Hello beautiful souls! The first time I saw Bunny the talking dog, I knew she was changing our perspective on consciousness in general. I’ve followed Bunny the dog and her owner Alexis Devine for years and together, they’ve proven that animals know much, much more than we think they do. I’ve seen Bunny remind her mom to give her pain medication; talk about dreams she’s had; and even make fart jokes. Our talk today hones in on how Bunny is also proving the spiritual nature of animals everywhere. It’s not just us, angels and God, Universe, Source . . . animals play a huge role in the spiritual realm and in helping us connect back to our own spirituality here and now.

To learn more about Alexis Devine and Bunny:
@whataboutbunny [IG] [YouTube] [FB]
Their book I Am Bunny is available at all major book retailers

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TRANSCRIPT

Julie Jancius: Hello, beautiful souls. Welcome back to the Angels and Awakening podcast. I’m your host and author, Julie Jancius. Friends we have on one of my favorite people in the entire world, even though I didn’t get to meet her until just today. And her beautiful puppies are on the podcast today as well. Her account on Instagram, even though I got this wrong in the rest of the podcast, is @WhatAboutBunny. And, uh, her name is Alexis Devine, and she’s got a dog named Bunny. And I’ve talked about this dog several times on the podcast, but as you’ll hear today, there are so many different instances in which Bunny communicates the wildest things to Alexis. And the way that Bunny does this, if you haven’t seen this yet on social media, is through buttons that are on the ground. And, Alexis started with one button with Bunny and worked her way up. And, um, you can see in her Instagram page, Bunny’s just got a slew of buttons to choose from. Each button is a different word, and so what Bunny will do in these different videos is go up to the buttons and press different word combinations to put different words together and communicate different ideas to Alexis. 

And it’s so interesting from the perspective that I am in life right now, because I wouldn’t have thought when I had my own child, physical, human child, that she would have her own personality, so young. But my kiddo came out, and within, I would say, the first couple of weeks, my goodness, did she have her own personality. And by three weeks, the personality was actually showing very strongly. Right. I always teased because we were in the hospital nonstop at that point, that, uh, my daughter ‘E’ would just love when SpongeBob was on in the background, or when she could see the picture, the colors on the tv, and you turned on anything else, and she hated it, and she would fuss until you would turn SpongeBob back on. 

But our animals have these personalities, too. And the more and more that we look at one another and see how much is just innate to who we are, my goodness, we start to have more compassion for ourselves, our animals, for others, and this world becomes a kinder, more loving place. And that is what I see Alexis doing. That is why I wanted to have her on the show today. Friends, if you haven’t been listening to the podcast, hopefully you have. And thank you for being here, but we have angel fest coming up, uh, this week, on Thursday, Friday, Saturday. It’s absolutely free. It’s a three day conference where I’m teaching you so much about oneness working with your angels. The angels say that we have this great, fantastic ability to be able to tune in to the abundance of our soul self, right? And the abundance of all that is. So when you think about your soul being connected to the oneness of all that is, there is an infinite amount of pure health, connection to other people, relationships, love, ideas, every answer you could possibly need. When you know how to go into your soul self, connect with that, you can really tune into those energies. So we’re teaching you all of that at Angel Fest. It’s completely free. 

If you want to register, go on over to free invite a friend. We would love, love to have you. And all that information is in the show notes, but I am so excited. Friends, hopefully you’re listening to this. If you’re watching on YouTube, you are in for a special treat. Didn’t know if this would happen. Didn’t ask for this to happen. Maybe I put in a little message to the angels and say, please have Bunny jump on the video because I would love to see Bunny in person. I’ve been following her for years and Bunny did wake up from a nap, and she was on camera a lot, so you can see that over on YouTube. But love you, friends. Without further ado, here is Alexis and Bunny. 

Hello, beautiful souls. Welcome back to the angels and Awakening podcast. I’m your host and author, Julie Jancius. And friends, today we have on possibly one of my favorite guests of all times. I’ve followed her for years and more, so even her puppy. It’s Alexis Divine, and she has written a book. It’s the same as her Instagram handle. I Am Bunny. And if you listen to this show over the years, you know that I have talked about Bunny over and over again because I think she is proving consciousness and so much more about consciousness than we even realized was there. So, Alexis, thank you for being here and welcome to the show.

