logoalt Hacker News

justinatorlast Thursday at 7:50 PM7 repliesview on HN

Humorous or not, there was a video of a dog trainer that trained his (you guess it: German Shepherd) in German commands, partly so that when he worked with client's dogs, he could use English, and his German-speaking dog who would be in close proximity (useful for reactive training) wouldn't compete with the client's dog.


Replies

schoenlast Thursday at 7:58 PM

Reginald Foster, a great Latin expert whom I once got to study with, emphasized that Latin isn't inherently difficult as a spoken language, as evidenced by the fact that it used to be lots of people's native language and used for all kinds of ordinary daily purposes.

One of his slogans for this was "in Roma antiqua, etiam canes Latine locuti sunt" ('in ancient Rome, even the dogs spoke Latin').

show 1 reply
chrisandchrislast Friday at 5:25 AM

So we're doing the opposite. As we're in the German spesking part of europe, our dog listens to English to not interfere with daily talk. It's IMHO one of the best choices to take a foreign language for your dog. You can also use different languages for different setups (e.g. to differentiate fun, working). Dogs anyway don't speak the language, they just listen to the voice, but as an owner it's easier to set context by moving to a different language.

jancsikalast Thursday at 8:31 PM

The evil of global mutable state strikes again.

This is why I only train my dogs in a pure functional language.

show 4 replies
badc0ffeelast Thursday at 8:09 PM

I think if I said sitz to my English-trained dog, she would sit.

show 2 replies
BoredPositronlast Thursday at 8:24 PM

We do it with our herding dogs so you can give the different dogs different commands.

show 1 reply
sudblast Thursday at 8:02 PM

I think this is a great idea in general - security through obfuscation, kinda.

vardumplast Friday at 3:06 PM

> German-speaking dog

Impressive!