I’d like to know about animals viewing mirrors in general of course.
I’ve seen videos of different animals reacting ti themselves in mirrors. Cat’s especially but also higher intelligence animals like monkeys and apes. I can’t say I’ve seen a dog reacting to a mirror.
Is my cat so smart that it doesn’t care it sees it’s reflection? Or is it so stupid it can’t comprehend what it’s seeing and ignores it?
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It thinks it’s another cat and is ignoring it to assert dominance.
If its seen it’s reflection before then it probably doesn’t care.
It’s so stupid that it cannot comprehend.
“Cats generally don’t seem to recognize their reflection in a mirror because they primarily rely on their sense of smell to identify things, not their vision, so when they see their image, it doesn’t have a scent and therefore doesn’t register as “themselves”; they simply perceive it as another cat in their territory.”
What you are thinking of is probably The Mirror test.
They put something odd, like a marker on the forehead of an animal, then show it the mirror and attempt to determine if the animal realizes theres something on themselves and reacts to try to remove the mark.
as you can imagine tests like this are really hard to do and get information out of since animals just tend to do whatever.
But for what its worth a quick google search seems to indicate cats generally do not ‘pass’ this test. Either not recognizing their reflection, or not interacting with it at all. Humans tend to be very very visual creatures, so reflections make a lot of sense to us. But most mammals rely on other senses a lot more than we do, so their brains really arent wired for stuff like this.
My older dog knows to use a mirror.
My puppy still barks at the mirror puppy who won’t play with him.