Dog won’t stop barking at reflection

Q:

My 2-year-old male Jack Russell terrier has a thing about his reflection whenever he sees it on any surface. Even seeing himself in the hubcap of a tire makes him go ballistic, barking at it and trying to bite it. I assume that he thinks it is another dog barking back at him and that is why he does this as I read that dogs cannot understand that their reflection is actually themselves. However, this dog is very, very smart, and I am not saying this because he is my dog. He is always figuring things out for himself and I have never had nor seen a dog do the things that he does. Yet since he is so smart, why can’t he understand that his reflection is not another dog, particularly since it does not smell like a dog?

This is an issue that has always interested me. Thus far scientific research done in controlled settings has proved that the only animals who can understand that their reflections are themselves are apes, dolphins and elephants.

However dogs and birds — as smart as the others in my opinion — cannot, and I have always accepted this as the way it is. One day, though, as I was getting ready to tape one of my TV shows years back, I had to hide the microphone under my shirt. Harry, my Scarlet Macaw, was on my shoulder and he always reacted to his reflection in the same manner that he reacted to all other scarlet macaws — he would spread his wings and try and attack it.

That particular day, I stood in front of a fulllength mirror so that I could see myself and adjust the microphone, and as

A:

soon as I walked in front of the mirror and stopped to adjust my shirt Harry stood at attention and said “Marc!” as he always did when he saw me. Then he just calmly sat on my shoulder and looked at our reflections tilting his head this way and that. He did not try to attack it nor did he ever try to attack his reflection ever again. Now I cannot say with certainty that Harry understood that it was him in the mirror. However I do know that he knew the other image in the mirror was me, as he said so loud and clear, and I assume that he also figured out that the bird he saw on my shoulder was not a strange scarlet macaw as he did not try to attack it as he always did in the past.

I would like to think that my full-length reflection gave Harry a reference point that he did not have in smaller mirrors so that he could figure out what was going on for himself. I always wondered if a dog in a similar situation would act the same way. A dog like your Jack Russell reacts to what it sees instantly so I doubt that such a dog could think of its reflection as itself, but I bet that a calm and mature dog that has experienced a lot of different things in life and thus was self taught by these experiences would act as Harry did.