animals and mirrors

I’m too tired to go researching this on the web right now, but it’s an interesting issue.

One always hear talk of which living creatures can recognize themselves in mirrors: just a few primates, I believe, and then with humans there is all kinds of talk about the mirror stage in psychoanalysis.

But then there’s another interesting question: which animals can recognize themselves in mirrors without knowing that it’s themselves? What I mean is this. Sometimes I’ve held Tamanya up to a mirror to see how she will react to her own reflection. It turns out I have to hold her very close to the mirror to get any reaction at all, but once I do, she clearly thinks her reflection is another cat. She is curious about it, and mostly friendly, but does swing her paw out at that “other” cat.

So too with the oven in this place, which has one of those smoky, dark-glass fronts that has a mirror-like effect. She’s really convinced that there’s another little kitten inside that oven, and a bit confused by it.

When we had pet ducks, they too would interpret their own reflections in mirrors as other ducks. In one case we brought a tall mirror outside, and the white pekin (the really aggressive one) actually walked around behind the mirror to see where the other duck was.

I’m not sure that it works with dogs, perhaps because dogs trust their noses more than their eyes in most cases. However, my parents’ fox terrier did become quite agitated by that Hartford Insurance commercial where the big buck jumped off the right-hand side of the TV screen. Woody would bark and go look out the front window next to the TV to see where the buck had gone. He was an inveterate deer-chaser, since my parents’ front yard has deer walking through all the time, being in a semi-rural location.