Chapter 3 Summary and Analysis

The more scientists have learned about primates, the more it is obvious that there is one true difference between primates and humans: speech. We are "living, breathing verbal machine guns" that constantly use sound to communicate. Unfortunately this can lead to confusion for dogs for several reasons. While we as humans use synonyms and similar phrases to enrich meaning and introduce nuances, dogs have no way to understand similar phrases, and so to a dog these phrases sound completely different. "Come here" and "Here, come" are the same to us, but two different things to a dog.

There is also the problem of habituation, which happens in many animals, including humans. When a stimulus (visual, aural) is constant, it loses its meaning and we have a tendency to tune it out. Translated to dog training, when a dog hears "Come" a...