Gestures, facial expressions, and vocal tone are all things she pays attention to.
Yes, but to be fair, that's common knowledge. Who hasn't run this experiment: tell a dog "you're so stupid and worthless!" in the happiest, most playful talking-to-a-dog tone of voice you can think of while scritching it behind the ears and see how it reacts?
The idea that a dog has a very good command of spoken vocabulary in addition to picking up nonverbal cues is what's new and interesting.
I disagree with the idea that this is new. The thing that is new is we're designing incrementally better experiments (but I would still argue that this experiment is flawed).
In the past, we would have said that this was an excellent trainer and the dog just does it for the food. In fact, this has been our default for hundreds of years.
For all we know, many dogs know or understand thousands of words, gestures, expressions, and even smells. This border collie probably understands even more than the words associated with the toys its supposed to pick up.
I call this a Jurassic Park problem. We ask bad questions and so we get the wrong answers. We continue to ask if any dinosaurs are missing instead of asking how many dinosaurs there are.
It's of no small amazement to me that we're so quick to treat revelations like this as a surprise. They're not.
I'm all in favor of the results of these experiments being spread as widely as possible in the hopes that it creates doubt about the way we treat all animals. We might treat them better.
Yes, but to be fair, that's common knowledge. Who hasn't run this experiment: tell a dog "you're so stupid and worthless!" in the happiest, most playful talking-to-a-dog tone of voice you can think of while scritching it behind the ears and see how it reacts?
The idea that a dog has a very good command of spoken vocabulary in addition to picking up nonverbal cues is what's new and interesting.