Today is the day my blog launches! Here, I’m hoping to create a space to share interesting information with other science lovers. My first post is going to be on a topic I’ve been wondering about for a while now…just how aware are dogs? My family got a Lhasa Apso puppy about one year ago in the middle of COVID’s first wave (July 2020). We named her Beyoncé, and she’s perfect. But sometimes I wonder…how much does she really know? Here’s a short video I found on the topic: 

This video suggests that Jazz could only “tell time” through scent – when the scent of one of his owners faded enough, he knew it was about time for that owner to come home. But conceptually, it didn’t seem like the people behind the video thought that Jazz had grasped the idea of time.

When in doubt, I figure Smithsonian is a pretty good place to start. Yasemin Saplakoglu explains animals’ body-awareness as, “[having] the capacity not only to perceive themselves but also perceive where they are in space.” In one experiment, scientists placed a visible mark on an animal’s face to see whether they would recognize themselves in a mirror. Dogs failed to recognize themselves (where elephants and dolphins were among the animals that did). But that doesn’t necessarily mean dogs don’t have awareness. Turns out, dogs are able to recognize their own body odor and remember specific events in their lives – so the takeaway is that they do have a sense of body-awareness, just a more basic version that’s focused around their body and how it interacts with their environment.

Now let’s talk about how dog body-awareness impacts people. An article from Penn Science based off a study done by Live Science notes that one important use of body-awareness is obstacle navigation. Obstacle navigation is used for a variety of activities, like walking or running … and without the ability to navigate obstacles, humans would lose a very common desire to want a dog (improving their amount of physical activity, as noted by Medical News Today). Adding onto that, Service dogs are trained to help humans with a specific condition, such as diabetes, epilepsy, or depression. They might be trained to remind their owners when to take their medication, or keep them safe while they’re having a seizure. Without body-awareness, it would be much more difficult for dogs to be trained in their service specialties.

So all in all – dogs do not have the ability to recognize themselves in a mirror, which is a high-level self-awareness test. But they do have a more basic type of awareness, called body-awareness, which means they understand how their body interacts with their environment. And why do people care? Without body-awareness, dogs wouldn’t be able to perform a lot of the tasks they do to help people. Many people get dogs as pets so that they can increase their levels of physical activity, and dogs can’t do that without being able to detect obstacles. The same logic applies to service dogs; they wouldn’t be able to perform their specialized tasks. So body awareness is important! Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoyed this post!