Alexis Devine: I’m so excited to speak with you. Thanks for having me.

Julie Jancius: Yes. So one of the very first videos that I watched of, uh, Bunny blew me away. It was the one where she went over to the buttons and she pressed stranger in paw. And you were like, what do you mean you’ve got a stranger in your paw? Like, come over here, let me see your paw. So she comes over, she hands you her paw, and there’s a splinter in her paw. She knew.

Alexis Devine: She knew, yeah. And, uh, she was able to express that to me. And it was one of the first times where she was using a word in a very unexpected way, which obviously has happened so many times since then. But stranger paw meant nothing to me, right until she came over to me and put her paw in my hands, and I pulled out that foxtail. And it was right then and there that I, uh, sort of thought, number one, this is incredibly powerful for enabling our dogs, the agency to tell us when and where they’re in pain. But also, it got me starting about how language and how words can be used in so many different ways and how important it was to really look at the full picture, look at the body language, look at the history of the ways she’s using these words because she’s got a very limited vocabulary right at the moment. She’s got about 105 buttons, and she’s got to be able to communicate all sorts of things with me. So there are ways in which she uses those words to communicate things that I never would have imagined. And it’s been a really beautiful process.

Julie Jancius: Well, it’s really changing the dynamic of interactions between dog owners, pet owners, and their animals. Just the way that I look at my animal now has changed because of the work that you’re doing. I have two dogs, uh, Lulu and fluff. And Lulu is like exactly my husband’s personality, or Fluff is exactly my husband’s. And Lulu is exactly my just. She’s just my soul animal. She’s the animal that I have dreamed of my entire life. And I look at her sometimes, and I know she’s communicating more, and they want to communicate more. So it’s so fascinating to be, uh, alive at this time, because you’re really taking us to another dynamic within our relationships. Talk to us a little bit about that and just, yeah, wherever spirit wants to take you with that.

Alexis Devine: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we know that dogs are communicating all the time, right? They’ve got this beautiful, nonverbal communication that they can use amongst one another to communicate some really complex things, right? And it takes us a while to step outside of the sort of egocentric world, anthropocentric world that we live in, to really look at how they’re communicating and appreciate that for its subtlety, right? And I think that once Bunny started using the buttons to communicate some things that seemed rather deep to me, I really felt this onus to explore how she was communicating intrinsically. So it was a communication that sort of scaffolded on itself, because when I first brought her home and I was like, oh, I’m going to teach my dog to talk. This is so cool. She’s going to be able to say, I love you, blah. I was like, this is really basic, whatever. And then she started taking it to the next level, and then I really knew that I had to take it to a deeper level as well. 

So it encouraged me to learn everything I possibly could about canine behavior to enable her as much agency to be able to find the words that were salient to her experience. So instead of becoming this sort of, I’m going to teach my dog English as a human and not go the extra mile. It really was flipped on its head. Because I am now a dog trainer, I am now very involved in the animal behavior community, and it’s helped me to enable her to be able to express things that I never would have thought possible because of this sort of scaffolded back and forth two way communication. Not just her using English to communicate with me, but me really taking things as deep as I possibly can to understand her on her terms.

Julie Jancius: Well, let’s talk about that, because one of the things that she presented to you was she was dreaming about certain things. And I don’t know if the dreams tie in with her saying, bird in belly, uh, but, um, dreams like that, dogs dreams, we always know that they have dreamt, but that they are really conscious of what they’re dreaming. How did that come about?

Alexis Devine: She had been using a couple of buttons on her board in ways that didn’t make any sense to me at all. She was using night talk sleep sleep talk talk night. And initially, because I do have a history of talking in my sleep, I thought she could be referring to that. But I asked my husband Johnny whether I had been, and he said, no, you haven’t talked in your sleep for years. So, you know, I’m in constant communication with– Bunny’s part of this research project. I’m in constant communication with those researchers. And I just asked them, I was like, what do you think this could mean? I don’t get it. I don’t understand. And she’s pressing these buttons repeatedly, so it’s got to mean something to her. And one of the researchers said to me, I wonder if she could be talking about her dreams. Perhaps next time she is actively dreaming, you very gently wake her up and you use the words that she’s been using with you to ask her what’s going on. So that’s what I did. She was dreaming. She was doing the little sleep woofs and her paws were twitching. And I walked over to her and I very gently touched her and said, hey, Bunny, what talks sleep. And she got up immediately. She went over to her buttons and she said, stranger animal. And as we know, she uses words in creative ways. So stranger animal, to me seemed, uh, to mean that she potentially was dreaming about some animal she didn’t know and therefore was, like, running in her sleep or talking in her sleep with them. So I added a dream button. And the moment that I added that dream button, she stopped using those other word combinations and only used the dream button.

