What About Bunny

Bunny is a social media influencing dog, who is owned by American owner Alexis Devine, a researcher in communication and cognition in canines. Bunny is of the Sheepadoodle breed and displays behaviors that may be human-animal communication. Bunny has reportedly learned 92 words. Bunny uses a set of soundboard buttons, made by FluentPet, to “talk”.

Bunny first rose to prominence when she went viral on video-sharing platform TikTok. Bunny has 7.2 million followers on TikTok as of December 2021. Bunny is currently the subject of scientific study by researchers at the University of California, San Diego. She is part of the TheyCanTalk study, and is monitored by cameras placed in the living room of her owner, Alexis Devine.

Personal Information

Name	Bunny
Date Of Birth (Age)	August 2019
Net Worth	$500k
TikTok	8 million followers
Instagram	1.2 million followers
YouTube	143k subscribers
Twitter	3.5k followers
Spouse/Partner	N/A
Nationality	American

Career

After Bunny had mastered the use of her “outside” button, Leo Trottier, a cognitive scientist, reached out and asked if Devine would team up to use his product called FluentPet, an augmentative and alternative form of communication that utilized a word board with programmed buttons. Devine accepted, and the two then teamed up with researchers from University of California, San Diego. Bunny is the subject of a research project by the university's Comparative Cognition Lab.

Bunny has a TikTok account run by her owner that showcases videos of Bunny using her “keyboard” to speak. Her account currently has over 8 million followers, and over 209 million likes. One video posted on her account, of Bunny discussing her owner's missing cat, has exceeded 18 million views on the platform.

Bunny uses augmentative and alternative communication. She presses buttons on a mat, each programmed with a recording of a specific word, such as “Bunny”, “walk”, and “bye”. Whenever these buttons are pressed, they play the words they are programmed to, similar to the Fitzgerald Key, a method used to teach deaf children sentence structure. Bunny can reportedly string at least four words together in broken sentences, such as “ouch”, followed by “stranger, paw”, a sentence that her owner interpreted as Bunny's paw being hurt.

Net Worth

Bunny’s net worth is courted to be an estimated $500k, although her earnings are retained by her owners. Most of Bunny’s earnings come from her social media presence as a content creator and brand collaborations.

On TikTok, the creator could potentially earn upwards of an estimated $7k per post, excluding brand-sponsored deals. On Instagram, she could earn upwards of an estimated $5k for a brand-sponsored post. On YouTube, her average earnings are around the $500 mark per video, excluding brand-sponsored deals, for which she could earn upwards of $1k per video.

Bunny has been associated with numerous pet care and animal care brands over her influencing career. Her ever-growing popularity has helped her monetarily collaborate with these brands over the years. We do not have the figures to justify how much she could earn from these sponsored collaborations, but we can assume that the figures are of a hefty sum.

Social Media

Bunny’s dominance on social media is very evident with over 8 million TikTok followers, while on Instagram she has over 1.2 million followers.

Personal Life

Bunny was born around August 2019. Her exact date of birth remains unknown. She is a Sheepadoodle mix. Her owner, Alexis Devine, always planned for Bunny to learn how to talk. She researched communication and cognition in canines, as well as dog training.

Devine also cited the work of Christina Hunger, a speech pathologist, who had been teaching her dog to speak using augmentative and alternative communication. Hunger used programmable buttons that her dog, Stella, could then press in succession together to form “sentences”, and used words such as “outside”, “Stella”, and “good”. This prompted Devine to have her own button when she received Bunny in October 2019 for the word “outside”, which Bunny learned to use with ease.