Mirror self-recognition may seem obvious to people, but it requires a certain cognitive sophistication. In fact, human babies don’t understand mirrors until they are 18-to-24 months old. Over the years, only a few animal species have passed the test. And dogs are not one of them. Your dog’s early encounters with a mirror may have made him fearful or curious about the other dog in the room. This lack of understanding seems surprising, considering the other complex mental and social skills dogs have been shown to possess.
Self-awareness is the ability to think about yourself as an individual and to realize that you are separate from others around you – to have a sense of self. It’s considered a prerequisite to understanding that others might have different feelings or thoughts than you do. This is a key part of being human, and to some scientists, it’s a debatable dividing line between people and animals.
Once again, the dogs spent more time examining their modified urine than their unmodified urine. But this time, they also spent more time investigating their modified urine than the anise oil alone. This suggests that it was the alteration of the dog’s own odor that caught their interest, not an interest in the modification odor.
The behavior of the dogs in both experiments supports the idea that dogs can recognize their own odor as being from “themselves.” Dogs may not recognize themselves visually in a mirror, but by changing the self-recognition test to a sense that dogs rely on more strongly, their sense of smell, it looks like they pass the mirror test after all. Whether this means that they truly have self-awareness is still debatable, but by asking the question in a species-appropriate way, scientists can gain greater insight into the minds of our canine companions.
Alexandra Horowitz, a researcher from Barnard College, recently published her own experiment in the journal Behavioural Processes. She studied dogs, using Gatti’s sniff test, in two different experiments. In the first experiment, 36 dogs were presented with three metal canisters, and their sniffing behavior toward the canisters was recorded. One canister was always a decoy containing water. Across three trials, the contents of the other two containers varied. In trial one, each of the other two canisters contained either the dog’s own urine or the dog’s own urine with an added scent. In trial two, the other two canisters contained the dog’s own urine or the urine of an unfamiliar dog. And in trial three, the canisters contained the dog’s own urine with an added scent or the additional scent alone. For those dogs that lived with another dog, there was a fourth trial with each canister containing either their own urine alone or the urine of their housemate.
Do dogs recognize themselves in mirrors? Here’s what experts have to say
The Mirror Test is a classic — yet controversial — scientific experiment to help researchers determine the level of self-awareness in animals. In this experiment, explains Affinity Pet Care, scientists will place a mark (something like paint or marker) on an area of the body that the animal can see only by looking in the mirror. If a test subject examines the mark on their own body (by pawing or scratching, for example) after only seeing it in the mirror, researchers can conclude they have self-recognition. According to many sources, including the American Kennel Club (AKC), dogs fail this test.
Today, canine behaviorists have more exact and appropriate ways to test for self-awareness. For example, even though dogs fail the mirror test, they pass a more recent “body as obstacle” test with flying colors. In this experiment shared by the AKC, a dog is tasked to pick up a toy and hand it to its owner. Here’s the catch: the toy was sometimes attached to the mat that the dog is sitting on. In an effort to see whether the dog can recognize their own body as the obstacle, researchers wanted to see if pups would get off the mat in order to move the toy. And they did!
Since dogs know where their body is in space, they may have more self-recognition than we realize. Still, although some dogs react to their own reflection, research has not yet confirmed that dogs recognize the reflection as another dog — let alone as themselves.
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