Dogs don’t recognize their own reflection in a mirror, research has found, but an adorable video on TikTok shows a pit bull mix apparently recognizing her face on a T-shirt.
The clip, posted to the @tofu_thepitbull account on Monday, shows Tofu the rescue dog looking curiously at her owner’s T-shirt, which has an image of her face on it. She is sitting on a bed wagging her tail and at one point attempts to touch the image with her paw.
“She was so confused,” reads the caption on the video, which has been watched more than 260,000 times.
Tofu’s confusion could be down to a lack of self-awareness, which is defined by the American Kennel Club (AKC) as “the ability to think about yourself as an individual and to realize that you are separate from others around you.”
Animal experts believe dogs have a low sense of self-awareness and have tested this hypothesis using the “mirror test” developed by psychologist Gordon Gallup Jr. in 1970. In the test, an animal’s face is secretly marked with an odorless red dye and it is placed in front of a mirror.
The AKC explains: “If he understands he is looking at himself and not another animal, he might touch the mark while looking in the mirror or turn his body to better see the mark’s reflection. That would indicate self-recognition, which in turn hints at self-awareness.”
Human babies begin recognizing themselves in a mirror at about 18 months old. Some animals have passed the mirror test, including chimpanzees. Dogs have not.
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“This lack of understanding seems surprising, considering the other complex mental and social skills dogs have been shown to possess,” said the AKC.
That could be because a dog mainly relies on its nose, rather than its eyes, to process the world. Researcher Roberto Cazzolla Gatti has investigated this via a “sniff test.” His 2016 paper, published in the journal Ethology, Ecology & Evolution, and other studies have found that dogs can distinguish their own urine from the urine of other dogs and show differing levels of interest in it, suggesting a level of self-awareness.
Whether or not Tofu knew what she was looking at, TikTok users loved the “adorable” video of her.
One joked: “How is she so smart? My dog won’t even listen when I talk to him on the phone.”
Another wrote: “Tofu: ‘mama you replaced me… Oh wait is that a mirror.'”
Newsweek has reached out to Tofu’s owner via TikTok for comment.
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