Mrs. D thinks there is a whole lot more going on in our dog Daisy’s brain than I give her credit for. Don’t get me wrong. I think Daisy’s a really great dog. At times, I’d even say a pretty smart dog. But I’m very wary of attributing to her human types of thought processes.
For example, Mrs. D observed the ther day that she suspected that Daisy was “self aware.” I expressed my doubts, but quickly ran out of ways to intelligently discuss it. She shows no recognition of her image in a mirror. What would be other signs/tests of self awareness? Tool usage? What animals other than some primates are believed to be self aware?
How significant is it that different dogs exhibit different personalities and preferences? That suggests to me a greater sense of self than, say, a mosquito.
This is one of those things that is nearly impossible to define. What does ‘self aware’ mean exactly? We can’t even define life with 100% precision (most definitions I’ve seen would allow fire to be included among the living). Prove you are self aware (seriously…I’m not certain it can be done any more reliably for you than it could be for a dog).
While I would be wary of attributing human types of thought processes to any other species there are some clear similarities.
I’ve seen my dog display a wide range of emotions that seem to equate very well with how humans react. My dog has shown joy, fear, sadness, anger, boredom, contentment and so on. My cats are a bit less obvious in this regard but you can still spot those feelings in them as well.
Seeing these emotions in the animal are obvious to us, as humans, because they are familiar. We seem to share some commonality with them.
So, maybe a dog doesn’t quite have the depth of understanding we as humans do but as a WAG I’d say dogs do count as self aware (which is to say a sense of self that goes beyond mere survival instincts).
Also, dolphins seem to recognize themselves in mirrors as well.
I worked for years with Bottlenose Dolphins (hence the UserName) but would not go so far as to say they are any more self aware than either a dog or cat. When I look in the mirror and see my reflection I know that it’s me, but my cat doesn’t seem to recognize anything in the mirror… yet if a strange cat walks past the window she goes nuts. Does the fact that she doesn’t react to her own reflection mean that she’s self aware, or just too dumb to recognize her own image?
I’ve read that other higher primates, Koko the Gorilla comes to mind, using sign language have “proven” some level of self awareness. She seems to know who “she” is, at least with respect to other creatures around her.
I guess it’s not clear to me why a cat or dog would need to be self aware to survive in their world. Cats and dogs don’t have a complex language capability either… but then they don’t need one.
I would like to think that because of a human’s higher consciousness we obtained self awareness along the way… and that we try to see some glimmer of it in the creatures we surround ourselves with… whether it is really there or not is something we can never know for sure.
Some poet once noted that man differs from the beasts in that man sees the ax from the beginning. An awareness of one’s own mortality and the mortality of others would seem to be important. How would a dog let you know if it was aware of death? A dog’s response to a dead fellow creature is to eat it.
I saw on the news the other day that they’ve discovered that dolphins are self aware…I don’t have a cite, but it said that they recognize their reflection and even use the mirror to examine unique markings on their bodies.
Or maybe it’s not that dolphins are self aware ----> they might just be very, very vain.
What does recognizing oneself in a mirror really say about self awareness?
I too have held my cat in front of a mirror and it completely didn’t care. Almost as if it didn’t see anything at all…she may as well have been staring at a wall for all the interest she showed.
As a test, while the cat was looking into the mirror with me standing behind her, I waved my hand. She clearly spotted that in the mirror and paid attention to it (the reflection). After a second or two she turned around and looked at me (my waving hand actually).
So, she clearly could see objects in the mirror. Did she know it was me standing behind her doing that? Her turning around suggests that she did but then again it could have just been chance or perhaps she heard the movement and reacted to that. It was hardly a scientific test so take from it what you will.
Nevertheless is it possible the cat (and dogs and whatever else) simply don’t care? So they see themselves in a mirror…maybe they couldn’t give a hoot. As dolphinboy pointed out his cat can identify other cats when seen through a window (as do mine) and clearly react to that. A stranger they react to, themselves in a mirror is no cause for them to do anything.
FWIW I have seen a dog go nuts at a mirror when it saw itself. It seemed to think the animal in the mirror was another dog and would bark at it and charge the mirror. How do I know what the dog thought of its reflection? I don’t, obviously, but it sure seemed that way to me. The dog did this as a young pup and the behavior ceased after a shhort while (maybe it just got board of the dog it could never get to…again I don’t know).
