Hoover (Seal)

A video of hoover from 1984, a year before his death: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzfWbNTKndw

As noted in the youtube comments, a good sample of him talking can be found around the 14:30 mark.

Human hearing is very prone to priming: if you know what to expect, you can easily hear it even if the original sound is quite garbled.

My favorite demo is by Michael Shermer (after 9 minutes): https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shermer_why_people_believe...

This is awesome. I wonder what several generations of selective breeding could do to the speech capabilities of different animal species. It would be very funny to see animals communicating to other animals using simple phrases like the ones Hoover could utter.

See Batyr (linked from the wiki)

“Like all cases of talking animals, these claims are subject to the observer-expectancy effect.“

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batyr

I’m curious how much this was studied scientifically.

They are a lot like dogs, and pups can bite hard also if feel treatened.