iPads for Dogs Are About More Than Selfies

If our modern digital world were to be reduced to one snapshot, it would probably be a cute animal meme viewed through a touchscreen device. Such is the result of years of technological innovation mixed with that defining feature of the human condition: an obsession with fluffy things.

It’s not exactly surprising, then, that some people are now trying to involve animals on the other side of the screen, by teaching their pets to use their devices. But it’s still a hell of a thing to watch.

Dog trainer and occasional Motherboard writer Anna Jane Grossman showed us some selfies taken by dogs a few months ago, and when I heard she was coming to do an iPad class for dogs in London, I had to go and see it for myself.

I turned up to the dog training masterclass on Saturday morning at a Shoreditch studio to find Grossman setting up shop with trainer Nicole Scott, who was holding the class as part of her City Dog series. Scott is a former NASA physicist and boasts an evidence-based and data-driven “scientific approach” to dog training.

As the four urban-dwelling dogs attending the morning session started to arrive, I asked Grossman what even was the point of teaching a dog to use an iPad. She admitted that it wasn’t so much about usefulness as a novel spin on obedience training and a way to give city dog owners something new to do with their pets, as well as something of a social comment on what we increasingly spend our time doing.

“I really believe that everything you teach a dog is good,” she said, pointing out that dogs likely don’t differentiate between silly and serious tasks, and probably think that humans are weirdly obsessed with sitting given the frequency with which they give the command. “What’s fun about using iPads is humans are so into iPads, so it’s a good way to get humans to work with their dogs.”

The process of teaching is more important than the actual result of the dog’s action, but if dog selfies encourage owners to spend more time working with their pets, all the better. “I don’t think dogs care about the device, they’d be just as happy pressing their nose on a milk carton,” Grossman added, as class participant Watson the French Bulldog gnawed on a chair leg.

Scott echoed this idea as the class kicked off, making reference to the “algorithms” of dogs’ brains. “The data show dogs taught to do anything have lower anxiety,” she said. Learning to press a button, however, could come up useful. If you could teach a dog to swipe and tap a screen—something that apparently any of the dogs present would be capable of with further training—they could, for instance, learn to call 999.

This was clearly beyond the dogs at this point, who started out by learning to touch their owners’ hands with their nose in order to get a treat. They then moved on to dummy iPhones made of wood and smeared with peanut butter, again receiving a treat each time they touched it. The basic operation of an iPad, after all, requires little more finesse than mashing buttons on a screen. And while touching a device with a paw might look cuter, Scott explained it doesn’t trigger the touchscreen as well as using a nose or a tongue.

There was a brief competition to see which dog could touch the dummy phone the most times in 30 seconds. I backed Jackson the Shiba Inu to win—as a city-based tech writer it struck me that I’d never seen the breed outside of the doge meme, so I figured he might have some sort of natural aptitude for the tech world. My skewed reasoning aside, he nevertheless took home the prize with nine taps.

Then it was time for the real devices to come out, and I watched bemusedly as the dog owners began smearing peanut butter on the screens of their iPads.

The dogs were taught to click an onscreen clicker in return for a treat, and to take pictures using an app called Big Button that essentially turned the whole iPad screen into a camera button. More often than not their “selfies” came out as blurs of fur with maybe a glint of an eye or a tooth as the dog went in for a lick of the peanut butter-flavoured screen, but they did seem to be getting the hang of performing the trick as the morning continued.

A painting app called App for Dog turned their touches into works of abstract art, and another used yes/no buttons so you could turn your dog into a kind of Magic 8 Ball depending on which part of the screen they went for.

The next step, Grossman said, was teaching the dogs to touch one part of the screen, or to touch it in a certain way. For now, they've got the indiscriminate screen-tap down, and I imagine their Flappy Bird high scores could rival those of most humans.