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Robert Walker

I’d say yes in the sense that it has kinship with other dogs. Unless of course brought up to imprint on humans. When it meets other dogs, it recognizes them as being the same species, not in an intellectual sense of course, but of heightened importance for it.

But not aware in the sense of being able to recognize itself in a mirror. So yes, and no.

In this video, the puppy may not know that the “dog” in the mirror is itself, but it might recognize it as being a dog - though a rather odd one with no scent. See how its tail is wagging and it’s in the submissive posture that young puppies use when they want to play with other members of their own species :).

BTW I think the mirror test could sometimes be misleading. After all dogs rely so much on scent, more so than vision perhaps, and the dog in the mirror doesn’t have any mirrored scent. I don’t know what test a self aware dog would come up with, but if it involved requiring high fidelity reproduction of scent in some kind of a “scent mirror” and they didn’t bother to include any visuals, as unimportant, we might fail it :). By a “scent mirror” there I mean one that was high fidelity in spatial resolution, probably, scents located in 3D space like an identical dog to itself, the other side of the “mirror”.

I don’t know if anyone has tried some kind of a “scent mirror” for dogs? Just a thought in passing. Maybe they would still fail the test if you could do that.

See also Gerhard Adam's answer to Does my dog know he is a dog?

UPDATE: Just found out from Maciej Wyszpolski about this - dogs passing the mirror test with scent, not sure it is quite the same as a “scent mirror” - just ignores its own scent but interesting:

Dogs show signs of self-consciousness in new 'sniff test'

About the Author

Robert Walker

Robert Walker

Writer of articles on Mars and Space issues - Software Developer of Tune Smithy, Bounce Metronome etc.
Studied at Wolfson College, Oxford
Lives in Isle of Mull
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