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+--- Thread: Can Dogs Smell Their ‘Reflections’? (canine community) (/thread-4070.html)
Can Dogs Smell Their ‘Reflections’? (canine community) - C C - Aug 18, 2017
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/08/can-dogs-smell-their-reflections/537219/
EXCERPT: [...] Gallup concluded that chimps could recognize their own reflections—a feat that “would seem to require a rather advanced form of intellect” and that “implies a concept of self.” [...] Consider the dogs. Dogs don’t groom each other to the same extent that apes do, so there’s no reason to expect that they would try to examine a mark on their heads. What’s more, the mirror test is a visual test, designed by visual animals (us) for other visual animals. Dogs see just fine, but they mainly live in a world of smell. If you want to know if they have a concept of self, it makes little sense to confront them with a mirror. You need to work in their world. A world of chemicals drifting through the air. A world that’s hard for us to imagine.
“Smell is so distant to our experience,” says Alexandra Horowitz from Barnard College. “We’re just not engaged with olfaction, so it’s taken a long time to see—or even imagine—what the world might be like for non-visual creatures, and to design experiments with that in mind.”
Marc Bekoff from the University of Colorado, Boulder, did just that with his own dog Jethro....
MORE: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/08/can-dogs-smell-their-reflections/537219/
RE: Can Dogs Smell Their ‘Reflections’? (canine community) - Yazata - Nov 10, 2017
A dog's own bed must have tremendous dog-smell for a dog since they rub around in it daily. But they don't react to it like they would the smell of another dog, so they must recognize it as their own smell.