Julie Jancius: Wow.

Alexis Devine: Which seems, of course, to signify that we had made sense of what those buttons were trying to communicate. Now, obviously, dreams are an incredibly nebulous idea, even to us as humans. So it’s really hard to say, what is she dreaming? Does she remember her dreams? Is this an accurate representation of what’s going on? But there are some signifiers that would tell us that, yes, we’re getting closer to an understanding of what’s going on.

Julie Jancius: It’s incredible. So in your book which is also called I am Bunny, it talks about, and I am having one of those mind blank moments on the researcher’s name, the woman who worked with the apes initially, it kind of goes through a history of how people have worked with animals to try and get them to a point of communication, and I wonder if you could talk to us a little bit about that. I guess one other thing I’m thinking of to add in here is animals just have such various different personalities, and I don’t think that you could have ever realized before you got Bunny or before I got Lulu, what they would really even mean to us, or who they would really be themselves before meeting them. In your book, it was talking about how some researchers maybe didn’t get as far with certain animals, and you really honor the animal itself of whether or not it wants to do this work and really not pushing them if they don’t. So I’ll let you take it from there. Sure.

Alexis Devine: I think you might have been referring to Jane Goodall.

Julie Jancius: Yes.

Alexis Devine: She’s hugely inspirational to me. But, yeah, I did go through a number of prior animal language studies, and I have very mixed feelings about those studies, and I think it’s okay to feel two diametrically opposed things at once. Those studies taught us so much about ourselves, so much about human language. They taught us a lot about animals as well. But they were controversial, right. 

In most of those studies, they were taking wild animals out of the wild, just away from their families, and they put them in these sort of sterile environments with the goal to try and see if living in human culture, if, uh, raising an animal as a human would lead to human language acquisition. And that’s unethical for a number of reasons, right? Like taking an animal out of the wild. Not ideal. Keeping an animal in a lab setting, not ideal. 

The thing about working with dogs is that they have been artificially and naturally selected over the course of 40,000 years for their ability to communicate and collaborate with us. So it feels natural to be able to share this kind of lifestyle with a dog in our home, going about our day to day business. We already know that dogs understand words, right? Ask anyone who has to spell the word ‘walk’ in front of their dog, right? Even if you do absolutely no training whatsoever, a dog is going to learn to build connections like that. They’re going to learn what a ball is, because you’re going to be saying that all the time with this ball in your hand, and then they’re going to have this experience of playing with it. They’re going to learn the word walk because you say it right before you go out the door and have this amazing outdoor adventure, right? So we know that that’s possible already. 

And there were some early studies in, um, uh, the early 1990s with Alexander Rossi from Brazil, who’s an animal behaviorist, and he taught his own dog, Sophia, a system of six buttons, and then wrote a paper on it which sort of disproved any sort of, um. Oh, my gosh, I’m blanking on the name of this horse that’s famous for not being as smart as everyone thought. It was, uh, clever Hans. Sorry, clever Hans, right. Was a horse who was purported to be able to do math and to spell and to count and all this, and then um, after a bunch of research, they realized that the horse was just responding to the human cues, which is in its own right form, ah, of brilliance. But it just makes sense for these dogs that we share our lives with that have been selected, uh, for their ability to communicate and cooperate with us, that we do something like this with them in our homes, in our day to day life. It just makes sense to me.

Julie Jancius: So how much time does it take to teach them how to use the buttons? And do you feel like you have to be there constantly 24/7 in order to be able to have that communication? Or does Bunny know when you’re gone? She obviously doesn’t use the buttons because you’re not there to communicate with.

Alexis Devine: Yeah, I mean, I think there’s so many variables that will affect how long it takes and how far you get. And, um, obviously one of those is time. The more time you’re able to spend with them naturally, the more quickly they’re likely to learn. But I think all dogs are capable of this. And there are so many cats that are also having incredible success, which is wild because I wouldn’t have thought initially of a cat having the same sort of motivation towards connection in this way. But there are all sorts of animals that are having great success. 

