In 2020, The Seattle Times chatted with Alexis Devine, a Tacoma resident who went viral online for teaching her sheepadoodle, Bunny, how to communicate using electronic buttons that played recorded words when pressed.
A lot has changed in three years — Devine’s social media follower count for one. When we last spoke, Devine had 300,000 followers on Instagram and 3.4 million on TikTok. As of this writing, those numbers are now 1.4 million and 8.4 million, respectively. In addition to gaining many more fans, Bunny, now 4 years old, also gained a couple of siblings: Otter, a 2½-year-old standard poodle, and Tenrec, a 1-year-old papillon.
What hasn’t changed is Devine’s goal with Bunny: connection. That aim is the heart of Devine’s new book, “I Am Bunny,” which chronicles her ongoing journey with Bunny and the potential of human-animal relationships. While Devine’s goal has always been to have the most connected and engaged relationship with Bunny possible, she was inspired to begin using the communication buttons with Bunny by speech-language pathologist Christina Hunger’s Instagram posts of using them with her dog, Stella.
Despite Devine and Bunny’s success with the buttons, “I Am Bunny” isn’t a how-to guide for readers to teach their pets to use them — “This is not a book about a talking dog,” she writes.
Instead, it’s a vulnerable, honest and funny account of Devine’s life before and with Bunny. The takeaway she hopes readers will glean from the book: Empathy is incredibly important, not just with our animal companions, but also ourselves.
“That’s one of the greatest lessons that Bunny has taught me is that in order to overcome some of my own personal challenges, I have to look through a lens of kindness, at my past experiences, and also at myself,” she said. “And I think if we’re able to take our animal companion’s point of view, we have a much better chance at connecting with them and at communicating honestly with them.”
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While Devine said she was approached to write a book that was more of a guide on how others could use the buttons, she declined in part because she knows every person is different and will have a unique approach with their pet, or “learners,” as she calls them.
The book she found more interesting to write was one looking at the bigger picture of her life and experiences with Bunny, which would be more relatable to her audience.
“I think that the through line of empathy, that the connection that we have is far more interesting than the question, ‘Is this language?’” she said of Bunny and the communication buttons.
It’s never been about that for Devine because she believes that regardless of whether Bunny knows what buttons she’s pushing, what’s mattered from the start is that they are actively learning about each other.
Throughout the book, Devine drives that mission home by getting honest about some of her personal challenges, including a 25-year struggle with an eating disorder. Devine explained she was cruel to herself during that time, which made her incapable of socializing and functioning day to day.
Now a certified professional dog trainer and a licensed family dog mediator, Devine said the more she learns about dog behavior and how they communicate, the more she is able to apply that knowledge to herself.
“If I do something that shocks me or that I’m not proud of, I’m able to frame that behaviorally and sort of understand the antecedents, the behavior itself and then the consequence,” she said. “So learning about behavior and dogs has really helped me break down my own behavior in a way that’s felt really powerful to me.”
Devine took what she learned from her personal experiences and channeled that into her relationship with Bunny, trying to approach her with as much kindness and empathy as possible. Bunny, too, has her own struggles, including anxiety and reactivity to strangers.
Even with these challenges, Devine said the more she lets go of the expectations placed on herself and Bunny, the easier it is for her to move forward with compassion.
Writing about Bunny’s reactivity was cathartic, Devine said, because she knows people can feel a lot of shame around their dog’s behavior. She did, too, at first. She couldn’t understand why Bunny would snap and lunge at strangers and why her dog couldn’t sit with her inside coffee shops like she’d imagined. But when Devine began to understand what drives behavior, she said it felt powerful to know that dog owners can affect change in their pets in noninvasive ways.
“When I learned that I could just change her environment and it would positively impact her behavior, it felt like a world opened to me that I hadn’t been able to explore prior to that moment,” she said.
In one particularly tear-jerking moment of the book, Devine recounts a rough day when a child and off-leash puppy charged at Bunny. Later at home, Bunny hit two buttons repeatedly “FEEL ALL DONE. FEEL ALL DONE.” It’s a moment to make any dog owner reading the book with a sleeping pup at their side pause and consider their own relationship with their dog and how they connect.
While Devine gets real about challenges, she also includes moments of levity and humor not only in her own words, but also Bunny’s. (Believe it or not, the sheepadoodle has told a few poop jokes in her time.)
“When she has a good day, my soul just soars. It is so fun,” Devine said. “She’ll frolic and she’ll be bouncy, and she’ll get this huge smile, and she wants to run and she wants to play ball.”
Between chapters of her experiences teaching Bunny to communicate, Devine also includes profiles about past animal language studies, and not just ones with dogs. They range from the familiar like Koko the Gorilla, who communicated via sign language, to the bizarre like John Lilly and the Order of the Dolphin (Google at your own risk).
Devine said she included these studies because she believes that what pet owners and researchers are doing with their animal companions today is different from past experiments.
Instead of putting a wild animal in a sterile setting and drilling it daily with commands to raise it as a human, Devine said, “[We are] raising our animals as the animals they are, trying to take into account all of their needs, fulfilling all of their species-specific needs, while also giving them another way in which to communicate.”
“I think that’s sort of the ethos of this community — not teach your animals how to communicate in English,” she said, “but get to know your learners as well as you possibly can, and then give them as many opportunities to fulfill their own needs as possible while getting the clearest picture you can about what those needs are.”
When we talked to Devine in 2020, she called herself a “hopeful skeptic” about her work with Bunny. Today, she still considers herself a skeptic “of just about everything in life” and says she’s very aware of what she doesn’t know. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter to Devine that she’ll never be able to definitively say what Bunny understands or what a certain word means to her.
“Because we do have brilliant communication,” Devine said. “And the depth of connection that I had hoped for is there and it continues to deepen the more time we spend together just knowing each other.”
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