Bunny (dog)
Bunny is a sheepadoodle who has reportedly learned 92 words using a set of soundboard buttons, made by FluentPet, to "talk".
Bunny first rose to prominence when she went viral on video-sharing platform TikTok. Bunny has 8 million followers on TikTok as of September 2022. Bunny is currently the subject of scientific study by researchers at the University of California, San Diego. She is part of the TheyCanTalk study, and is monitored by cameras placed in the living room of her owner Alexis Devine.
Biography
Bunny was born around August 2019. Her exact date of birth remains unknown. She is a sheepadoodle mix. Her owner, Alexis Devine, always planned for Bunny to learn how to talk. She researched communication and cognition in canines, as well as dog training. Devine also cited the work of Christina Hunger, a speech pathologist, who had been teaching her dog to speak using augmentative and alternative communication. Hunger used programmable buttons that her dog, Stella, could then press in succession together to form "sentences", and used words such as "outside", "Stella", and "good". This prompted Devine to have her own button when she received Bunny in October 2019 for the word "outside", which Bunny learned to use with ease.Six months after Bunny had mastered the use of her "outside" button, Leo Trottier, a cognitive scientist, reached out and asked if Devine would team up to use his product called FluentPet, an augmentative and alternative form of communication that utilized a word board with programmed buttons. Devine accepted, and the two then teamed up with researchers from University of California, San Diego. Bunny is the subject of a research project by the university's Comparative Cognition Lab, which has received funding from Trottier's dog game console startup CleverPet.