Dogs may not be able to recognize themselves in the mirror, but that doesn’t mean our pets don’t have a particular level of self-awareness.
Recent research has shown that dogs can recognize their unique scent, such as looking at what is called an “olfactory mirror”. In a new study, dogs may also be aware of their bodies.
Body awareness is the ability to think of your body as a clear object in relation to other objects around. It is considered to be one of the fundamental foundations of self-advocacy.
In children of the human race, this type of self-perception has historically been tested by asking a toddler to put back the blanket they are currently sitting on. If the child can realize that he has to stand up and pull his body out as an obstacle, then he is declared “body conscious”.
Usually, it takes around 18 months or a year for babies to have the intellectual capacity to figure this out.
To adapt this test to dogs, the researchers tried to see if these animals also had the same level of body awareness.
In 2019, a small study found that dogs have cognitive abilities about body size and how it affects the way they move around the world, but here’s the study. Early studies show their bodies are generally seen as an obstacle.
The researchers found 32 dogs of different breeds and sizes that met the requirements of the test, which involved pets picking up a toy and giving it to their owners. The highlight is the toy that is connected to a mat that the dogs sit on.
In other words, to bring the toy to its owner, the dog must first get off the mat. These results are then compared to what happens when the toy does not stick to anything at all or when the toy is connected to earth.
“This way when the dogs tried to pick up the target, which again was impossible, the dogs did not feel a parallel lift under their feet,” the authors said.
Without this tug under them, the dogs would not have pulled away from the mat so quickly. They realize that their position does not matter. But when the dog feels a tug on the mat below, he quickly comes out and picks up the toy afterward. However, it was not just this feeling that surprised the dogs.
Even when the toy was tied to the ground and a researcher pulled the dogs’ paws with a leash, the dogs didn’t jump off the mat as quickly. This shows that dogs can understand when a pull is done on their own and when a pull is done unrelated to the immediate challenge.
In short, the animals in the study were able to distinguish “my body is an obstacle” and simply “there is an obstacle”. They also know how to instinctively move their bodies to overcome obstacles to success.
“We suggest that dogs’ responses to the primary test can be explained by body awareness and an understanding of the consequences of their actions,” the researchers explain.
More research will be needed to understand the continuum of self-perception that exists in the animal kingdom and not just in dogs. Very little research has been done on the perception of animals that treat their bodies as an obstacle.
Elephants are one of the only other animals to have undergone similar body-to-obstacle tests. In one of these studies, researchers found that Asian elephants leave the mat much faster when needed to successfully complete a task.
The results are similar to what is currently shown in dogs, but elephants can also recognize themselves in mirrors, unlike dogs.
The mirror test is based on visual appearance, but the “body as an obstacle” test is about our own actions and the physical properties of our body as an extension of that. Elephants have both of these types of self-recognition.
The researchers concluded that: “Although the dogs did not pass the mirror marking test, we now have evidence that they can pass the body as an obstacle test. The results support self-representation as a more or less connected array of cognitive skills, and the presence or absence of a particular building block may vary by species. “
