I’d say they probably pick up on non-verbal communication much more than verbal. And you can point to exceptional cases, but there’s a pretty wide variation of every kind among dogs, and I’m guessing most dogs aren’t going to have the vocabulary of a marquee herding dog.
My dog would probably pick “stay” out of this and maybe “out”, though when I say “out,” I usually inflect it up, like I do for all my questions.
My favorite little language thing with my dog is, when I see a point of interest, like a squirrel or a another dog, is ask him “Who is it?” and he’ll start looking around. The weird thing is I didn’t teach him this, so either someone else taught him, or “hey look around there’s something you need to see” is just a really easy thing to trigger in dogs.
I’d say they probably pick up on non-verbal communication much more than verbal. And you can point to exceptional cases, but there’s a pretty wide variation of every kind among dogs, and I’m guessing most dogs aren’t going to have the vocabulary of a marquee herding dog.
My dog would probably pick “stay” out of this and maybe “out”, though when I say “out,” I usually inflect it up, like I do for all my questions.
My favorite little language thing with my dog is, when I see a point of interest, like a squirrel or a another dog, is ask him “Who is it?” and he’ll start looking around. The weird thing is I didn’t teach him this, so either someone else taught him, or “hey look around there’s something you need to see” is just a really easy thing to trigger in dogs.