A dog mom thought her foster pup was ignoring her, but it turned out that he could only understand Spanish, The Mirror reports.
Ariana Giampietro had been taking care of American Pit Bull mix Monty and couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t sit when she told him to. She spoke to the shelter she fostered him from. They told her that he’d previously lived on a farm with a Spanish family. As a result, the only words he understood were in their language.
Making Monty Bilingual
The 26-year-old used the Spanish words for ‘down’ and ‘let’s go’. Straight away, Monty knew what to do. The pup was smarter than she thought. He knows a lot of words in Spanish, and his dog mom is now teaching him commands in English too. The bilingual dog will soon be moving into an English-speaking forever home.
“I had had Monty for eight days and was really confused why he wasn’t responding to commands,” explained Ariana, an adoption case manager for children in care. “I could tell he wanted to – he was listening to me, but it was like he didn’t know how.
“Once I found out about his background, and realized it was because he only knew Spanish, I was amazed. I was so happy to understand where the dissonance came from.
“After I started speaking to him in Spanish, it was like he settled right in. He started getting ‘zoomies’, and his overall confidence skyrocketed because all of a sudden we weren’t alien to him.
“Nothing prepares you for the shock of being able to bridge that cultural divide. I was shocked but so excited when it all made sense.”
Learning Spanish
Ariana started fostering Pit Bulls after sadly losing her own Pit Bull, Jack, to cancer last year at the age of seven.
Monty was her first foster. Fortunately, her partner Andrew is fluent in Spanish, so he was able to help her in training him. And now, Monty’s confidence has increased to the point where he’s even playing with Lucy, their other dog.
“It’s weird,” said Ariana. “I had been telling my boyfriend for so long that I wanted to learn Spanish, and I downloaded Duolingo but never used it.
“Andrew now laughs about it because having a Spanish-speaking boyfriend never made me commit to Duolingo – but having a Spanish-speaking dog has.”
