At times, Bunny also appears to ask for what she wants, whether it's 'scritches,' or to be let outside. Outside of her existential pondering, Bunny uses her buttons to ask a lot of questions about poop.

'What I can tell you is that Bunny clearly seems to be engaging in some sort of communicative exchange.” “Right now, if you ask me, ‘Does Bunny talk?’ the answer is, I don’t know,” Rossano said. Yet, to figure out if Bunny can 'talk,' let alone wonder 'who this,' we have to grapple with defining what language is in the first place, and ask how our interactions and biases about animals might influence our conclusions. One of the lead researchers, UCSD's Federico Rossano, said he wants to prove that studies that probe the limits of animal communication can be done rigorously, with big sample sizes that collect troves of data, and are followed up with targeted experiments in the lab. “Right now, if you ask me, ‘Does Bunny talk?’ the answer is, I don’t know.”īunny is the most well-known of the participants, but there are currently over 900 animals involved. Her custom Augmentative Alternative Communication (AAC) soundboard has over 70 buttons that produce pre-recorded words in six categories the buttons are organized using the Fitzgerald Key, originally developed to teach deaf children sentence structure.

Over the decades these inquiries have led to in-fighting between those who believe that some animals can be trained to converse with humans, and those who think that human bias and misinterpretation underlie any such communication skills.īunny is more than a TikTok celebrity, she is a participant in the latest attempt to research these issues, through her involvement in a large study called They Can Talk, based at the Comparative Cognition Lab at University of California San Diego (UCSD).

Bunni how we first met working