I think one of the reasons that Bunny and I sort of skyrocketed on social media as quickly as we did is because I started teaching her just shortly before the pandemic hit. And I was self employed. I was a wearable art designer, and no one was buying wearable art during the pandemic. All the boutiques that I was selling were closed. There weren’t any live markets, no fashion shows. I was like, well, I’ve got some extra time on my hands. I’m just going to teach my dog to talk. So I did just spend all day with her at the buttons. I’d be working on other things, but I’d just be sitting there and I was available to her and I was available to explore the sort of boundaries of this with no sort of preconceived boxes in mind. Right. I hadn’t told myself, well, this isn’t possible. Well, she could never tell me about her dreams. Well, she’d never be able to tell me that she was in pain. I was just like, let’s see what happens. I tend to lead my life in that way, sort of with as much openness and curiosity as possible. And I think that allowed us to explore some concepts that maybe someone with, uh, a history or background in canine behavior might not have allowed themselves to explore. Right.

Julie Jancius: Yeah, you talk about that in the book, and I think you’re so spot on with that because you just had that open mind. You were more open to everything that Bunny was capable of doing. Yeah. When it comes to the words that she uses, I’m wondering if you think it’s possible for animals to communicate not like God, universe, source in that respect, but just an interconnectedness a oneness, or do you think that that more comes back to just love in general for them?

Alexis Devine: Well, it’s interesting. There’s definitely a level of curiosity in Bunny that I hadn’t expected to see. When we see toddlers sort of exploring their knowledge, we’ll hear them ask questions like, why is the sky blue? Or why is the grass green? A couple of weeks ago, Bunny noticed it was raining outside. She walked over to the window and looked at the rain for a while, walked back to her board, pressed rain, and then walked around and pressed why? And that’s very reminiscent of asking these sort of bigger questions, sort of like, why are we here? What does it mean? 

In addition to that, her exploring our sameness and difference. She really struggled with the concept of dog, human, animal. Like, what am I? Who am I? Where do I fit in? And she still doesn’t settle on one or the other. She’ll go back and forth in terms of how she sort of identifies herself. And I think this is, um, sort of moving in that direction that you were talking about, just trying to understand who we are and how we fit in on a deeper level. Right. And that’s what I believe spirituality is. Like, what is our place here? How do we fit in? What does it all mean? And I do see glimmers of that in Bunny. I haven’t seen any glimmers of that in Otter yet. He’s more of a let’s go to the beach and party kind of. She’s very sensitive, and she’s got a ton of anxiety. So I think that’s one of the things that she has this desire to understand because of those things.

Julie Jancius: That’s so true, because I remember seeing a lot of those videos where it seemed like she didn’t want to end the conversation, that she wasn’t accepting of the information. Like, mom, human, animal, didn’t want that whatsoever. So that’s interesting. 

You’re right. I think that right there shows that interconnectedness of how much she sees us as just, I don’t know, if it equals, but equals. Mhm. Yeah. That’s amazing. Oh. When it comes to my dog, Lulu, I think watching Bunny over the years has really shown me how much of Lulu is just her nature in and of herself, where she has a bone and fluff has a bone she doesn’t want to share. She’ll even try and go over and get Fluff’s bone and hide his for later so that she could have both herself. And I used to get upset, right? Or like if my daughter would come over and try and take. And I really watched my dad with our animals growing up, being so kind of harsh with them and rough with them, but really working with the nature of who they are and what’s just so intrinsic to their being, you can’t really change that with shame or barking at them, barking back at them. It’s really us changing our behavior to fit who they are.

Alexis Devine: Yeah, I mean, there’s this trend, obviously, there’s the gentle parenting trend. Bunny felt like she was missing out, so she’s coming up for some kisses. She really wants to lick my face right now. So this gentle parenting trend has crossed over into the dog world. Gentle dog parenting. Right. And, uh, I am a human who is not going to have human children. So it made sense to me to treat my dogs as though they were kids, right? There was never this sort of question in my mind. Well, do I beat them or do I treat them with kindness and try to adapt to the environment so they are their best selves? And I think that’s what the parents that we would strive to be will do with their human children as well. Like, okay, this kid isn’t fitting in. Bunny, Come on, baby. She’s yelling at Tenrec for being too close while she’s getting scritches. Typical Bunny.

