Your Dog is Even Smarter Than You Think

[EDIT: Added more info on research methods. Addressed some common criticism. Added titles for video links and a few new vids. Prevented revolution with a military coup d'état]

A combination of surveys and bayesian estimates[1] leads me to believe this community is interested in autism, cats, cognition, philosophy, and moral valence of animals. What I’m going to show you checks every box, so it boggles my mind that I don't see anyone talk about it. It has been bothering me so much that I decided to create an account and write this article.

The community will ignore fascinating insight just because its normie coded. Cute tiktok-famous poodle doesn't pattern match to "this contains real insight into animal cognition".

There’s an intervention to help non-verbal autistic kids communicate using “communication boards” (not to be confused with facilitated communication which has a bad reputation). It can be a paper board with pictures or it can be a board with buttons that say a word when pressed. In 2018 Christina Hunger (hungerforwords.com) - a speech pathologist working with autistic children using such boards - started to wonder if her dog was in fact autistic. Just kidding, she saw similarities in patterns of behavior between young kids she was working with ("learner" seems to be the term of art) and her dog. So she gave it a button that says “Outside” and expanded from there.

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