36 thoughts on “I feel like this when I’m shaving”

  1. Never mind about cats and mirrors – the soundtrack scared the shit out of Ollie and Pepper!

  4. I once had a cat who appeared to understand mirrors. If she was looking in a mirror and saw something in it move, she looked behind her to make sure that nobody was trying to sneak up on her.

    1. Agreed. Just because JAC isn’t a geologist doesn’t mean that he can’t have a beard. Though my wife has recently re-started her nagging campaign to try to get me to drag razor-sharp bits of steel over my face on a daily basis, despite me being a geologist.
      The response of animals to themselves in a mirror has a complex, clearly polyphyletic distribution. Which suggests that either there are different (in detail) types of “mirror response” between species/ genera/ phyla, or that the “mirror response” is strongly environment dependent (c.f. other people’s comments in this thread about some cats being distressed by mirrors, others by the sound track, and kittens becoming accommodated to seeing themselves in mirrors), and that maybe the “mirror response” is actually based on some bio- / neuro-chemistry that is common across phyla.
      My memory is just doing a double-check on me. The examples of “mirror response” that I can think of are all vertebrates, though it crosses class boundaries (Aves and Mammalia, at least) ; so parsimoniously the level at which the feature (whatever it is) developed is around the same as the “amphibian” / “reptile” split. However, I have a nagging feeling that I’ve heard of “mirror response”-like activity in cephalopods – both octopodes and cuttlefish (decapodes?). Which would be really interesting if it could be backed up, and even more interesting if the responses are similar but fundamentally different.
      I remember swimming with a cuttlefish a while ago in the Atlantic (pix … here ; if that animal wasn’t posing for us, then it was doing a damned good impression of a catwalk diva.
      Yeah, mirror responses are interesting – and people are looking at them in detail.

      1. “Just because JAC isn’t a geologist doesn’t mean that he can’t have a beard. Though my wife has recently re-started her nagging campaign to try to get me to drag razor-sharp bits of steel over my face on a daily basis, despite me being a geologist.”

        LOL! Made my day. 🙂

        One of my cats regularly looks at his face in the mirror and seems intrigued rather than angry. Another has learned to use the mirror to track other cats around corners etc. The rest are indifferent to reflections. I had one cat who refused to look at anything she didn’t understand, mirrors included.
        I think some cats might take their cue from a human’s behavior. If I’m paying close attention to something, the cats often come to see if it’s something edible, alive, or otherwise interesting.

  6. I’m no evolutionary scientist, but could something like this have been the origin of “consciousness” — or at the very least self-awareness — in primates?

    Mirrors abound in nature.

    All the apes consumed with fighting with their reflections in puddles of water were… well, consumed.

    😉

    1. Mirrors don’t abound in nature, really. Many bodies of water are in motion from current or wind. Try looking into a natural puddle.

      Perhaps you mean the origin of self-consciousness, not consciousness. Even then, I don’t see why seeing one’s face would account for the origin of self-consciousness any more than seeing one’s hands would.

      1. No, actually mirrors do abound in nature.

        abound:

        1.Exist in large numbers or amounts.
        2.Have in large numbers or amounts.

        Also, the word self-consciousness is just as nebulous and poorly defined as the word consciousness.

  7. I would hazard that the cat which ignores itself in a mirror is more conscious and possibly more intelligent than those that go nuts. The difference could mean a bit of self-awareness, or just seeing the image as two-dimensional and not worth its time (though if that is the case, the laser pointer shouldn’t work..).

    2. I disagree – a cat which ignores itself in a mirror may not even register what it’s seeing.

  8. My experience of cats is that this is odd – I have only ever seen curious and slightly defensive behaviour of kittens when first exposed to mirrors. They seem to learn very quickly that this is not a cat and then ignore it. I wonder if this was cat that was only exposed to mirrors in adulthood or if there is something a lot more complex going on. Like E.A. Blair above I was convinced my cat knew about mirrors and when in front of one and saw a reflection behind her, would turn and look, but I couldn’t sure she wasn’t hearing something. I spent quite a while trying to set her up (mirrors at ground level etc) to test this one. Nothing convincing – she was too alert to my presence.

  9. My kitteh just tore off to the back of the closet. — Should be seeing him in a few days 😉

  10. Cat looks to be about a year old. There might not be a lot of experience with mirrors here.

    I killed the sound as I saw my cat was disturbed. If she hears sound like this long enough she will run to all the windows to figure out where the cat fight is.

  11. In defense of the cat, when I end up at a place that has those b*ig, full-wall mirrors* I often wonder who I am looking at, if I am a more than a few feet away.

