“It seems that Hugo has no patience for this student,” joked an Instagram user while reacting to a funny video of a Malamute and his pet dad.
Social media is flooded with videos of dog parents teaching various tricks to their pet pooches. However, have you ever seen a dog teaching something to its pet parents? Meet Hugo The Malamute, a cute dog who has donned the hat of a teacher to help his pet dad learn something very important – how to ‘speak dog’.
“Hugo teaches me to speak dog,” reads a caption posted along with a video that shows Hugo trying his best to teach his human how to ‘speak dog’ properly. The video is posted on an Instagram page dedicated to the dog.
The video opens with Hugo and his human sitting on the floor. Throughout the video, the dog keeps on trying to teach its human. What is even more hilarious is how he expresses his frustration to his pet dad failing to learn.
“It seems that Hugo has no patience for this student,” joked an Instagram user. “Are you treat orientated? They might help you learn,” added another “This made me laugh so hard. You guys have a great relationship!” praised a third. “Love how he just puts his paw right on your chest, like a true buddy,” added a fourth. “That’s so funny. I did that with my pup Charlie. He got so excited he jumped all over the place,” wrote a fifth.
Dogs actually do respond better when their owners use cute ‘baby talk’, study finds
Dogs’ brains are sensitive to the familiar high-pitched “cute” voice tone that adult humans, especially women, use to talk to babies, according to a new study.
The research, published recently in the journal Communications Biology, found “exciting similarities” between infant and dog brains during the processing of speech with such a high-pitched tone feature.
Humans tend to speak with a specific speech style characterised by exaggerated prosody, or patterns of stress and intonation in a language, when communicating with individuals having limited language competence.
Such speech has previously been found to be very important for the healthy cognitive, social and language development of children, who are also tuned to such a high-pitched voice.
But researchers, including those from the Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary, hoped to assess whether dog brains are also sensitive to this way of communication.
In the study, conscious family dogs were made to listen to dog, infant and adult-directed speech recorded from 12 women and men in real-life interactions.
As the dogs listened, their brain activities were measured using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scan.
The study found the sound-processing regions of the dogs’ brains responded more to dog- and infant-directed than adult-directed speech.
This marked the first neurological evidence that dog brains are tuned to speech directed specifically at them.
“Studying how dog brains process dog-directed speech is exciting, because it can help us understand how exaggerated prosody contributes to efficient speech processing in a nonhuman species skilled at relying on different speech cues,” explained Anna Gergely, co-first author of the study.
Scientists also found dog- and infant-directed speech sensitivity of dog brains was more pronounced when the speakers were women, and was affected by voice pitch and its variation.
These findings suggest the way we speak to dogs matters, and that their brain is specifically sensitive to the higher-pitched voice tone typical to the female voice.
“Remarkably, the voice tone patterns characterizing women’s dog-directed speech are not typically used in dog-dog communication – our results may thus serve evidence for a neural preference that dogs developed during their domestication,” said Anna Gábor, co-first author of the study.
“Dog brains’ increased sensitivity to dog-directed speech spoken by women specifically may be due to the fact that women more often speak to dogs with exaggerated prosody than men,” Dr Gabor said.
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