Soundboard Dog

Submission 6,806

Part of a series on Dogs. [View Related Entries]

About

Soundboard Dog refers to a video of a dog named Stella communicating with the use of a floor soundboard. After several news outlets reported on the dog, videos of the dog pressing buttons gained popularity in edits on YouTube.

Origin

On July 27th, 2019, Instagram account hunger4words was created.^[1] On the account, speech-language pathologist posted videos of her dog Stella using a custom-made soundboard containing simple words such as "Walk," "Good," Beach", "Stella," "No," "Outside" to communicate with her (examples shown below).^[2]^[3]

On November 4th, 2019, People reported on Stella.^[4] In the following days, more media outlets covered the story. On November 5th, YouTube user NeonFlareify posted an Epstein Didn't Kill Himself meme based on the video, gaining over 12,000 views (shown below).^[5]

Precursor

In November, 2017, a unknown user posted a video of a dog repeatedly pressing its paw on a toy Nut Button. ^[6] A November 9th, 2017, reupload of the video to YouTube received over 64,300 views (shown below), with a later reupload receiving over 145,000 views.^[7]

Spread

Following NeonFlareify's post, more YouTube users posted videos based on the hunger4words posts, with several edits also being posted to /r/youtubehaiku subreddit. For example, November 6th, 2019, edit by kmlkmljkl received over 15,000 views on YouTube.^[8] A November 16th edit by Justin L received over 3,500 upvotes on /r/youtubehaiku.^[9]