Inside of a Dog_ What Dogs See, Smell, and Know - Alexandra Horowitz [88]
The inner dog (About themselves)
The best scientific tool proposed to determine if dogs think about themselves—if they have a sense of self—is a simple one: the mirror. One day the primatologist Gordon Gallup pondered his reflection while shaving and wondered if the chimpanzees he studied would ponder their reflections in mirrors, too. Certainly using a mirror for self-examination—smoothing a shirt over belly, patting down a wayward hair, testing a coy smile—is a display of our own self-awareness. And before we are self-aware, as young children, we do not use mirrors as adults do. A short time before children pass theory-of-mind tests, they begin to consider their mirror images.
Gallup promptly placed a full-length mirror outside his chimpanzees' cages and watched what they did. They all did the same thing first: they threatened and tried to attack the mirror. Suddenly, it seemed, there was another chimp right outside their cage; this must be addressed at once. Despite the no doubt confusing result—the mirror image seemed to attack back, only for the affair to resolve without ado—their first days with the mirrors were full with social displays toward this new, glaring chimpanzee. After a few days, though, the chimpanzees seemed to come to a realization. Gallup watched as his chimps approached the mirrors and began to use them to examine their own visages and bodies: picking at their teeth, blowing bubbles, making faces toward their mirror image. They were especially interested in parts of their bodies that are ordinarily visually inaccessible: the mouth, the rump, up the nostrils. To be sure that they were thinking about the mirror images as themselves, Gallup devised a "mark" test: he inconspicuously applied a prominent dab of red ink to the head of the chimps. These first subjects in this test needed to be anesthetized to apply the mark; later researchers would affix the mark while doing ordinary grooming or medical care of their animals. When the marked chimps again stood in front of the mirrors, they saw a red-tagged chimp—and they touched the spot on their own heads, bringing their hands down to examine the ink with their mouths. They passed the test.
There is considerable debate about whether this indicates that chimpanzees are thinking about themselves, have a concept of self, recognize themselves, are self-aware, or none of the above*
—especially since it would be disruptive of our ideas about animals to suddenly grant them self-awareness. But the mirror tests have continued alongside the debate, and to this date dolphins (by moving their bodies to explore the mark) and at least one elephant (using her trunk) have passed the test; monkeys have not. And dogs? Dogs have not been shown to pass the test. They never examine themselves in the mirror. Instead they behave more like monkeys do: they sometimes look at the mirrors as though it were another animal, and sometimes look at it idly. In some cases, dogs will use mirrors to get information about the world: to see you tiptoeing up behind them, for instance. But they don't seem to see the mirror as an image of themselves.
There are a few explanations why dogs might behave this way. The dogs may indeed not have any sense of self—thus no sense of who that handsome dog in the mirror might be. But as the debate over this test indicates, it is not universally accepted as a conclusive test of self-awareness; thus neither can it be a conclusive determination of lack of self-awareness. Another possible explanation for the dogs' behavior is that the lack of other cues—specifically olfactory cues—coming from the mirror image leads dogs to lose interest in investigating it. Some fantastical odor-mirror that wafts the dog's own scent while reflecting the dog's own image would be a better medium for this test. Another issue is that the test is predicated on a specific kind of curiosity about oneself: one that leads