Catch Blue in action on Instagram @phoebe_unphrased and YouTube @PhoebeUnphrased.
Q. Who is/are this/these learners of yours?
Phoebe is a 4 year old Poodle ShihTzu Mix who was rescued out of a hoard one year ago. When I got her, she had been severely neglected and had very limited communication skills or experience in the world. She had never been outside.
Q. How long did it take for them to press their first button?
Due to Phoebe’s lack of prior learning skills, it took three weeks of clicker training for her to be willing to touch her paw on anything. But, being highly food motivated, once she learned that pressing a button gave her control over food, she was off to the races!
Q. What have the buttons revealed about your learners that you wouldn’t have known without the buttons?
Gosh, many things! Here are a few in no particular order:
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Our other dog is a reactive barker, and when he barks, Phoebe will join in and bark too. Although she doesn’t look stressed in that moment, now that she has buttons she will ask for Cuddles when he is barking. So, I go over and pick her up, give her cuddles and tell that she is safe. I never would have known she needed that re-assurance based on just body language alone.
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Phoebe definitely has a sense of fairness. If she gets a treat or something and our other dog does not, she will use her buttons to ask for him to get some too. I am totally surprised to see her advocate for our other dog through buttons.
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I am someone who has always believed that dogs live in the present, but Phoebe and her buttons have taught me that she does think about the past and future as well. For example, just yesterday, she used buttons to tell me that she loves my friend, Diane, and wonders when she will see her next.
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Phoebe has separation anxiety when I am not in her presence. And, she pays little attention to my husband whether I am there or not. So, it’s been surprising to realize, through buttons, that she is often wondering where he is when he’s not home. Without the buttons, I would never have guessed that he’s on her mind!
Q. What do you do to ensure the buttons remain an engaging and positive experience for your learner over time?
We have been using buttons for a year now. And, from that very first Treat button, Phoebe has been obsessed with all of her buttons. She eats on them, sleeps on them, plays on them, and presses them constantly…so much so, that my friends and family wish I could turn her off at times. One of the AIC behavioral experts suggested that perhaps her total lack of resources, agency and quality of life in her prior hoarding situation has caused her to fall in love with her new world of buttons. In fact, instead of calling it her Soundboard, we now call it her Sound Office…and the doctor is “Always In”!
One thing I am keenly aware of, however, is making sure any new button I add is meaningful and motivating to her. There are plenty of words I use verbally, but I only put down buttons for words I know that she will want to use…because the buttons are hers to use to communicate…not for me.
Q. What’s your funniest button moment?
Phoebe has a lot of prey drive, so for my birthday, I got a Swift Paws Lure Course. Well, Phoebe did not disappoint as she is totally obsessed and wants to run the course morning, noon and night! So, of course, I put the word Swifty on her board so she could ask for it whenever she wants. Now, when I’m barely out of bed each morning, I hear “Help, Help, Help” coming from her soundboard. And when I walk into the living room and ask her what she needs help with, she immediately presses Swifty. It's like it’s been on her mind all night and it’s now a “Swift Paws Emergency.” It makes me laugh every time!
Q. What’s your most surprising button moment?
The most surprising button moment is when Phoebe was chewing a bone on her soundboard, but left it there to take a walk with me. When our other dog saw this, he went over and started chewing her bone (he had already finished his.) Before buttons, Phoebe would have run over and a squabble would have ensued with Phoebe coming out on top. But on this day with buttons, she sprinted over to her board, barked twice, pressed the Help button, and then looked at me. Although she’s used the Help button before in other contexts, what surprised me the most is that in the heat of battle, she chose a learned response (pressing a button) over a more primitive response (defending with her teeth). Given that adrenaline was high and response time was short, it's pretty amazing that she chose buttons over going ballistic!
Q. What challenges have you faced with button teaching?
Our greatest strength (Phoebe being obsessed with her buttons) also was our greatest challenge. Our original design was a traditional soundboard on the floor. And, while Phoebe did use her paw to press a single button 25% of the time, the other 75%, she used her entire body to press as many buttons as possible all at the same time. It was a bit like taking a kid to a candy store and asking them what they want…to which they respond, “all of it, I just want all of it!!” While initially I tried to accommodate her “splatting, splooting and rolling all over the buttons” strategy as best I could, it became clear that her preferred method of “word salad” button pressing would not result in a clear and scalable communication system moving forward. So, we spent over six months brainstorming using trial and error to come up with a system that would be more concise, scale to a large number of buttons, but not dampen her enthusiasm for her board! Because I needed to solve this challenge first, we weren’t able to add any new buttons during that time. So, we had a six month setback for learning new vocabulary. Now that we solved this challenge, however, we’re adding new words all the time. (If you are interested in what we did and how we got to our current configuration, I’ve posted in the community forum…just search the term splatting or splooting!)
Q. How do you decide when to introduce a new word to your learner?
This is a tough question because every learner is different and every word is different.
If a word is concrete and highly motivating to Phoebe, I will often add a button quickly. For example, we got a new plush puzzle which is a bag full of treat-stuffed potato chips. I got the toy in the mail, stuffed it with treats, gave it to her and said “Chips”. Then I immediately put the button on the board, rubbed the plush toy on the button and that was that. She started using the button the same day the toy came in the mail. It was easy for me to model and her to understand without any advance verbal preparation.
With emotions, however, I have been verbally modeling them for some time but still haven't put most of them on buttons yet. Words like Happy, Love, Excited, Worried, Safe, Mad and Sad all give off different chemical profiles in the brain. And dogs can tell those scent profiles apart. So, I want to make sure that if I put down a Happy button, I already know how to identify when Phoebe is truly feeling Happy (serotonin flood) and not accidentally pair the Happy button when Phoebe is actually feeling Excited (dopamine rush). To do this well, I want to take the time to really understand Phoebe’s individual emotions and body language, extensively model and test out my assumptions verbally, and have a strategy in place on how I will respond when Phoebe presses that emotion button on her own, especially if it’s not matching her body language. I want to do all of this planning before I put that button down.
Q. What advice would you give to others who are interested in teaching their learners to use buttons?
1. Before you start, take the classes offered by Fluent Pet…Button Bootcamp and Let’s Get Them Pressing. I took every educational class I could from Fluent Pet, and some I took multiple times. Now that AIC has been around for a number of years, there are so many best practices and things you can learn from others to get off to a great start. Don’t base how you get started only in what you see on social media. Instead, learn from the great experience that others have put into these educational materials. It’s so critical to start with a solid foundation.
2. Always remember to pick words that are highly motivating to your learner. It is so tempting to put down buttons to reflect what we want to say or what we want our learners to say. But, the buttons aren’t for us. We can already say with our voice what we want to say. The buttons should reflect what our learners might want to say.
3. Join the community to learn from others. AIC is a fairly new field when it comes to dogs and cats. There is so much we can learn from each other. We’re all citizen scientists in a way. Join in the conversation and when you get stuck, speak up. Or, if you’re having success, pay it forward by helping others. It takes an AIC Village!
