How Your Dog Really Recognises Itself

Animals have more self-awareness than first thought

WE CAN ALL ADMIT to placing our dog in front of a mirror with the hopes that Fido might recognise himself. But despite the many unbelievable actions our pooches can perform, recognising themselves in the mirror isn’t one of them. Instead, researchers are finding that a dog’s keen sense of smell is how they know who they are.

According to research published in the journal Behavioural Processes, dogs use their sense of smell for self-recognition. This new research supports previous studies debunking the idea that dogs can recognise themselves by looking at their reflection.

For the study, researchers used the ‘sniff test’ of self-recognition on 36 domestic dogs. The test was previously proven successful by Roberto Cazzolla Gatti, a researcher at the Biological Institute of Tomsk State University in Russia. In their original testing, Gatti and his team found that “dogs distinguish between the olfactory ‘image’ of themselves when it has been modified.” They’ll sniff for much longer when their scent is doctored with another odour. “Such behaviour implies a recognition of the odour as being of or from ‘themselves’,” Science Daily explains. The researchers in the current study say the results offer compelling evidence of selfawareness in dogs. They believe their findings can show “… that this capacity is not a specific feature of only great apes, humans and a few other animals, but it depends on the way in which researchers try to verify it.”