A Woman Discovers Hilarious Reason Why Her Newly Adopted Dog Kept Ignoring Her

Bringing a new furry friend home could be really exciting and heartwarming, yet if he keeps you ignoring for weeks, that can definitely become a problem.

This adopted chihuahua, Max, didn't listen to Kalee McGee's commands due to his language barrier.

More info: TikTok

“I’m gonna talk fast because your time is precious but this is hilarious and I have no one else to tell, so please listen," Kalee McGee started her TikTok video.

“We adopted a dog two, three weeks ago, a great little chihuahua, 4 years old, from the shelter, no information on him, absolutely adorable, super great," shared the excited woman.

In the short video, Kalee McGee explained that despite great effort, the new dog didn't seem to respond to her commands: "He sits when you have a treat in your hand, not when you say sit, he knows what a crate is and he walks really well on a leash, so it seems he has some training, but he won’t listen to us."

Yet soon enough, McGee sorted out where the problem was.

“We figured it out: he only speaks Spanish...” she said.

“Our little chihuahua doesn’t know English and has been looking at us like ‘what are you talking about?’ I died when I found out so I’ve got to show you,” she explained before flipping her camera around to show Max.

When she looks at him and says "Max, come", he just stands there, but when she repeats the phrase in Spanish, he walks straight over to her happily wagging his tail.

The same thing happens when she tries to tell her chihuahua to sit: in English, he ignores her, and in Spanish, he does exactly what she says.

“I don’t speak Spanish so I know that wasn’t the best, we’ve been relying on Google Translate, but please, if you have anything else, let me know, cause I would love to see how smart this cute little man is. I just don’t speak his language,” McGee shared on social media.

Apparently, this is quite a common situation, because thousands of people started to share similar stories right after McGee published a video with Max.

In 2021, a study by researchers from the Department of Ethology, Eötvös Loránd University, shared the groundbreaking news that dog brains have the capacity to detect speech naturalness and distinguish between languages.

This study started with Laura V. Cuaya and her dog, Kun-Kun.

"Some years ago I moved from Mexico to Hungary to join the Neuroethology of Communication Lab at the Department of Ethology, Eötvös Loránd University for my postdoctoral research. My dog, Kun-kun, came with me. Before, I had only talked to him in Spanish. So I was wondering whether Kun-kun noticed that people in Budapest spoke a different language, Hungarian,” said Laura V. Cuaya.

“We know that people, even preverbal human infants, notice the difference. But maybe dogs do not bother. After all, we never draw our dogs' attention to how a specific language sounds. We designed a brain imaging study to find this out," she added.

Kun-kun and 17 other dogs were trained to lie motionless in a brain scanner during speech excerpts of The Little Prince in the Spanish and Hungarian languages. All dogs had heard only one of the two languages from their owners, so this way, researchers could compare a highly familiar language to a completely unfamiliar one. The scientists played scrambled versions of these excerpts as well, which sounded completely unnatural, to test whether the dogs could detect the difference between speech and non-speech at all.

“This study showed for the first time that a non-human brain can distinguish between two languages. It is exciting, because it reveals that the capacity to learn about the regularities of a language is not uniquely human. Still, we do not know whether this capacity is dogs’ specialty, or general among non-human species. Indeed, it is possible that the brain changes from the tens of thousand years that dogs have been living with humans have made them better language listeners, but this is not necessarily the case. Future studies will have to find this out," concluded researcher Attila Andics, senior author of the study.

The study has discovered that the way dogs respond to language and speech could depend on their age and breed.

Indeed, Kalee McGee's story with her chihuahua Max not only showed a funny way to learn a new language, but also revealed how much we still don't know about dogs and how they understand us. I guess the final thought here could be: before you make assumptions about your dog, try to say the same thing again and better in different languages.