When I was a kid, we used to try to fool our dog, Hairy. We’d make a stuffed dog “growl” and “bark” at him. Hairy was always game, responding to the play with growls and barks of his own, but I’ve always wondered just what his thought process was. Did he understand it was play? (And it’s obvious that animals enjoy play.) Did he on some level believe the stuffed dog was a real dog?
Modern technology makes such questions even trickier. Here, via Boing Boing, is a video of a real dog reacting to a $15 battery-operated toy.
I find it unlikely that the real dog — Isabel — would believe she were encountering another animal. For one thing, the toy isn’t going to possess the scent of a living creature. For another, its “bark” sounds artificial. But what does Isabel think? She’s fascinated by the interloper, but what is her perception of it?
On a similar note, my wife gave me a fake crow for Christmas last year. (Yes, I’m serious.) It’s not a real crow, and it doesn’t even have real feathers, but it certainly looks real. Its wings are spread wide, and if I swoop it around the room, the cats get tense. “Why is there a crow in the house?” they seem to say. One of the cats runs like hell. The others wonder if they might not be able to catch the crow.
When its not tormenting my animals, the fake crow lives on one of our windows. One of our cats — Max — periodically attempts to examine the crow. He’s very curious about it, but since it’s out of his reach, he feels thwarted.
How does this fake crow affect my cats’ views of the real crows outside?
I wish there were a way to get deeper inside animal minds.
Some years ago I bought a stuffed black holloween cat to adorn my desk at work. It had a “squeeze me” mechanism which activated a digital recording of fairly life-like meows. In time I brought it home and amused myself freaking out my live cats until they figured out that, as you point out, the stuffed version had no odor.
However, I recently visited the National Geographic website and came across the page for the domestic cat which contained a short .mp3 file of actual cat vocalizations. Playing this on the computer speakers aroused considerable interest for several minutes.
Equally intriguing are animals’ reactions to mirrors, and to the sight of other animals, or sometimes moving objects in general, on TV. Cat TV has periodically been a big hit, although my cats actually get bored after a while, as they do believe it or not with the bird activity outside our windows. My cats ignore glimpses of themselves in mirrors, although other cats sometimes think there’s another animal there. Chimpanzees have been shown to actually realize they are looking at themselves, because if a researcher has placed a smudge on the chimp’s face, that chimp will try to wipe it off when he sees it in the mirror.
Really fascinating stuff. You wish you could ask animals questions (I so with my cats could talk) and have them answer you, but they’re probably too smart for that!
my cats will get interested in just about anything that moves, anything that’s insect-size and anything that smells. i guess that sometimes one single sign of possible predator or prey is enough to arise interest. right now one of them is eating my headphones.
Isabel: “hmm, smells nothing like an animal, kinda looks like one…does this mean the robots are taking over?” :)
The reaction at 0:26 is interesting. I wonder if she’s thinking, not “what is it?” but “what’s it going to do to me?” So, even if she never figures out what the new ‘creature’ is, she might be able to trust it if she could make the connection that it’s just being controlled by the guy on the left.
My cats don’t respond to cat noises on the computer for some reason, but if I whistle, they do. Does the sound remind them of birds? If so, when they see who’s making the noise, does it give them a moment of ‘cognitive dissonance’? :)