A new US study used a sniff test to assess dogs' ability to recognize themselves. The experiment confirms the dog's self-cognition hypothesis proposed by a professor last year. While pets have been adept at social cognitive tasks and even meta-cognitive tasks, they failed the mirror self-recognition test. Through a pioneering ethological approach, different ways of checking self-recognition were applied to thirty-six dogs accompanied by their owners.
This study confirmed the previously proven evidence showing that “dogs distinguish from the olfactory image of themselves when adapted:examining their own scent for a longer period of time when an additional scent is present than when not. This behavior implies a recognition of the smell as being or of itself.”
The study on a larger number of dogs shows that “the sniff test of self-recognition, even when applied to multiple individuals living in groups and of different ages and genders, provides important evidence of self-awareness in dogs and can play a critical role in show that this capacity is not specific to just great apes, humans and a few other animals, but it depends on how researchers verify it.
