come from the buttons and noticing his body language and the congruencies and things like that. I think it's also about trusting what they're actually telling you, too. There have been times where he's hit something on the board and I'm thinking he wants something else. There was one night in particular: I had taken him for a walk, he went to the bathroom, came back inside, and I asked him if he wanted to go to the store. And he said, no, he wanted to go to the bathroom again. And I took him to the store - and he pooped in the store. Fortunately, it was PetSmart, so it's not the first time that that's happened in there.
HZ: Communicating with her companion animals has changed how Mary Robinette communicates with humans too. Including herself.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: Sometimes Elsie does not have a word, or we're away from the button board, so what you do is something called two hand choice. You offer two hands, you'll say, like, "Do you want to go inside or do you to spend more time outside? Inside/outside?" And they'll tap with paw or nose boop the one that they want to do.
It’s something that I have begun doing with myself: so I have ADHD, and executive function is real hard sometimes. And I've begun when I'm trying to trying to move forward with the project, I've begun two hand choicing myself.
And so one of the things that I've learned with doing the two hand choice with the dogs, or when I'm trying to guess a context with Elsie, if I've offered a choice and it was the wrong choice, that I don't offer that choice anymore. I'm like, "Okay, you have two choices in front of you. You can answer the emails, or you can take a nap. But taking a nap has not served you anymore, so you can answer the emails, or you can do the dishes. Two hand choice." And so I've begun using that framing for myself. Mixed results, in much of the same way it is with the animals sometimes. But that kind of framing has been a thing that has been happening with my brain.
For me, it's reducing the executive function load, the decision-making load, by trimming it down to two, and also by saying, "That hasn't served you before. That was a bad choice." I'm always saying to Guppy and Elsie, "Good choices." And I have also found myself saying that to myself. It's like, "Good choice. You did open the email; good choices."
HZ: It's like a flowchart in real time.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: Mm-hmm, yeah.
HZ: A few months before we met, Mary Robinette's mother Marilyn died. She had had Parkinson's Disease, which is what my father died of two years ago, with some pretty brutal dementia in his latter years, and I wish I had had this conversation with Mary Robinette while my dad was still alive.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: There are lot of ways that I was not expecting working with Elsie to be helpful with my mom's decline. My mother had Parkinson's. And Parkinson's does a lot of things - people focus on the tremoring, but one of the things it does is it slows down the processing speed. You would say something and she wouldn't respond, and then you'd fill the silence and it didn't give my mom's space to express herself. And with Elsie, one of the things that they talk about is it can take five to forty seconds for a cat respond, and so I would count. And I started doing that with with Mom, where she would say something, or I would ask her a question, and I would just start to count in my head. That gave her time to respond to me. It gave time for her to find the word, make the connections, and just to talk, like just to gather her energy and talk. So that was one thing, was just reminding myself: slow down, count, just count to forty.
The other one was context and how Elsie would say something and she's clearly trying to communicate something to me, but I don't know what. And so I would have to look at context what we were talking about, and try to sort of piece it together: sometimes super clear, but again changes based on context.
So my mom, in the last month: Parkinson's often comes with what we call the dementia expansion pack. What happened with mom wasn't that she didn't know who people were she just became completely unmoored from time. So sometimes she was still in the 1980s working on an arts council grant; other times she had fast forwarded it, and we were getting ready for Christmas. So it was just meeting her where she was.
HZ: For my dad it was the 1970s and he had to get to London for a very important art event, or to watch a rugby match. And we'd have to say, "It's ok dad, it's Tuesday, the rugby's not on on Tuesdays." Which he did remember, because some of the last information to stay with my dad was rugby-related.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: There were two things that I remember where I felt like I was using the Elsie skills. One was she, she kept saying things like “Why don't we move the marble-topped dresser in here to put the food on when the company comes,” or “Let's do this thing for when the company comes,” “Let's do that for when company comes,” and the company wasn’t coming. I would always just treat it like improv and I would just roll with her, but I'm like, why does she doing this? What contextually is she trying communicate tools she has? And I realized that she had always liked house kept a certain way, and - excuse me, she did correct me on this: mom liked the house the way it should be kept.
