I’m a Biology student and after seeing the results of the magpie mirror test I’ve decided to try a version of it on my tom cat. He doesn’t use mirrors to look at people, and he actually avoids looking at them. But then, he’s an indoor-outdoor cat, with all the social upbringing that interacting with other cats in an urban environment entices.

But he tolerates me putting a mirror in front of him (there’s one at my desk where he likes to lie down), so I gently patted his head and left a small post-it there, way up where he couldn’t see it. A few moments later, after I was sure he didn’t know it was there (he didn’t react to it), I put the mirror up to him and asked him to look at it.

He looked up at it, instantly lept off the desk and began shaking his head (NOT the one reflected, his own), pawing it to get the post-it off. So he obviously knows that the image in the mirror is his reflection, and he knows that if something is attached to him in the mirror, it’s attached to himself, which is a clear sign of self-awareness.

The more interesting about that is that when he was a kitten, 11 years ago, I picked him up and introduced him to the mirror. At first he hissed, but then I told him it was him, I pointed to my image, to myself, to his image, to him, and then made him put his paw on his reflection on the mirror, just like we humans instinctively do with babies to teach them about mirrors.

I believe, from those experiences, that cat understanding about their reflection on mirrors is learned, just as ours and other animal’s is, and the only thing that makes them seem not to understand it as easily as we do is that cats have a different approach to their image that we humans and other animals that actually enjoy interacting with their own reflection, like pigs and apes, do.

And that that difference in approach isn’t instinctive, but part of a set of social norms and practices that vary between indoor-only cats and outdoor cats, and also depend on how much human-cat interaction the cat receives from its owners.

I’ll be repeating the experiment after long enough has passed that he gets used to not being “tricked” like that again, and will film it this time, so I can have a permanent record.

If you want to try that experiment with your cat, and register it, I’d love to know about it. Just please don’t forget to add if your cat is indoor-only, indoor-outdoor or outdoor-only, if it has any contact with outdoor cats (as is the case with my female cat, who’s indoor only but lives with my male, who goes outside), if it has been taught to recognize the reflection as himself or has figured out itself/never been exposed to a mirror before.

I definitely agree with the idea that the mirror test is hugely specieist – but I’ve heard of some people who say that “cats don’t have emotions, you’re just anthropomorphizing them”. Okay, so when Imber gives the particular desperate-sounding call that I’ve learned means, “Mommy-Cat! Where *are* you?!”, and I say something (which leads her to me) or come over to her, and she starts purring and rubbing up against me… she’s not relieved? Huh, could’ve fooled me!

As for cats and ASDers… There’s a wonderful (picture) book out there called _All Cats Have Asperger Syndrome_ by Kathy Hoopmann. It’s an *excellent*, clear description of what Asperger’s (and essentially ASD) is, by comparing our behaviour and reactions to those of cats, with wonderful (and heartwarming, and often humourous) pictures of cats in various situations. It seems an excellent tool to introduce the concept to people, whether children old enough to understand or adults, and everyone I’ve shown it to has enjoyed it greatly.

As for TVs… we used to have two cats that were fascinated by our TV. One of them liked to watch her reflection in it when it was off (she could spend hours staring at it), and wandered away when it got turned on; the other was fascinated by the short-lived YTV “butterfly” commercials (back in the mid 90s), and used to walk around to the back of the TV to see where the butterflies had gone to.

:) tagAught

My cats have never shown any interest in mirrors. Neither one of them sees a mirror as anything more than a cold, hard pane of glass with meaningless shapes floating in it. Things in mirrors don’t have smell or taste; they can’t be batted around, chewed, licked, sniffed, or whacked with one’s paw. That makes them irrelevant to my cats.

I still have pretty much the same reservations about the mirror test that you have, though. Cats’ sensory environment is different. Humans are so hugely visual–something that doesn’t have a smell or a taste or even a texture still has meaning to us. I’m even more visual than average–I learned to read about the same time as I learned to talk, because this primarily visual printed language made much more sense to me than fleeting sounds. But my cats aren’t really that way. They see things, sure; but they see things in terms of whether they’re new or interesting. The shapes in the mirror are neither new nor interesting; the shapes out the window are both new and interesting, though equally unreachable.

That they ignore the mirror may not be such an indication of lack of an idea of “self” as many professionals think. If they ignore the mirror, because they can’t interact with it; but don’t ignore things out the window, which they also can’t interact with, doesn’t that mean that they understand that the mirror things are just copies of the things that already exist in the world around them–just meaningless reflections? If they didn’t know that the cat in the mirror was themselves, why would they hiss at a cat out the window, but ignore their own reflections?

The mirror test is interesting, especially as a way to see how an animal reasons; but I don’t think you can use it to test whether an animal has self-awareness. Animals just think too differently from us, and too differently from each other, to use that as some kind of global litmus test. It’s just not valid.

I’ve lived with cats who seemed to enjoy mirrors, and would also make eye contact with me that way. Oddly, my grandmother started into how it’s bad luck for a cat to look into a mirror when she saw me holding one there. I have no idea what that reaction was about.

They think of us as something unnatural, something deeply wrong that just shouldn’t happen that way. And there’s something deeply wrong with that in a whole different way than what they think of us.

Well said.

Others might argue they have object recognition but they don’t realize it isn’t another human or another cat. But then they don’t attack the cat in the mirror like they would if one walked into their home. This suggests they may recognize the cat in the mirror as self. And they also frequently make eye contact with their humans through the mirror like Amanda mentioned, and mine sometimes talks to me via the mirror as well.

Even still, others may say that they have recognition but still don’t understand the concept of “reflection”. But I myself have never seen a cat try to walk THROUGH a mirror, implying they know it’s a hard surface and not another room.

I’m not certain they know it’s definitely their own reflection, but being familiar with my own cats’ behaviors it certainly seems like it.

My dog (he died years ago) had a distaste for red (a colour that dogs don’t see, so red objects would probably have looked muddy yellow to him) and a great fondness for blue. If you put a red bandanna-scarf ’round his neck, he would take it off and bury it. If you put a blue one on, he would run ’round to everybody and do a ‘look at me!’ wiggle. If it fell off, he’d carry it until somebody put it back on (or something else exciting happened and he forgot.)

and about a different-looking collar, i think cats are not so much into fashion?
i wonder what is cat aesthetics? in what way do they have an idea of beauty?