As to dolphins responding to their own reflection dolphinboy is the expert but I saw a video of a dolphin playing in front of a video camera and monitor. The camera and monitor were inside behind an observation window and the dolphin floated there for a long time staring at its image on the display and would do things like blow bubbles, work its jaw, change its orientation every which way all the while looking at the monitor. That dolphin sure seemed to have an idea that it was looking at itself and was intrigued.
I didn’t mean to imply that dolphins won’t react to what they see in mirrors. They do seem to react (which is kind of odd since their eyesight isn’t so great compared to the detail of their echolocation reflections). But I’ve also seen parrots react to what they see in mirrors as well as Siamese Fighting Fish… but I don’t see anyone suggesting that they might be self aware.
Dolphins are indeed large brained mammals and as such are sometimes lumped into the same group as smart apes (like chimps) and young humans. Perhaps their large brains are more related to their complex sensory apparatus than cognitive capabilities??? They seem smarter than say a dog, have an advanced communication system, and can be trained to do amazing things, but that’s a far cry from human-level intelligence… or self awareness.
Dolphins always seem eager to learn new things… until their bellies are full and then they only want to have sex with each other. Perhaps they are just smart enough to appear to be self aware…
Hello All,
Well as Dolphinboy has worked with Dolphins, I too have had several years working with and training Dolphins. I have seen things in these mammals that have amazed me and even left me questioning my own Intelligence in the whole sceme of things. I do not know about you Dolphinboy but at the aquarium I worked at we utilized ‘target training’ to work with the dolphins, and many of us who were on staff there had dogs as well. We all used the ‘target training’ to train our dogs. With out going into much detail about the training method, I have to say Intelligence is usually defined by the beholder.
The Mirrors we humans have in our houses are all there because I believe an inherient human trait is vanity. In essence our weakness is our Vanity. Dogs and cats merely don’t care, thus lookng into a mirror to them is most likely irrellivent. As for the primary question of a dog’s awareness of themselves. Absolutely, they are aware they are alive, they feel pain, they think and reason to some degree. As for a Dolphin I have used mirrors as well with our Dolphins, it looks like they are studying “something” yet they are definitely aware they are there, and what is reflecting back at them in the mirror is themselves…Sorry I’m a little partial to the Dolphin.
I think the self-aware mirror thing would be a chimp would look at itself in the mirror, and react by touching itself. (Well who doesn’t?!) Wilson has some stuff on this in the first couple chapter of On Human Nature. I’ll try to dig it out. Say it is used to what it loks like, and one day you put a bandaid on it’s face. It looks in the mirror, and touches the bandaid.
Whereas a dog, at most, thinks the reflection is another dog. Tho it recognizes your reflection, cause it knows what you look like.
One thing that seems like relatively higher reasoning by my dog, is if he tell her to go get her ball, she will go to another part of the house and bring it back. As for a toy, and she brings one of the 10,000 or so rubber toys littering the premises. But for both, she understands the ides, even if the toy/ball is in a different room. I know it is not a direct analogy, but I remember when babies are quite small, if you show them a toy and then put it behind your back, they think it disappeared.
Finally, wow! One of my silly little queries got moved to GD! I just feel warm all over!
Self-awareness is such a vaporous word that it is often used by homo-centric people to artificially widen the gulf between humans and animals. These people are absolutists who insist that this “self-awareness” they speak of either exists or it doesn’t. Tool use and language stopped being handy delineators, so they had to come up with something indefinable to maintain their feelings of superiority.
That is horse dung. There is an obvious continuum of self-awareness, from pain felt by an insect through whatever behaviours you perform that demonstrate your understanding of your relationship with your environment. Dogs are self-aware in that they know their names. This is obvious to anybody with more than one dog because of the glee exhibited by the dog who is NOT being yelled at. They are able to do extremely simple number problems because they know when one is getting more food than the other, and this also shows their understanding of “justice” to be on a level similar to that of a small child. They understand hierarchies because they know their place in the pack and want to better it. They understand that they have to defer the gratification of emptying their bladders in order to stay in your good graces. They know happiness, they know sorrow, and, most importantly, they know guilt. They know when they screwed up. And anybody who thinks that Bowser doesn’t know why you are disappointed in him when he goes in the house, who says, “He doesn’t even know he did it ten seconds after he did it,” has no understanding of the world of odors dogs live in. Bowser knows darned well who crapped in the basement. He probably did it on purpose because he’s mad at you.
