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The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

Polls are now a reliable indicator of what corporate Republicans want us to think.

“Until such time as the world ends, we will act as though it intends to spin on.”

People really shouldn’t expect the government to help after they watched the GOP drown it in a bathtub.

You passed on an opportunity to be offended? What are you even doing here?

We know you aren’t a Democrat but since you seem confused let me help you.

Marge, god is saying you’re stupid.

Stop using mental illness to avoid talking about armed white supremacy.

75% of people clapping liked the show!

These are not very smart people, and things got out of hand.

When I was faster i was always behind.

Hi god, it’s us. Thanks a heap, you’re having a great week and it’s only Thursday!

Reality always gets a vote in the end.

The willow is too close to the house.

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

Jesus watching the most hateful people claiming to be his followers

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

A norm that restrains only one side really is not a norm – it is a trap.

Republicans cannot even be trusted with their own money.

Be a wild strawberry.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

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Cancel the cowardly Times and Post and set up an equivalent monthly donation to ProPublica.

You are here: Home / Pet Blogging / Dog Blogging / Respite Open Thread: That Dog in the Mirror

Respite Open Thread: That Dog in the Mirror

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Some dogs do recognize themselves in their reflections — I knew an Afghan Hound who was so enamoured by his own voguing skillz that his handler joked about using a hand mirror instead of liver treats to get his attention in the show ring. Other dogs seem to find the whole mirror thing somewhat unsettling. If a ghost, for us tactile primates, is a being we can see but not touch, then perhaps a canine ghost would be one they could see but not smell.

IMO, that’s the best explanation for the Golden Retriever in the top tweet. He is confronted by a strange dog who has no olfactory signature! This is mildly alarming, especially if it’s happening on *his* personal territory. Naturally, he shows his teeth to let this uncanny intruder know that he is a dog not to be trifled with, a canine in full. Good news! — the Unsniffable understands this gesture, responding in kind, but matching the exact lift of lip and angle of ears to a nicety. Whatever his other problems, at least this is a dog who knows his manners, so Original Dog is able to relax from his original alarm and give a measured canine smile. The world, for a good dog, remains good…

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56Comments

  2. 2.

    sab

    I only ever had one dog who recognized herself in the mirror. She was sitting btween my legs in front of the mirror staring at the scentless dog when I reached down and scratched her head. She looked at my reflection, then up at me, and a lightbulb went on in her head.

    After that she used to spend a lot of time gazing at herself.

  4. 4.

    dmsilev

    Appropriate for this thread:
    ‘Who pours the kibble?’ And other answers about daily life for dogs in the White House

    For instance, who fills the water dish, rubs the bellies and scoops the poop? Can the pups just pop into the Oval Office? And what if one ruins a rug or bites an ambassador?

    Here are the answers along with a peek into the lives of first dogs.

    Favorite anecdote:

    The most notorious breach of diplomacy was perpetrated by Pete, Teddy Roosevelt’s bull terrier mix, who reportedly pantsed the visiting French ambassador and chased him up a tree on the White House grounds in 1906, according to the White House Historical Association.

    Also amusing:

    Betty Ford told Pickens about a wee-hours potty run that went awry. The couple’s golden retriever, Liberty, was days from giving birth to nine puppies and needed to go outside, so she woke up the president at 3 a.m. by licking his face. He dutifully pulled on his bathrobe and slippers and took her out to the South Lawn to do her business.

    When the pair returned to the house, the elevators to the residence floors had been shut down for the night. They schlepped up the stairs to the second and then the third floors, only to find the doors bolted. They were locked out.

    “And there they were,” recalled Betty Ford in a 1978 memoir, “a President and his dog, wandering around in a stairwell in the wee small hours of the morning, not able to get back to bed. Finally they came all the way down again, and by that time the Secret Service had been alerted, and somebody got the elevator started.”

  5. 5.

    Jim Appleton

    Not so sure this is recognition of self, rather than recognition of other.
    I had a famous encounter with a cassowary named Blue Arrow, documented in Outside Magazine.
    Her cohort is famous — and declining, in part because of aggressive behavior toward vehicles.
    Truth is that they are challenging their own reflection in the glass and paint, thinking some other cassowary attempts dominance.

  6. 6.

    Just Some Fuckhead

    Made bean soup for dinner and used my last three cans of Goya beans. No more Goya for me.

  7. 7.

