You must be thinking, how can animals think or understand words? The answer to this question is, a simple YES, and not just dogs and cats, but most pets. If you have any pets at home, you must agree that they do understand a lot of what is said to them. A recent study reveals that dogs accumulate pretty impressive human vocabularies without any specific instruction whatsoever.

Animals have the brainpower to understand human language and use their own languages in profound ways. Lets take parrots for an example, and we all know, that it can be trained to speak human words. As well as dogs, they will react to the word “walk” with a knowing, tail-wagging enthusiasm, or seat, bark, sleep, quit, attack, good boy, bad boy, no, yes…

In the early 1900s, the German Wilhelm Von Osten claimed that his horse, Clever Hans, had amazing abilities: Not only could it understand words but it could perform arithmetic. Supposedly, Clever Hans could stomp his hoof the correct number of times to answer mathematical questions. People came to test von Osten’s remarkable claims only to find that the horse did indeed respond accurately. How could it do this? Psychologist Oskar Pfungst investigated the matter to find that when Clever Hans answered questions, he was actually just responding to subtle unconscious cues from people. Although he couldn’t really do arithmetic, Clever Hans’s ability was certainly astounding.

Just because animals most don’t understand abstract concepts, they may not understand the words that refer to abstract concepts, but they will if they were trained to with direct suggestions. For example, we humans understand ideas such, “sadness”, “love”, “anger” and or “fear”, when to dog’s it means nothing unless they experience it. That means a dog can be capable of understanding words from direct suggestions as long as the dog refers to a concrete things that is known to them and repeated to them over and over. Like when you hug your dog and tell him, “I love you” – comes with face and body language, same for telling them good boy or bad boy.