Marie Gibbons, co-founder and CEO of VeriBark, joins Our Hen House to explain how her AI-powered app analyzes over 130 dog body signals and vocalizations to help pet parents understand what their dogs are really communicating. The conversation digs into the science behind animal body language, the ethics of using AI in animal advocacy, and VeriBark’s ambitious roadmap to expand beyond dogs into cats and, eventually, farmed animals like chickens and pigs, with the goal of building empathy that could reshape how people think about the animals they eat.

• How VeriBark’s AI interprets dog behavior using body signals, vocalizations, and a peer-reviewed ethogram
• Why breed-specific morphology (like a Whippet’s tail position) can throw off behavioral interpretation
• The accuracy limits of AI-driven animal communication tools (currently 70–90%)
• VeriBark’s plans to expand into CatChat and farmed animal communication tools
• The ethical risks of AI “welfare washing” in animal agriculture — and how VeriBark aims to guard against misuse

ABOUT OUR GUEST

Marie Gibbons’s life’s mission is to use science and technology to help animals. She spent more than two decades working in veterinary medicine and cultivated meat research, developing technologies to reduce reliance on factory farming and improve the lives of billions of animals. She’s the co-founder and CEO of VeriBark, using artificial intelligence to help people better understand what their dogs are communicating through body language and vocalizations, with the end goal of expanding this technology to farm animals and wildlife, helping humans build more empathy and compassion for all animals through a deeper understanding of how they communicate.

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