    Aleta

    The first night my dog was here he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror in the next room.   Backed up in a hurry.  Approached again cautiously,  just his head around the corner.  Eye contact, tiny wag.  Came forward a little more.  A little more wag.  Strange dog wagged back, staying in place, and appeared friendly.  Soon they were face to face, tails going enthusiastically at each other.  My dog looked so happy to have found a friend in this weird new indoor place.   The other dog was equally happy to see him.

    Later he stood staring at his face in the oven door window.  The reflections in the big windows were so spooky he tiptoed past them the first few nights.

     

    ETA I think his brain until then had not had a chance to  learn to process reflections (or vision from a height).  He would stop and stare at patterns and reflections on the river or ocean, which he hadn’t seen before.  He still watches current patterns,  waves and light moving on water.

  11. 11.

    Jim Appleton

    @Just One More Canuck:

    Yes they are.

    I spent about five minutes shoving a 350 pound seven-foot tall bird with one horn and a blue head, and massive talons.  Somewhere I have pictures from inches.

    My legs were giving way in panic, I was nauseous, and my presumably last thought was “my mom is going to hear that I was killed by a giant bird.”

  12. 12.

    Robert Sneddon

    @Just One More Canuck: You’ve never encountered the Scottish midge, then. It’s the only flying insect known to be proof against anti-aircraft fire.

    This has been proven scientifically — there was a military test-firing range up in the Scottish Islands (Barra, I think). Some time after WWII the site was used to test a radar-controlled AA gun. The gun tracked a remote-controlled target out to sea and the firing path went through a large cloud of midges startled out of the clifftop gorse by the gunfire. The gun director’s report stated the drone target was hit but the midges were unhurt by the barrage of proximity-fuzed shells fired at them.

  15. 15.

    Old Dan and Little Ann

    Our crazy rescue, Yeller, was the worst dog I ever had.  I don’t miss him for beans. The night we brought him home from the shelter he spent about 5 minutes staring into our full length bedroom mirror. Creepy as hell. This  same he day ran away the second I put him in the the fenced yard and he found an out.  Oh, YEAH. He Fucking jumped onto our dinner table and sent our dinners flying that 1st night as well.  Fucking Yeller!

  17. 17.

    S. Cerevisiae

    I caught my Bella admiring her own reflection not too long after I rescued her, ever since her nickname is my little diva lol. She’s a big goofy German Shepherd who likes people more than I do but everyone loves her too.

  20. 20.

    The Moar You Know

    IMO, that’s the best explanation for the Golden Retriever in the top tweet. He is confronted by a strange dog who has no olfactory signature! This is mildly alarming, especially if it’s happening on *his* personal territory.

    One of my “hobbies” is training dogs for Guide Dogs for the Blind. And we get about 20% Goldens (the rest are labs) Plus, well, I own a golden just like the one in the video. My boy’s much redder, though.

    That is absolutely not what’s going on here – you are selling the dog’s intelligence far too short. The dog knows it’s him in the mirror, knows what he’s looking at and is practicing. Every damn Golden that’s rolled though this house does it; we have mirrored closet doors (yay 1980s!) and they just sit there and practice. Or admire themselves. Or practice their signature move; my wife and I laughed until our sides hurt one night watching one of the Guide Dogs practicing picking up his bone and then dropping it in the fashion he found aesthetically most pleasing. He did this for almost an hour. The resident golden, our boy, not only knows who he is the mirror but knows other dogs, my wife, me, what’s outside the window, etc, and has realized that he can watch everyone and everything in the room from all kinds of different angles without looking directly at any of us.

    They pick this up young, too. If they’ve got access to mirrors at their height they’ll pick it up as babies. They all will get it by the seventh month. Never met a lab that didn’t get it either, but their timetable might be different.

    I don’t know about other breeds, but would bet more of them understand the reality of mirrors than not.

    Just because they’ll eat their own poop doesn’t mean they’re stupid.

  21. 21.

    Just One More Canuck

    @Robert Sneddon: @NotMax: Don’t really want to encounter any of them, but a “350 pound seven-foot tall bird with one horn and a blue head, and massive talons” (up to 5 inches long) and apparently a really bad temper will do it for me

  24. 24.

    Jim Appleton

    @Just One More Canuck:

    All you have to do is crouch down.

    They are responding to standing humans’ upright posture as another cassowary in a threat display.  Much as they do when they see their own reflection in a car window.

    Become placid and ground-focused, and they immediately lose interest.  By chance, that’s what happened to me.  I tripped, grabbed her cold green ankle by accident (really weird sensation), and noticed instantly that she lost interest.  Had I not stayed low, …

    What happened was she saw the upright threat posture neutralized.

