Like do they connect the dot between farting and smelling a fart
This is the type of quality content that keeps me coming back to the site :stalin-approval:
They have no sense of recognizing being cognizant of themselves, like with the mirror experiments.
I feel like there's a general misunderstanding about what the mirror test is showing (and when I took psych in school it was taught wrong there too, although that's the same class that taught about "the Tuskegee Airmen Experiments" and gave a completely mangled two sentence history of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments). What the mirror test shows is whether an animal maintains a persistent visual self-image that can be informed by reflections, that is to say they have a clear enough and established enough image of what they themselves look like that when changes to that occur they can identify them using their reflection. It doesn't say anything about whether an animal can understand what a mirror is (the most common misconception) or whether they have basic awareness of their body.
Tuskegee Airmen Experiments
lmaooo I hope this was a TA who was completely checked out. that sucks so hard
It's been a long time, but I think the teacher may have even been the head of the social studies department? I know she was the head of something else in the school. But no, actual teacher who in retrospect fucked up at least some key part of basically every lesson subject.
Not that it's surprising: in retrospect there were a lot of just basic factual errors that I can remember from that school, ranging from minor "you should really know this even though it's not important" like the English teacher who didn't know what "whetted" meant despite teaching the Illiad every year, to the "ok you're literally just teaching outright lies here" that defined every civics and history class (like literally teaching that the US stepped in and annexed Hawaii to stop the coup mercenaries hired by plantation owners carried out, explicitly teaching the common misconception of how tax brackets work as fact, or even just directly contradicting their own textbooks out of sheer incompetence).
there are lots of animals who rely a lot more on smell than sight, which is why the mirror experiment is meaningless in determining that
Ever since seeing this video I have been wondering whether individual animals can have exceptional levels of body image/self awareness
Mark my words, the animals are up to something. Farts can be faked. Am I saying the government is replacing your dog's farts with mind control gas? You tell me.
My grandma's dumbass dog routinely startled himself with his own rank farts
Probably better than humans can. Many animals have highly developed senses of smell specifically because it allows them to correlate scents with the things that caused them. Shitting and sniffing trees to see who was there last are in the top 10 things a dog does, I guarantee you they have an intuitive understanding of how farts work.
Honestly humans are kind of the precocious 12 year olds of the animal kingdom.
