If you put a puppy or a kitten in front of a mirror for the first time, how would it react? Social media is full of videos of dogs sniffing or barking at themselves in mirrors, and cats trying to fight their own reflections. Adorable though this scenario may be, some psychologists see it as something deeper, a test of self-awareness.
Charles Darwin was once struck by an orangutan named Jenny gazing into a mirror and wondered whether she recognized herself. Over a century later, psychologist Gordon G. Gallup designed an experiment to test this, marking the faces of chimpanzees with a small amount of dye and observing their reactions when placing a full-length mirror before them.1 Although the experiment’s methodology and assumed implications have been criticized on a number of different fronts, this Mirror Self-Recognition (MSR) test has since been adapted to study a variety of different animals over the years. Orangutans, chimpanzees, dolphins, orcas, magpies, and ghost crabs have supposedly passed versions of the test; dogs, cats, giant pandas, baboons, and cichlids have supposedly not.
Failing the test has been taken to imply a lack of self-awareness, which could in turn have significant evolutionary and cross-species implications. As Jennie Coy explains, in order to cooperate like a human is (at least theoretically) able to, ‘an animal has to be sufficiently aware of itself: first, to place itself in relation to the environment; secondly, to perceive itself as having an effect on that environment; and, thirdly, to be aware of the other individual as separate from itself.’2 Self-awareness has controversially been even further connected to questions of intelligence and rationality, traits that have in the past been considered unique to humans and thus separating them from non-human animals. As recently as 1988, Tim Ingold noted, ‘The view that non-human animals may be regarded as self-conscious subjects with thoughts and feelings of their own is still something of a heresy in ethological and psychological circles.’3
Darwin’s observations and the MSR test came well after the Middle Ages, but there are a few medieval tales reflecting the underlying premise that certain animals are unable to recognize their own reflections. The first is a fable commonly titled ‘The Dog and Its Reflection’. Aesop’s version of the fable describes how a dog carrying a piece of meat sees its reflection in a body of water. Thinking that it is looking at a different dog with another piece of food, it opens its mouth to attack. In doing so, it drops its own food in the water, leaving it with nothing.
This was an extremely popular fable, with versions of it adapted across the world and throughout the Middle Ages. The c. 1200 Aberdeen Bestiary, for instance, describes the dog losing meat upon seeing its shadow as a somewhat convoluted allegory for preachers ‘driving off the ambushes laid by the Devil’. In most renditions, the fable is used as a more straightforward moral message against greed; in some others like in the thirteenth-century Icelandic Hemings þáttr, the message is more political.4 Whatever the subtext may be, every version of the fable is based on the assumption that a dog would not be able to recognize its own reflection.
A second similarly confused animal is the tiger. Medieval animal texts like the Aberdeen Bestiary describe a somewhat cruel ploy to capture a tiger cub and escape the wrath of its mother: ‘When [the thief] sees the tigress drawing close, he throws down a glass sphere. The tigress is deceived by her own image in the glass and thinks it is her stolen cub. She abandons the chase, eager to gather up her young. […] And thus, trapped by the intensity of her sense of duty, she loses both her revenge and her child.’
This case is slightly more complex. Like the fable dog, the tigress is unable to recognize its own reflection, but does at least evidently understand the reflection to be a familial member of its own species. Of course, the small size of the glass sphere contributes to this confusion, as does the ‘intensity of her sense of duty’ as a mother.
There is an unstated but strong assumption across both stories that a human being would be able to correctly parse their reflection and not succumb to the same errors as the other animals. Reflection stories about humans or half-humans from Narcissus to mermaids are usually concerned with the dangers of pride, vanity, and luxury, but this is all the price of human intelligence. As Joyce Salisbury explains, to medieval philosophers, ‘the main principle defining animals was their perceived lack of intellect, “reason.”’5 The dog and tiger bestiary stories suggest that self-awareness was also tied to human intellect and reason at this time, and, in fact, centuries before Darwin and Gallup, a medieval Mirror Self-Recognition test was already being theorized.
Ashley Castelino, DPhil
Public Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow
Medieval Institute, University of Notre Dame
- Gordon G. Gallup, Jr., ‘Chimpanzees: Self-Recognition’, Science, 167.3914 (1970), pp. 86–87. ↩︎
- Jennie Coy, ‘Animals’ Attitudes to People’, in What is an Animal?, ed. by Tim Ingold (Routledge, 1988), pp. 77–83 (p. 80). ↩︎
- Introduction to What is an Animal?, ed. by Tim Ingold (Routledge, 1988), pp. 1–16 (p. 6). ↩︎
- Hemings þáttr, in Icelandic Sagas and Other Historical Documents Relating to the Settlements and Descents of the Northmen of the British Isles, vol. I, Orkneyinga saga and Magnus saga, with Appendices, ed. by Guðbrandur Vigfússon (Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 347–87 (p. 366). ↩︎
- Joyce Salisbury, The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages, 2nd edn (Routledge, 2011), p. 4. ↩︎