    Similar thing happens when a cassowary loses track of a self reflection.

  27. 27.

    Ken

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: I find short stories hard to write.

    Well, it is hard to beat the emotional impact of “For sale, baby shoes, never worn.”

    My favorite short-short is titled “If Eve Had Failed to Conceive”. There is no text, just the title.

  28. 28.

    prostratedragon

    When Cat (not his real name) was a kitten there was an uninstalled full-length mirror in the apartment, lying on its long side in the living room. Cat walked up to it and invited the other cat to play. Played with the mouse or ball in front of it, with no response. Went right up to it and put his paws on it; noticing the hard surface, maybe, began to sniff it. When the other cat sniffed right back, apparently thought, “I’ll get to the bottom of this!” Lined up at one end of the mirror and, fixing the other cat with eyes right, bounded like a gazelle several times down the length of the mirror.

    Now, this is a potentially dangerous thing for a cat to do if it relies on the people present being alive to give it food and such, but we all survived somehow. As for Cat, he seems to have concluded that it wasn’t another cat, or in any event, lost interest after that. Ah, the poignancy of lost innocence!

  29. 29.

    Dorothy A. Winsor

    @Ken: I’ve seen that baby shoes line. It makes me cringe every time

    ETA: Where we lived in Iowa, there was a swap sheet where you could list things for sale or trade. I once saw “wedding dress, size 16, never worn.”

  31. 31.

    Pete Mack

    That dog is a golden retriever,  so there is no way on God’s green earth he recognized himself in the mirror. Lab retriever it’d be another story. She’d go grab a sock from another room just so she could show off to herself.

  32. 32.

    Kent

    My wife grew up in Vitacura Chile, a fairly affluent district of Santiago with lots of big high-rise apartments that have balconies.  She told me when she was about 10 or 12 she and her brother and acquired a red laser pointer and would borrow their father’s binocular and sit out on their balcony searching for dogs on other balconies across they city.  People would often put their dogs out onto the balconies at night.  When they found a dog they would use the laser pointer and binoculars to get the dog agitated and gleefully chasing the red dot back and forth across the balcony.  Sometimes they could get the wound-up dog to crash back and forth into the balcony door until the furious owner would come bursting out to yell at it in the middle of the night.  Then then they would lay low and giggle and start the process all over again.

    Children can be cruel.  But I suspect the dogs actually loved the distraction and exercise.

  41. 41.

    Aleta

    @Jim Appleton: I looked at outside on line for a story about Blue Arrow, but the only story was one when she fell (while going after dogs, who then killed her).  Were you at that encounter or did you meet her on the trail?  Sounds like she was known for going after hikers and joggers.  That would give me bad dreams for a while.

  44. 44.

    StringOnAStick

    We had a robin that would attack its reflection in the sliding glass door.  No big deal except for the prodigious amount of robin poop every day. We bought one of those big plastic owls and put it inside the door right where the daily attacks were happening.  It was hilarious watching Mr Badass come flying in for an attack session, see the owl and have a complete attitude (mental and physical) change in a split second.  No more pecking the door, no more piles of robin poop.

  48. 48.

    SteverinoCT

    I saw (on YouTube, no doubt) an experiment with dolphins and reflections. Not only did they recognize themselves, one of them spent a lot of time displaying his privates for his own admiration.

  50. 50.

    stinger

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: Dorothy, this is great! You spin such good tales, and I love your person- and place-names and your use of language. “…the night already snared in their branches.” Congrats on publication!

  52. 52.

    John Revolta

    Our dog Otis likes to look at himself in the oven door window. We’re not sure what he thinks though. He’s very smart in some ways and not so much in others.

  53. 53.

    Jim Appleton

    @Aleta: 
    I can’t find it either, though I did a few years back. Don’t know what’s up with Outside’s archive.
    My experience was circa 1996, a couple years before she was killed.
    One of my observations was that the goon who wrote the main story about chasing down wild cassowarys contrasted markedly with Peter Matthisen, who wrote eloquently in the same issue outsideonline.com/1749311/outside-magazine-feb-2003 about another matter.

  54. 54.

    J R in WV

    @StringOnAStick: ​
     

    We had a robin that would attack its reflection in the sliding glass door.

    We had a male cardinal who hit every window in the house every day. We have 47 windows. So aggressive. Over now, thankfully.

  55. 55.

    Martin

    Not just recognizing in the mirror, but the video a bit back of the dog mocking the corgi. You can’t do that if you don’t have a sense of your own self-image and how it relates to the image of the other dog. Further, the corgi knew it was being mocked.

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