Introduction
"MAD" chimes a slightly distorted voice from the speaker. "MAD" "MAD" it repeats insistently.
I chuckle to myself, and watch as on the screen infront of me a small domestic shorthair cat
repeatedly smacks a button on a bright orange mat. This cat is named Billi, the titular star of
a youtube channel known as BilliSpeaks, where Billi does indeed speak. This isn't just your average
howling dog though, you see Billi speaks via button presses. Billi's Minion ( Human Translation - Owner)
Kendra has set up a diverse mat filled with a variety of buttons all with the goal of helping Billi
be able to communicate. At the time of this article, Billi has 36 buttons all with unique phrases
that would seem to commonly come up when dealing with the everyday life of a cat. However, Billi obviously
has some favorite phrases as "Mad", "Food", and "Dad" seem to have an above average occurrence on the BilliSpeaks
channel.
I've been watching this channel for over 3 months at this point, each day carving the 5 - 10 minutes to see what Billi has been saying. These little patterns are adorable clues into the mind of Billi, but also raise some interesting questions:
"Does Billi know the word's meaning, or the word's action?" "Does Billi understand any concept of grammar at all, or is she just repeating phrases that produce reward?" "If the buttons were moved from their current locations, would she be able to adjust?" "How many words can a cat learn?"
These question nag at me, every single day a new video is posted, a new interaction showcased, sometimes even new vocabulary added! All of this is amazing, and even within the past 3 months I can see an obvious line of progress where it seems as if Billi is actually learning and not just seeking rewards. But how do I prove it? Despite the job title of engineer, at my heart I am a scientist, and as a scientist the first thing I want is an experiment, I want a control, I want variance, and I want data. However, despite Kendra seemingly being the best Cat Mom on the block, I highly doubt she's going to welcome a random stranger into her house to obsessively watch her cat and jot down notes for 3 months. I could consider using any of the million AI transcription tools on the market now to attempt to data crawl all of the Billi videos, but that leaves a chance for bias in the data - as how can I control if Kendra only uploads successful communication or includes the failures too?
The awnser is simple - I have a cat, and she's quite smart! How about I teach her to speak?
Meet Sandy the Cat
Sandy is a domestic short hair cat, lovingly adopted from H.E.L.P animal rescue in the
chicago-area. My history with Sandy actually begins fairly early, as originally we were just
supposed to foster her back in 2007 when we picked her up with two other cats ( affectionately called
Rusty and Houdini). However, I had recently undergone a bit of a tragic loss and in what continues to be
one of my families biggest weaknesses, upon getting to know Sandy I decided to attempt to heal my hurt with a
cat. As such, Sandy became what is known in the community as a "Foster Failure", and was adopted in October of 2007.
I'll spare you 16 years of history, and simply state that she has been my solid rock
the entire time. I had owned many cats before
Sandy, however they had always had a more stereotypical relationship with me, where
they lived in the house, and permitted some allowance
of affection and time but at the end of the day were independent. Sandy however is
the opposite. Sandy does not like being alone, she does not like hiding,
and for some reason she is tolerant no matter how much affection I care to show, even
when she'd rather be off playing with any of her many toys sat in her toy bucket.
Put most abbreviated - Sandy is so much more to me than just a "cat".
The Crisis
And last year, that became a problem. You see in February I had begun noticing her become
much more aggressive with food. She'd always been a healthy eater, but now she woke me up at night begging for more,
and was seemingly always sat on the counter looking for more. I had noted it, but in my head
I just assumed she becoming more "cat"-ish as there's a million stories online of cats bugging humans for food
well before the humans had woken up. I switched her over to a supposedly healthier food, and doubled it up
with daily wet food, but it wasn't going away.
This came to a head the week of March 14th, 2022. It was the 18th, and just before we were set to go to bed I noticed something odd, Sandy was acting weird about her litterbox. More than that, she was darting between the litterbox and hiding under the bed, which is something she doesn't normally do. Specifically, our regular nightly routine was getting in bed, having her curl up under my arm, and then me reading for an hour before going to sleep, and so as I laid down and she stayed hidden I began to get concerned. Finally, I got up and went to inspect her and noticed she was quivering and the spot on the carpet below her was soaking. Any pet parent knows this spells nothing but trouble, but unfortunately it was late at night and no vets were available, so I made a note to call first thing in the morning, and we spent a rough night with my fears growing the more I doom scrolled PetMD.
The next morning we rushed to the vet, where they recommended they run a full blood panel and give her a day of IV treatment. Although I was upset to part with her, it was important she got treatment so I spent the day distracting myself as much as possible, waiting to hear the results.
Around 5pm they came - Sandy was diabetic. Her litterbox behavior was her in full diabetic ketoacidosis, with a crazy UTI infection. They gave her more fluids to help her blood sugar, told me to pick up insulin, and sent her home with a basic injection tutorial. They said this should be enough to get her back in shape, but I'll state it as politely as possible when I say - They were idiots.
Neglecting the hours of other important diabetic cat information they failed to teach me, they had failed to correctly evaluate the blood report, as I'd learn when Sandy became non-responsive that Saturday. I rushed her back, and they got her some fluids and force fed her a bit, but they told me to begin to prepare for the end as they didn't see a path forward. They offered two other clinics near by who might be able to get her a feeding tube and insulin drip. I packed her up and brought her to the first clinic that night.
I'll save some exposition and say that the clinic did the best they could, but lacked all the tools.
More importantly, they only were open at night, and during the day a new clinic would oversee the cats, but they
did not treat the cats, only fed them and watched them. All this in mind, and another upseting conversation about
putting her down, I took her to the last clinic, the VCA. The VCA is one of the wider known clinic in america,
to put it simply they have bleeding edge pet health care but only offer it for bank breaking prices. I learned this the hard way
as the second they whisked her off to the back room the vet took me aside and told me she instantly recognized the DKA, and had other suspicions
but cautioned that for a normal cat to fully recover from DKA, it would take roughly $10,000. This number seems insane, but it would later double
when they ran blood work and revealed that she had entered kidney failure and would need blood transfusions and additional treatments.
I have no intention of getting into pissing contests here, but I'll state that from what I know most people would decide they had met the end of the road there. Perhaps worse, most would be forced to end it there, Americans simply don't keep $20,000 floating around for vet bills. I'm not going to speak to the how - and I'm not going to justify the why - simply know that I managed to make sacrafices, and acquired the funds to keep her alive. The only reason I go into such detail here is simply to prove my earlier point - Sandy is more than a cat to me, she's my child, and I'd go to the end of the world for her.
The Buttons
Okay well this got darker and more personal than originally intended, simply put this specific article was meant to get into the back story
of how I decided this venture was worth while, and the justification for why I believe animals can understand us. I'll wrap it up here before the scroll bar becomes
smaller than an atom, if you're interested in DIY talking pet buttons, continue to the next page for the start of the electronic debug!