Julie Jancius: Exactly what we’re talking about.

Alexis Devine: Yes, exactly what we’re talking about. Yeah. Right. So obviously I could have yelled at her for that. Uh, but instead I’m going to keep giving her scritches and just distract her from that and we’ll deal with that at a different time. Tenrex seems comfortable, but, yeah, just because, uh, dogs are considered property and not dependence, just because they can’t vote doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t afford them the same graces and kindnesses that we do to human children. Like they deserve those kindnesses. Nobody wants to live in fear. Um, we know from science that people and animals respond better to positive reinforcement than they do to punishment. There’s less fallout, there’s deeper connection. And so that was the approach that I decided to take from day one.

Julie Jancius: Yeah, that’s amazing. When it comes to, um, animal consciousness and where you want to go with that, explain that to everybody, is there anything that you want to do with it, or are you just going to kind of let it go and flow as it may?

Alexis Devine: I think part of my journey has been, well, all of my journey has been a learning journey, and I never anticipated the journey being a teaching journey, but I think that there are a lot of people that are learning quite a bit from my page. That’s never been sort of a directed goal of mine, but I feel like the more I learn, and I’m going to continue to learn because I’m quite passionate about it, the more information I am able to sort of disseminate and hopefully help sort of turn this tide. I think right now we’re in the middle of a movement where people are realizing much more than ever before that all animals are sentient, that kindness speaks volumes, that we can learn a lot if we decide to actively listen in as many ways as possible. So I like to let things evolve as they do while I’m on my personal growth journey, and hopefully that will allow me to sort of present information to the world that helps other people find their own learning journeys as well.

Julie Jancius: Yeah, amazing. Do you see or have any background vision, too, of there is a lot of research being conducted behind the scenes. Where are they going with consciousness and animals as they look at this?

Alexis Devine: I think the main goal has always been for the research project to determine how and how much animals are capable of communicating in language like ways. And I think that as they continue to receive data, those goals shift a little bit based on patterns that they see that are fascinating to them. So I don’t know exactly where the research is going to go. I know that there are a couple of papers under review right now, and now that fluent pet has the connected systems. So the buttons are all Bluetooth enabled, they’re all connected to a centralized speaker, and every time a button is pushed, it’s recorded in, um, the app. So all of those button presses, that data is automatically sent to the research team. So it’s much easier for them to see patterns now and sort of correlate data and find things that are of interest, much more so than it was before, when we all had to sort of individually report all of that data and manually add everything to the app.

Julie Jancius: Because I was talking about this with my husband years ago when, uh, we found you. Do you feel like one day there could be a job? I think this could be his job in retirement, where you find animals who do want to do the buttons, so not the animals who don’t, because we don’t want to push that on them, but that do want to create or work with the buttons and that you have somebody that actually teaches them to work with them and then places the dog with the right owner? Or does the connection more so happen with the owner teaching the button system?

Alexis Devine: Yeah, I think the teaching of how to use these buttons is such, uh, or should be such an individualized system. Right. Because every dog has its own needs, has its own desires.Every human has its own limitations on time and capacity. So I think that it’s really important for a person who wants to be using buttons with their dogs, to be actively listening to their dog, to know what makes them tick, to understand their sort of idiosyncrasies, so that they can provide words that are really salient to that dog’s experience. For example, if someone were to make a button board for me and they put the word moist on it, I would never use it.

Julie Jancius: Right.

Alexis Devine: You have to be picking words that are really important to the individual. So I think developing that connection with the individual is hugely important. That being said, we do have a button boot camp and a button academy to help people get started and really troubleshoot some of the challenges that are encountered when first getting.

Julie Jancius: Amazing. Amazing. Well, I wonder into just about spirituality in general and Bunny. And Bunny coming into your life and maybe just that connection in general, not being religious in any way, shape or form, but just the spiritual connection and how it’s changed your concept of life and everything.