  12. This makes me think of the mark test for self-awareness in animals (put a mark on the forehead, and see if they try to remove the mark while looking in a mirror).

    Human children get it after a few years.
    Many chimps seem to pass the test (many even look at their bums in the mirror), and at least one or more elephants and dolphins (not sure how to test dolphins other than staring time since they have no appendage to wipe the mark off).

    But does failure to pass the test mean the animal doesn’t recognize itself in the mirror? What if the animal just isn’t that interested in its own reflection, but still recognizes itself. How could we test that?

    2. I haven’t checked my current cat, Isa, for her reaction to mirrors, but she does a mean job of stalking a laser pointer dot. One thing that does appear to mystify her, though, is if I shine the pointer on her paw. She can see it, she knows it’s there, but she can’t feel it, and that, apparently, has her baffled.

    3. I think a big part of the problem is with using spots as the test marker.

      When Baihu first came inside, he was intrigued by the mirror, but figured it out very quickly.

      I very much doubt he would have paid any more attention to a smudge he could only see in the mirror than any cat would to a smudge visible on the fur; cats just don’t seem to care all that much about markings.

      But when he had the Blue Collar of Shame on after he…ah…got “tutored,” he again paid a lot of attention to his reflection in the mirror. It also changed Tamar’s perception of him, as well.

      I think most cats would pass the mirror test if given a fake mane, and very few would pass he test with a smudge of dirt. Other fake appendages, like wacky ears, might do the trick, as well.

      b&

  13. The mirror thing is odd. Our two cats don’t react negatively to mirrors but we cannot even get them to look at themselves in the mirror. It is like the mirror somehow freaks them out so they try to avoid looking at it at all. Either that, or they are just very self-concious and have a poor body image and low self-esteem! (Which is silly because they are handsome/pretty kitties.) Interesting to see/know that not all cats are like this.

    (Mia did react to the cat fight noises, though. I didn’t even realise she was under the table!)

    1. Your cats may be having a natural feline reaction to being stared at. Contrary to many comic strip cats’ behavior, felines of all types generally do not like to be stared at eye-to-eye (Paul Leyhausen explains this in his book Cat Behavior). It has to do with predatory behavior involving an attack from behind. If the prey can look the ccat in the face, this is not possible. For a cat to look at its own reflection frequently means meeting its reflection’s gaze. When a cat feels uncomfortable, it also engages in a practice known as “looking away”, which is frequently anthropomorphized as embarrassment.

  14. I heard stories of cats attacking their reflections but our cats never seemed to pay any attention to mirrors at all, which was quite disappointing. One of them made up for it with brilliant string chasing, even when she was very old. She also wouldn’t attack your hand when you needed to unhook the string, something I can’t say for all cats.

  15. If I pick my cat Tiggy up while standing in front of a mirror, she meets my eyes in the mirror. She knows exactly what she’s looking at. And yet some of them never seem to get used to it.

  16. My wife played that video and immediately all three cats and the dog came running to the room to see what was going on.

  17. I think it’s more likely the cats that look away from the mirrors are being submissive in an attempt to prevent a fight with the cat in the mirror. The more dominant personalities are probably the fighters.

    1. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, as a rule cats do not like being stared at eye-to-eye. This has little to do with whether they are submissive or dominant – it’s a general feline trait. A cat looking in a mirror has trouble avoiding its reflection’s direct stare, so it looks away.

      Leyhausen reported instances where a lion in the wild was kept at bay simply by staying in front of it and staring it down.

      1. The significant exception to that rule is the half-lidded stare with slow-motion blinking, the feline equivalent of googly-eyes. It’s often followed by a head bump and nose rubbing.

        b&

  19. Odd…as riled up as that cat is, his tail isn’t fluffed. Shouldn’t he have a bottle-brush tail? There seems to be some pilo-erection along his spine.

    1. It’s entirely possible that there are not enough cues present to fluff the tail. All the cat has is a visual cue, but no auditory or olfactory ones.

      One thing cats cue in on visually is faces. With humans, our faces are enough like what cats recognize as a face (eyes, nose, mouth roughly in the right places) to register with them, but are different enough that we normally don’t elicit a hostile response (though this can and does vary with individuals). Humans also lack the sound and scent that would identify us as cats (and, therefore, competitors for food and territory). It is for those reasons that many cats are able to bond with humans more closely than with other cats (giving cuddles doesn’t hurt, either).

      1. Hmmm…when my indoor cats see another one in the backyard, they fluff up even though the windows are closed. No auditory or olfactory cues, just visual.

Comments are closed.