HZ: Oh yeah. As decreed by neutral forces.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: Yes, with the international convention. And I looked at the house, and I'm like, "Yeah, no, the house is actually a little bit of a mess right now," because we were full-time caregiving. And so I hired cleaners to come in and clean, and she stopped asking to make changes for the company that was coming.
And then the other one was she kept saying she needed to go shopping, she needed to get something very special, over and over again, wanting to go shopping. It was really hard for her to leave the house. I knew that that was going to be like a disaster trip, it would not be fun for her, actually, if we went to do it. I would have been fine with the stress for myself, but I knew what her body was doing to her at that point. So again, I'm like, okay, well, what is she actually saying? And it clicked when I walked into the bedroom and my dad - who loves her, but, you know, is an eight-year-old boy - had just put her in one of his fiddling t-shirts. She was a woman who always was so careful with her appearance. And I'm like, "Oh, she's saying she doesn't like the way she looks." And so I bought a bunch of adaptive clothing, things that were meant for Parkinson's patients, wheelchair patients, that did not look like hospital gowns, they all just looked like dresses - because they were, they were just dresses for wheelchair users - and got a box for her of those and she stopped asking to go shopping.
What I started doing with mom was trying to look for the context and the emotional truth that she was experiencing. And I don't know that I would have done that if I hadn't just spent like two years working with this cat.
HZ: Also, two hand choice came in useful again.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: One of the other things Parkinson's does is that it steals your voice over time. That accelerated during her last week, really. And so when we were getting dressed at first it would be like, "What do you want to wear today, mom?" And the slowness of the brain, the fact that she was from time, all of that meant that she would say, "Well, what do you think I should wear?" Which was her way of masking. And so I started just holding up dresses. You know, what do you want to wear today, Mom? And she would pick one. And first it was, you know, the blue flowered one, she would tell me. Then as her voice to go, she would just point. And then she would just look. But what that means is that on the day she died, she was wearing a dress that she picked out.
And that's a gift that I could not have given her if I hadn't learned the tools from this ridiculous talking cat situation. But you know, that giving them agency - we say all the time with the learners: presume competence. And yeah, all of the times that she was unmoored from time and trying communicate, all times it's like, well, did she really look at this dress? Yeah, she did. If you presume competence and you pay attention to everything happening and give them time to respond, she had grace and dignity on her last day.
HZ: And choice.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: And choice, yeah; and joy too. And, she - she passed the morning after their 58th wedding anniversary. She hung on for that. Which is also why it was so important for her to be wearing a dress that she wanted to be wearing. It's something I was very glad I could do for her.
HZ: Yeah, what's striking with both her and Elsie is that it's like you're going over a bridge to where they live.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: hmm. Yeah, that's exactly, exactly what it is. Elsie is coming over the bridge to me by just agreeing to use these buttons. And so I have to figure out what she wants and she means. But also, Within the context of looking for those patterns, like, if mom had said, “I want to go shopping once” okay. But it was the pattern of it. And with Elsie, you know, sometimes she'll say something and she's just experimenting with the words just to see what they'll do. So the danger is inserting my wants and my wishes and my thoughts in. And it's really hard as a human who is pattern seeking creature to not - there are things that I'm like, I really want that to have a meaning. No, she's a cat. What is an important thing to a cat? Probably kibble. Maybe murder.
HZ: And what's been the best thing you think about this whole process for you?
SASCHA CRASNOW: I get to talk to my dog. Honestly, like that's something I've probably wanted since I was a kid. And I get to talk with her and I get to help her live her best life. And probably a slight second to that is just the community of people who I've met through it. It's just this whole community of people who care deeply about their animals and and learning more about them and are interested in expanding knowledge and learning more, and I think that's just so wonderful to have met people who are live all over the world and you know come from all sorts of backgrounds and yet all have this really powerful thing in common.
