I know, I know, you probably already think you can, but I mean like really talk to them. In the long-running debate on how dogs can speak with humans, new research from December says that they can, at least in two word combos using buttons. Let's get into it. The team from the University of California, San Diego, were inspired by people posting videos training their dogs on soundboards. They have a bunch of dog-friendly buttons that recite a pre-recorded word when pressed, and that's who the researchers went to for this study. They reached out to people with soundboard-trained dogs and had them manually report through a phone app whenever they or their dog pressed buttons on the soundboard. They did want to focus on dogs with some reasonable experience using the soundboards, so they limited their data set to those who submitted at least 200 interactions. I know that sounds like a lot, but they had 152 dogs that were active enough to make the cut. And in just under two years, it gave the researchers a massive data set of almost 200,000 so-called dog pressing events. They published their work in the journal Scientific Reports. Now, the dog parents didn't change anything about how they labeled the buttons for their dog. The owners got to decide the button labels and layouts for their own soundboards. But the researchers did group the button words into broad categories when doing their analysis, like food or play, for example. Perhaps unsurprisingly, some of the most pressed buttons were for things like go outside, treat, food, and play. The data showed something exciting. When dogs press buttons on these soundboards, it wasn't accidental. And remember, they captured what the owners pressed too, so they could tell they were doing more than just copying their owner. But what does it actually mean? To figure that out, the researchers looked at how dogs paired button presses, like pressing food and play together, and then they compared those combinations to random patterns. Some combos popped up more often than others, more so than you'd expect just by random chance. But of course, not all combos were winners. Later and love you were rare. This is called interspecies communication, when two species, like human and dog, find ways to talk to each other. And the field is riddled with controversy and backtracking. Take parrots, for instance. They can say really impressive things, but in a lot of those cases, research points to those vocalizations being more mimics of human speech. use of soundboards in this study helps avoid this, but whether the humans selectively recorded when they were impressed with something their dog did, it's still a point where bias could be leaking in. Overall, the findings that these weren't just accidental presses, they weren't imitations, and didn't seem random for most dogs tells us there could be something going on here. But some questions remain, like how much do the dogs understand what's happening? Is it just some very lucky pattern matching? The team said next they'll be testing if the dogs look at their owners for cues when pressing the buttons, indicating that they get that there's some communication going on. And if they respond with context cues that make sense and are specific, like play bowing only when they hit the play button, then that'll be a good indication too. There are some gifted word learning dogs that can learn and remember words for hundreds or thousands of objects. So maybe it'll be species specific. And for the cat lovers, Taylor, girl, you listening? Cats have been found to follow human pointing. They can tell whether a human is paying attention to them and to decide whether they should engage, but only modestly respond to emotional cues like whether their owner is happy or angry. Ladies and gentlemen, we are now boarding Group A. Please have your boarding passes ready to scan. If your phone is cracked, old, or was chewed up by your chihuahua travel companion, please refrain from holding up the line. And instead, simply go to Verizon and trade in any phone in any condition from one of their top brands for the new Samsung Galaxy S25 Plus with Galaxy AI on Unlimited Ultimate. And watch or tap. Also, on now. Service plan required for watch or tap. Trade in and additional terms apply. See Verizon.com for details. The subject of emotional support animals has become somewhat controversial in the past few years. You might remember the emotional support peacock that went viral in 2018 for not being allowed on a United flight, for example. Sidebar, I think about that story all the time. Anyways, let's get back on track. There's a ton of anecdotal evidence that contact with emotional support animals is beneficial to mental well-being, but there are still those out there who think that the registration and proliferation of emotional support animals has gone too far. And you might be thinking, Sam, this is a science show. Where is the scientific evidence to back up the need for these animals? Well, lucky you because Dr. Janet Hoy-Gurlach joins Curiosity Weekly to talk about that very subject. She's a licensed clinical social worker and the director of veterinary social work at Open Door Veterinary Collective. Just a few years ago, she and her team published a pilot study that provided the first peer-reviewed scientific evidence suggesting emotional support animals may benefit people's mental health.

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kind of wild that this study was the first of its kind, and it wasn't even all that long ago. Thanks so much for joining me, Dr. Hoy Gerlach. To kick things off, I want to break down some key terms here. We often hear about emotional support animals, we hear about service animals, and then there are just regular pets, but they're not all the same. So could you explain the differences between these and why it's important to make those distinctions?