Alexis Devine: Yeah, well, having Bunny in my world has changed everything about my life. Like, 100%. It has rewritten the script and I’ve never considered myself a particularly spiritual person, but I do kind of have a sense that there are things going on in the universe that are outside of my control, but that are leading me in a direction that is meaningful. And I certainly have felt that here, like, never in a million years would I have imagined myself with three dogs, uh, with one of them who’s reactive. Never thought I’d be a dog trainer. Never thought I would write a book. Something really exciting has just happened that might be too early for me to share, but environment plays such a tremendous role in how dogs thrive or don’t thrive, and same with humans. And so I was recently able to put an offer on a property with a huge amount of acreage where I can go escape with my dogs and give them a quality of life that they thus far haven’t really. So I’m really, really excited for this next chapter to be able to go explore the impact of environment on all of our mental health and see perhaps that correlates with Bunny’s physical health as well. She’s got some conditions that make it hard for her to exist happily on a day to day basis. And I’m thinking that some of these subtle changes that the universe has brought around and sort of manifested might make this next chapter really beautiful for us.

Julie Jancius: I know you can never know, but is there also, like, a form of telepathy where she doesn’t even have to use the button sometimes and you just know what she’s thinking?

Alexis Devine: Oh, definitely. I’m not sure if I would call it telepathy so much. It’s just, like, really subtle body language that I’ve become really keyed into, and maybe those are one and the same, but I definitely don’t always need the buttons to know what she’s thinking.

Julie Jancius: Amazing. When you were writing your book, because when you’re in the writing process, there’s just so much that comes up and there’s just some really big aha moments that you, as an author, tend to love within the book. What was that for you?

Alexis Devine: Well, I get pretty vulnerable in the book, and I wasn’t sure how vulnerable I wanted to get. And in the end, I decided that it was important to share some really hard facts about my past in order to make my journey with Bunny more relevant. And one of the things over the last few years that has been completely game changing for me was a diagnosis of autism. I’m continuing to learn so, so much about that, but being able to reframe so many of my prior past experiences, traumas, et cetera, has really enabled me to become a better dog guardian for Bunny because I’ve been able to see things through a new lens. I’ve been able to look at her own sensitivities, anxiety, reactivity, uh, through a similar lens as I’ve been able to reframe mine. And that, I think, has been the biggest improvement to our relationship.

Julie Jancius: That’s amazing. That’s amazing. Well, and we talk a lot, too. I’m adHd. And how did you get that diagnosis of autism? Because even for women who are ADHD, it’s hard sometimes to get to that accurate diagnosis.

Alexis Devine: It is because it manifests so differently in women than it does men. Right. I think the biggest piece for me was that I was really researching, uh, aac augmentative and alternative communication, which is what, uh, is used in speech language pathology to aid nonverbal people in their use of language. Right. So I was researching the history, I was researching what it’s used for. Um, and that took me down this road of really looking into autism. And I started hearing stories from autistic women who were late diagnosed, and I started realizing that I related to all of them. So then my focus specifically sort of narrowed down to autism in adult females. And it just became clear to me that my experience was so close to that experience that it was important for me to follow through with a diagnosis. And when I did get the diagnosis, I wasn’t surprised at all. But it does take some time to sort of adjust to this new knowledge and to start to look at how you’ve interacted with the world in the past through this new lens. And it just gave me so much clarity.

Julie Jancius: That’s so beautiful. I love that. Do you have any great resources for– Because there’s so much information out there too, for women who are curious about learning more? Are there any that are better than others, resource wise, for autism specifically? 

Alexis Devine: I think this is probably a controversial take, but I think TikTok is a really good resource because you get to hear personal experiences and you get to hear a lot of them, and you get to experience the difference between someone who is self diagnosed, someone who– We’re laughing because Bunny, uh, is just up, uh, in my space. She wants kisses and scritches. She hasn’t allowed me to stop touching her for like, the last 15 minutes, which is totally fine. Yeah. And hot take because a lot of people will say, uh, don’t get your information on TikTok because there’s a lot of bad information there. But I think being able to listen to so many people’s personal experience is really what you need. It’s what you need. You don’t need something that’s like sort of pedagogical or like, this is what autism is, you need to hear. When I was a kid, this is how I interacted with the world here as an adult. Here is how I interact with the world. Here’s how I view things. Here are some quirks about me, and that’s what really is going to allow you to relate and sort of figure out if this is a good path for you.

