a dog fight with itself at mirror

Serious question: When your dog looks in the mirror, what does he see? A playmate, maybe. An adversary, sometimes. But could he possibly recognize himself? For that matter — does a dog have a sense of “self”?

These are abstract questions, and it is too bad for us that dogs can’t answer for themselves. And so, instead, scientists who study animal cognition have devised a test for measuring these hard-to-comprehend concepts, involving the use of one commonplace household object: the mirror. It’s called the mirror self-recognition test, and since its inception in the 1970s it has been considered be the “gold standard” of determining whether or not a creature possesses self-awareness. Elephants, chimpanzees, and dolphins are among the creatures who have passed, suggesting that these animals have a sense of self. But plenty of other primates, along with highly intelligent creatures like octopuses, are either confused by or totally uninterested in the mirror.