Dogs / Behaviour
Puppies sometimes bark at, paw at, or try to play with their reflection in a mirror, but most adult dogs learn to ignore mirrors entirely.
Puppies sometimes bark at, paw at, or try to play with their reflection in a mirror, but most adult dogs learn to ignore mirrors entirely.
This is not because dogs eventually "figure out" that it is their own reflection — the mirror self-recognition test, which dogs generally fail, suggests they do not.
Rather, the mirror image provides no useful scent information, and scent is the dominant sensory channel through which dogs identify other beings. A reflection that looks like a dog but carries no smell and no pheromonal data is, from the dog's perspective, simply not worth engaging with — a non-entity in their olfactory world.
This is a fascinating example of how fundamentally different the dog's sensory hierarchy is from the human one.
Article content © S Vejay Anand. All rights reserved.
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