He’s a guide dog, so obviously very smart in some ways, but in other ways he’s very much still a dog. He’s still terrified of thunder and fireworks. While he’s normally aloof with occasional fits of cuddliness, when it’s loud outside he tries to climb into my skin.
I wish I could tell him “You’re fine, dude. The thunder is outside and you’re inside” in a way he understands.
But if you’ll permit me a linguistic tangent, you could take the concept of “talking dog” in a bunch of different directions.
-
Give him phonetically articulate human speech, but leave his mental faculties otherwise unchanged. He’d express his simple animal needs in a way that happens to correspond to words in a human language, and I would likewise be able to articulate simple concepts to him in a way he understands. Honestly not that far off from the array of push buttons thingy that we saw on YouTube a few years ago.
-
Make him fully sapient, but leave his vocal tract untouched, incapable of articulating human speech, but with the mental faculties to link symbols to meanings and form recursive ideas. A bunch of my constructed languages use this as a premise, talking dogs (or doglike aliens) that still sound like dogs.
My current golden is smarter and better trained than my last. Thing is she just does not have impulse control when she has something she likes so like can’t keep her from jumping on people. Its like if anythig is within 10 ft of her obeying goes to zero. Really its like she would want to but all the brain juice just clears everything away. The other thing is she absolutely hates noises she can’t determine the cause of. She does a bit better if I open the balcony and sit with her there but the further away we are the worse she gets. Its like with dogs. one is barking and snarling in her face. no prob. one is barking from a balcony and she can’t pinpoint where. run away! run away!