Julie Jancius: Well, I think that’s such a great point because when I was growing up, my aunt would always be like, you’re so ADHD. And I was like, no, I don’t want to hear that. And then my mom would take me into counseling offices after my parents divorced and kind of just stack the deck in the counselor’s favor and be like, she’s always running around touching everything. And I was like, no, actually, I’m not, because that’s not what ADHD, the hyperactivity isn’t running around touching everything for females. It’s this overactivity in the mind where I think that’s why I related so much to spirituality, because getting into meditation for the very first time was the first time ever I felt still within my head.

Alexis Devine: Oh, uh, that’s incredible.

Julie Jancius: Yeah. Amazing. I am so excited that Bunny’s been on the video. I hope a lot of people are watching over on YouTube. We don’t want a 24/7 Bunny cam, but we kind of do because she’s just so amazing and think she’s an animal angel that has just added so much to this world, and so are you, Alexis, thank you so much for all that you do for this world. And I know that you’re involved in so many different projects. If people want to give, if they want to learn about the buttons, if they want to learn about you. And watch Bunny’s just amazing stories. 

Oh, we forgot to talk about the poop. Um, fake poop. Got to tell a fart joke before we go. Um, tell that one, too. Yeah.

Alexis Devine: So we were talking about, um, interesting ways in which language and words can be used. Well, Bunny went through a phase where she was obsessed with poop, where she was constantly calling my partner out for pooping. She said, dad went poop. Poop smell, uh, poop now and then one day. So I do talk in my book also about dog laughter, which is a thing. And one day, she was sort of laughing, and she pressed the words, play poop. And I was like, what? And she sort of, like, was laughing at me. It’s sort of like this pant sound. I was like, what does that mean? She goes, play poop. And then I realized that I had farted and that she was, uh, making commentary about the fart. And then she’s done that to Otter. She’s done that to, you know, there are, um, plenty of jokes to be had with this dog right here.

Julie Jancius: I read that, and then I couldn’t get the visual within my mind because what does it look like? What does it sound like when the dog laughs? And then you said, in the book that you found a way to almost kind of mimic it back to her. How do you make that noise? So that we could laugh to our dog? Because you said in the book that when you do it, she almost always laughs or smiles back.

Alexis Devine: Yeah. So it’s sort of like pants, but with more forced air. It’s like that. You can see she comes up. Both dogs are all. Dogs are staring at me right now. And she comes up and she’s like, oh, I love you. See, it works.

Julie Jancius: It does. So here, wait. I’m going to try it and see if I get it. So it’s like that?

Alexis Devine: Yeah, like that.

Julie Jancius: Oh, my gosh. That’s awesome.

Alexis Devine: And you can try with, like, if that’s not doing it, try with a little bit more forced air or a little bit less, like a higher pitch. Lower pitch. You can play around with it a little bit and see what gets them going.

Julie Jancius: But is it kind of like when they do it, are they always opening their mouth and smiling a little bit, or sometimes are they more relaxed with their mouth?

Alexis Devine: I think the more relaxed is typically a pant. I mean, they can obviously be stressed and panting, too, where you’ll see the commissioner pulled back a little bit more, but, um, with the laughter, it always seems like a smile to me. It’s a bit more tense than a calm pant. And the air that’s being exhaled is a bit more forceful. That’s my experience. I’m sure it varies from dog to dog, but you could see her reaction right there.

Julie Jancius: Yeah. Amazing. I mean, she went right up to you and was just kissing on you and loving on you. That’s hysterical. I am so excited for the future. I want to see just how much we can communicate with our animals. I don’t care about being the Jetsons or flying cars or any of that. Give me talking dogs. Yeah.

Alexis Devine: Ah, for sure. 100%. I’m on board.

Julie Jancius: Yeah. Where can everybody find you? Find your book. We’ll put all the links in the show notes.

Alexis Devine: People can find me on social media. @WhatAboutBunny on all platforms, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, all those. And, uh, people can find my book on Amazon. They can find it at Barnes and Noble, HarperCollins, and it’s. I Am Bunny. How a talking dog taught me everything I need to know about being amazing.

Julie Jancius: Amazing bunny. Thank you for being you.

Alexis Devine: She’s a pretty cool girl.

Julie Jancius: Yes, she is. Thank you so much, Alexis.

Alexis Devine: Thanks so much for having us. This has been a really fun chat.