Say you have a dog with the level of training of a K9 police dog (i.e. highly trained) and the language used during the training was English. I know that it’s not just what is said, but how it’s said that effect how a dog interperts what to do, but what if someone wanted to train the same dog but they spoke Japanese?
Would the training have to start over? Would it take the same amount of time, be accelerated, or would they not have to start at the ground level?
(No, I don’t need to do this, just generally curious.)
As long as the trainer knows both commands (the English that the dog knows and the Japanese that the trainer wants to change it to), it would be very quick.
Animals don’t understand human language same the way humans do. I doubt that the training the dogs undergo is anything more complicated than classical conditioning: a stimulus (the command) eliciting a conditioned response (the behavior). Given a competent trainer, any dog can learn to substitute the new command for the old, and perform the right behavior. It shouldn’t take as long to train the new command-- the dog would only be learning to associate the new command with a behavior it already knows, and not learning an entirely new behavior.
About 15 years ago, a police force in (I think) Missouri bought a trained dog from the Netherlands. When it arrived it was learned that the dog only responded to commands in Dutch. Rather than having the cop learn a few words of Dutch, they sent the dog all the way back to the Netherlands to learn the commands in English.
Hand and arm gestures are just as important as speech for many dog commands. If both trainers used the same gestures, it would be even quicker for the dog to learn the new language.
A dog has the potential language recognition skills of, IIRC, a three-year-old human, so it is a bit more complicated than simple conditioning. With simple conditioning I’ve been able to train a guppy to jump over a matchstick. A dog, if trained well, can accumulate quite an extensive “vocabulary” of recognized language cues.
If a dog learns to associate the word “sit” with the action of sitting, you can easily give him an alternative word for the same action (though it will confuse him a bit at first, of course) and then simply stop using the original word “sit.” He may never quite forget the word “sit,” but he will come to be just as familiar with the new word.
When I got my last dog from the shelter, she was a year old and had been named Nikki by her previous performance. Well, I was an Art Student, and “Nikki” just would not do. I re-named her 99 and in less than two weeks she new it as her name. I would occasionally call her Nikki just to gauge her reaction, and within a couple years she stopped responding to it completely.