Live with a cat long enough, pay enough attention to their body language, their routine and mannerisms, and you’ll begin to understand them.

Talk to them long enough, they’ll learn the inflections of your voice, identify specific meaningful words, responding to promises of dinner with excitement, or hushed mutterings about the vet with burrowing as far from visibility as they can manage.

We all communicate with our pets, to varying degrees, but body language and routine are imprecise forms. I’m by no means the first pet owner to wonder if something’s getting lost in translation.

But communication is kinda my thing, so when I heard about people teaching their pets to use communication buttons, I had to give it a go. My wife and I have spent the past two years training our cat Poppy to talk to us, and it’s been a wild and enthralling experience.

I’ve talked about Poppy and her buttons on mastodon a fair amount, but since I’ve had a number of people tell me how interesting they find the process, I thought it was worth a more in-depth discussion.

Poppy’s up to fourteen FluentPet buttons at this point, in five general categories:

1. Names
   • Poppy
   • Dad
   • Mom
   • Friend
2. Activities
   • Play
   • TV
   • Bedtime
   • Uppies
   • Shell Game
3. Needs
   • Love
   • Hungry
4. Observations
   • Outside
   • Noise
5. All Done
   • All Done

Of these, Poppy uses five (“Uppies”, “Shell Game”, “Love”, “Hungry”, “All Done”) on a daily basis. The rest she uses with differing regularity, and we use them to model meanings to her by saying the words and pushing the buttons while demonstrating the meaning.

It’s been fascinating to see semantic drift in action, even on this small scale. Part of the learning process involves being as specific as you can while modelling meanings - because any misunderstanding during initial modelling is going to be exacerbated with repeated use - but even with words where the initial use seemed to be understood, over time the meanings have subtly shifted.

“Friend” was originally modelled based on our neighbours visiting the house regularly for a number of weeks, to get Poppy used to other people being in the house. (We have the best neighbours.) But we have clearly told Poppy she’s our little friend in the past, because she’s started using it in interactions directly with us, presumably as a term of endearment.

“Uppies” began as “to be picked up”, but - presumably due to Poppy’s routine of being carried upstairs for us to marvel at her eating her breakfast - she occasionally uses it to refer to “upstairs”.

“All Done” was originally modelled as “whatever we were doing, is finished now” (Play All Done, Noise All Done, etc.) but it’s become Poppy’s most-used button on the mat with an array of apparent meanings, from “this conversation’s over” to “you’re still sitting there and I don’t appreciate it” to a general sense of frustration.

Even more interesting is that while she generally uses one button to express a thought, she will occasionally construct a multi-word thought, which requires more interpretation on our part.

Recently we’ve even been able to tell when she’s constructing a phrase because she’ll sit beside the mat, lifting one paw in place as if imagining pressing the desired words, sometimes for several minutes before she approaches the buttons and rapidly types out her phrase.

Examples of this include phrases such as “Outside Bedtime” after coming back from the window after dark, “Outside Friends” when we were cleaning the house late in the evening and that’s a rare-enough occurrence that she’s anticipating guests, and various combinations of “Bedtime” “Love” and “Hungry” to mean “I’m sleepy and the only thing that’s keeping me awake is I haven’t had my food yet”.

This is something we’re hoping to see more of as we increase her vocabulary, but it’s been a promising start.

So how did we get to this point?

I started out teaching her to touch the top of an object with her paw; I’d double-tap the object in question with my index-finger and ask her to push it, and she’d get a treat for putting her paw on it.

When we received the FluentPet buttons, I kept one of the buttons disabled and used that as a training button. We developed our previous game of touching the object, except she only got the treat if she touched it hard enough to make the button click. (This also aligned nicely with the clicker training I’d used the previous year to get her accustomed to having her claws trimmed.)

After a few weeks of that, we then introduced the mat, with “Play” and “TV” buttons for her favourite activities. And despite modelling the buttons consistently, Poppy ignored them.

We’d previously read that best practice is to not associate pressing the buttons with food - aside from the initial training with the dummy button, at least - so we resisted giving her a “Hungry” button for some time, and continued with her training. But Poppy is a very food-motivated cat, so eventually we relented.

And suddenly, she understood that “Hungry” was to ask for her mealtimes, and the other buttons were to ask for her other activities.

Since then we’ve been gradually rolling out buttons a few at a time, adding them in pairs or groups of related/opposing meaning where possible. A lot of the time it’s a matter of recognising words that we’ve already been using consistently with her - such as “Love” and “Outside” - or things that we think she might want to ask for.

Most recently “Shell Game” was a real hit, after I taught her how to play three-card monte with a set of cups and hidden treats. She asks me to play every morning, and gets so visibly excited when I set everything up.

When she responds so strongly to us providing something she’s actively asked for, I can’t help but think there’s more to it than just her excitement over playing her favourite game. She asked for something, using a language which doesn’t come naturally to her, and she was understood.

And it seems there’s a thrill in being understood that crosses species.