JOELLE ANDRES: I would agree with that. The community is huge, too, because it's a lot of troubleshooting and problem-solving, it's interesting to see which animals use similar combinations. Like I think Buster or Juno had used "squeaker car" after Parker had used "squeaker car" for ambulance, and there's two dogs on opposite sides of the country that are both using the same combination for the same meaning. And so almost creating like a dictionary of sorts of what it could potentially mean when they press a pattern. And just having each other to cheer each other on also, because there are a lot of skeptics. It refocuses you on the way that we all started because we wanted to learn to communicate with our pet, not because we wanted to become internet famous. Because at the end of the day, I'm still going to keep communicating with my dog using the buttons, whether or not we're posting it online.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: Give it a try with your learner. Even if you approach it just as an enrichment activity just as a game, it's still worthwhile, just to see what will happen.
JOELLE ANDRES: And I think that, too, sometimes people see on the internet dogs with 122 buttons and think that, “I don't have the time for that,” but you don't need to have that. You could just have four, you could just have twelve, you could just have one. I think that going into it, just open-minded and not knowing where it could go is the first step.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: I think actually that's one of the bigger changes, is that I used to just be able to talk to Elsie to mask the fact that I was talking to myself, and now I'm like, “Oh no, you understand more of this than I think you do.”
JOELLE ANDRES: She knows all your secrets.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: She does. And, and worse, she can tell people.
And then I have this additional lens because I'm a science fiction writer and I am having communication every day with a non human intelligence. And it has changed the way I think about what happens if we ever make contact with extraterrestrial life. It's changed the way I think about what are core important things? Because these creatures are not human, but the things that are important to them align so closely to the things that are important to us: you know, love and safety, security, routine, concern about wellbeing, like empathy, like the fact that we're seeing that coming from these wonderful little tiny monsters, it makes me think more about like what it means to be human. Because I have this contrast this every day where it's like, you aren't human and yet we have this stuff in common. And yes, Elsie, I too like delicious quiet.
HZ: I should take that as a cue to pack up and leave you in your delicious quiet.
HZ: Today you heard from Mary Robinette Kowal, Zazie Todd, Sascha Crasnow and Joelle Andres. And thanks to Elsie the cat, and the dogs Guppy, Bastian and Parker.
Zazie Todd is an animal behaviour expert and author: her books include Wag, Purr, and her latest is Bark, the Science of Helping Your Anxious, Fearful or Reactive Dog. Find out more about her work at companionanimalpsychology.com.
Mary Robinette Kowal is a puppeteer, cohost of the podcast Writing Excuses, and multi-award-winning novelist. Her newest novel The Martian Contingency. Find Mary Robinette and her work at maryrobinettekowal.com.
And you can find Joelle Andres and her dog Bastian and Sascha Crasnow and her dog Parker on Instagram and YouTube; I’ll link to all the episode’s guests at theallusionist.org/lexicat2.
Next episode is the annual end of year Bonus episode - I love these, I save up stuff all year for them, where the guests have said very interesting things that weren’t language-related or didn’t fit into their episode. But in the Bonuses, we get all that! And in there you’ll hear from Zazie Todd again; she will advise on how if you want to change your dog’s name, how to get them to recognise the new one. So come back next time for that.
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
yarborough, noun: (in bridge or whist) a hand with no card above a nine. Origin 20th century: named after an Earl of Yarborough, said to have bet 1,000 to 1 against its occurrence.
Try using ‘yarborough’ in an email today.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman, on the unceded ancestral and traditional territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Martin Austwick provided production and editorial assistance, and also composed the music. Find his songs at palebirdmusic.com.
Thanks to Scott Newman and Jenny Mills from On Air Festival, Erika Ensign, and Mary Robinette Kowal’s family: Ken Harrison, Rob Kowal, Jamie and Steve Harrison, as well as Elsie, Guppy and Todd.
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Find @allusionistshow on Instagram, Facebook, BlueSky and YouTube, and I’m keen to hear what you think after you’ve listened to an episode, so do let me know.
And you can hear or read every episode, get more information about the topics and the guests who talk about them, and see the full dictionary entries for the randomly selected words, and keep track of the events that are coming up like the 10th birthday live show and Christmas Carol readings, and donate to the show and become a member of the Allusioverse - all of it is at the show’s forever home theallusionist.org.
BUTTON: All done.
