My own dog has used "outside water good before" to tell me about going potty outside, but over time, outside water has come to mean rain. There needs to be an

My own dog has used "outside water good before" to tell me about going potty outside, but over time, outside water has come to mean rain. There needs to be an acknowledgement that conditioning does happen, and that animals who don't learn language can still recognize words as signals without having any deeper understanding. With buttons, animals are brought to understand the words through contextual use and modeling of the word - emotions and time and abstractions are taught that take the word beyond mere signaling and conditioning. If you go back and review reports about Clever Hans, what you find is an overwhelming bias and a perverse incentive to deny any and all "cleverness" the horse may have had in favor of maintaining humanity's sole domain of complex and abstract thought. Clever Hans could likely accomplish simple arithmetic. Nearly everyone who "debunked" the claims at the time was hopelessly biased and tangled up with their own worldviews. Horses are brilliant. I've met horses that are smarter than many people I know. (I've also met horses that were sociopathic asshats without any redeeming personality traits, but that's a story for a different thread.) If dogs can learn complex, abstract language and simple counting with a brain the size of a ping pong ball or a peach, a horse brain 4-8 times larger is going to be much more capable and facile. I think this type of research that takes an unbiased and rational approach to animal cognition will lead to better outcomes for everyone. There's a lot that veterinarians and biologists are taught with roots deep in religious myths and cultural tropes, so it's left a large and mostly untapped field of discovery available for a new generation.