My doggie, Shnookums, is one of the smartest, most self-aware people that I know. She knows the world revolves around her because my family and I exist to serve her. All she has to do is look at us with those big, brown eyes, and we’ll do her bidding. She’s got the perfect life–good food, lot’s of love, and shelter–and all she has to do is just be herself. When my sister picks her up and holds her in front of the mirror, she sees her reflection, but I think what she’s most concerned with is the fact that my sister is holding her and that she is loved.
Now she doesn’t always get her way. She knows she has to choose her battles. Somedays she can’t go for a ride in the car, and she DECIDES it’s good strategy to obey when my mom tells her she has to stay home. She’s not going to bite the hand that feeds her delicious homecooking. That’s just not smart. She responds to my mom’s no-nonsense tone of voice, and I imagine even though she disagrees with some of my mom’s orders, she understands that my mom tells her to do certain things for a reason. I imagine there are plenty of humans out there who haven’t mastered that concept yet.
Of course I’m biased because I just love Shnookums to death, and of course you just have to take my word about how she responds to her family. I admit I think that overall dogs fall into a range of intelligences just like people do. Some are really smart, some are average, and some are dumb as doorknobs. Shnookums is just one of the really smart ones.
You know the more I think about this the more I should say too that sentience/intelligence really is difficult to define. Now I’m not a psychiatrist, and I’m by no means an expert on intelligence tests. I just think that although generally humans have some notion of what intelligence is, we still have much to learn about the workings of the human brain. And I seriously doubt we’ll ever learn how to measure accurately how intelligent a person is because humans are first and foremost individuals, and individuals have a funny way of not fitting easily into categories. However, where we mess up is in thinking that what equals intelligence as we understand it now for our species MUST be the standard that applies to ALL species. That’s just too narrow a definition for comfort IMHO. Does any of this make any sense?
One doggy expert claimed that dogs don’t know guilt, only fear and appeasement. Evidence: if you yell at a dog for something it didn’t do, the dog will cringe, put its tail between its legs and perform the required range of behaviors that persuade the homo sapiens that it feels guilt. It does those things whether or not it has done something considered “wrong” to homo sapiens.
Homo sapiens, OTOH, are apt to rave about how intelligent their offspring and surrogate offspring are.
I don’t know how much one can really read into that. If someone whom you accepted as family (or however dogs regard the humans who keep them as pets) started yelling at you for no good reason that you could ascertain, yet you were unable to profess your innocence (lacking a common language and all), how would you react? I for one would most likely go the appeasement route (striking out at my ‘accuser’ is probably not a good option, especially if whomever is doing the yelling is much larger than I, as is the case for most dogs compared to humans. Nor is just standing there, or ignoring the individual).
I’m not saying that a dog will consciously choose to ‘look guilty’, even though it ‘knows’ it is not. It may just be an instinctual behavior, in an effort to save its own skin. But, even among humans, it can be difficult to determine if someone truly feels remorse for wrongdoing, or if the individual is simply attempting to appease in the hopes of reduced punishment.
All this to say that I feel that the ‘evidence’ provided by the above doggy expert is inconclusive at best, and provides no real insight as to doggy emotions.
Agreed, and since all previous delineators between ‘Humans’ and ‘Animals’ have become unreliable, I propose that we define humans as set apart from animals because they aren’t afraid of vacuum cleaners.
I was listening to a radio programme on this the other day. The speaker said that one way they test for what we regard as “self awareness” involves exposing animals to their own reflection in a mirror and then in some way altering wht they see - such as painting a red dot above their nose. The theory goes if they’ve really cognited that the reflection is them, and then they perceive the change, they will sekk to investigate it on their own body.
I don’t know how valid it is, but struck me as an interesting concept.
No good. Had one dog who LOVED to be vacuumed. And my present dogs may fear the vacuum, but they are brave enough to attack it anyway. Which they try to do to the lawn mower, demonstrating they still aren’t as smart as they could be.
She knows the world revolves around her because my family and I exist to serve her. All she has to do is look at us with those big, brown eyes, and we’ll do her bidding. She’s got the perfect life–good food, lot’s of love, and shelter–and all she has to do is just be herself. When my sister picks her up and holds her in front of the mirror, she sees her reflection, but I think what she’s most concerned with is the fact that my sister is holding her and that she is loved.