Kalee McGee, who lives in Indiana (United States), went to an animal shelter in her community to adopt a new pet, so in November 2021 she brought a four-year-old Chihuahua dog to her house and named him Max.
Young American adopted a Chihuahua dog who only understands Spanish
Through the video clip titled ‘If you judge my laugh, that’s rude. If you judge my Spanish, it’s fair,’ Kalee told her TikTok followers that she and a friend adopted an “adorable” and “very cool” dog who seemed to have no training at all because he didn’t listen to her commands.
For weeks they tried to make him understand, but it seemed that they couldn’t handle him until they realized a curious situation: the dog only understood words in Spanish.
“Our little chihuahua doesn’t know English, he’s been looking at us all this time like ‘what are they saying’. I died when I found out,” says Kalee McGee in the recording of her published on November 17, 2021.
How did Kalee McGee find out that her dog only understood Spanish?
Through a series of question-and-answer videos on her TikTok profile, on November 18, 2021, the American explained that after adopting Max, she tried to make him sit with the English word ‘sit’.
The animal didn’t react and tried again using German words because she had heard that many people train their pets in that language, but it didn’t work either. Then Kalee’s friend suggested that he try Spanish as a joke on the canine’s breed, since Chihuahuas are dogs native to Mexico.
As data, the figure of the Chihuahueños is present in archaeological objects dating from the Mesoamerican era, such as vessels, statues, or cave paintings. Some breeders believe his ancestry was the techichi, a popular dog in Toltec culture.
So, the young woman searched Google translate for some instructions to give Max in Spanish and they worked, her new pet understood most of the words, as shown in the following video:
Do dogs understand different languages?
In December 2021, the University of Eötvös Loránd (in Budapest, Hungary) released the study ‘Speech naturalness detection and language representation in the dog brain’ through the medical journal ‘NeuroImage’, and representation of language in the dog’s brain’).
In this investigation, scientists agree that dogs can recognize the language of their masters and differentiating it from an unknown one. They concluded this after analyzing 18 dogs with brain scans that during an afternoon of games, in which they were all exposed to words Hungarian and Spanish.
Exactly two of those dogs came from homes where Spanish was spoken as the first language and the rest from completely Hungarian families; they then noticed that the auditory regions of the canine brain responded when the animals identified a language that was familiar to them.
Source: Univision
