Grey wolf may show signs of self-awareness with the sniff test of self-recognition

Although there are recent claims of a lack of evidence of self-consciousness in many tested species, the ability to recognize oneself in a mirror, which seems an exceedingly rare capacity in the animal kingdom, may not be the only way to check for animal self-awareness (i.e. the capacity to become the object of your own attention). A new testing approach, based on a different sensory modality (such as the sniff-test for self-recognition, STSR), recently proved to be effective with dogs. We applied this sniff test to a group of four captive grey wolves, living in male-female couples in two different enclosures at the Wolf Park in Indiana, USA. In this preliminary study, wolves showed some signs of the ability to recognize themselves through the “olfactory mirror” and exhibited some clues of mark-directed responses, particularly scent-rolling, which may shed more light on this still unclear behavior and represent a sort of olfactory equivalent to passing the original mirror test.

尽管近期有研究指出，在诸多已测试的动物物种中未发现自我意识相关证据，但能够在镜像中识别自身的能力——这在动物界中堪称极为罕见的能力——或许并非检验动物自我意识（即能够将自身作为注意力对象的能力）的唯一途径。近期，一种基于不同感官模态的新型测试方法（例如用于自我识别的嗅探测试（STSR））已被证实对犬类有效。我们将该嗅探测试应用于美国印第安纳州狼园（Wolf Park）两个不同圈舍内、以雌雄成对形式生活的4只圈养灰狼群体。在这项初步研究中，灰狼表现出通过"嗅觉镜像（olfactory mirror）"识别自身的若干迹象，同时呈现出标记指向行为的相关线索，尤以气味滚动行为最为显著。该研究或可进一步阐明这一迄今仍未明晰的行为，并代表了一种与通过经典镜像测试等价的嗅觉层面验证方式。