In 2021, Bunny, a TikTok-famous Sheepadoodle, stared at herself in a mirror and asked "who is this?" by tapping her paws on her augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) device's buttons. The much-viewed video of her pondering herself in a mirror prompted jokes that she was having an existential crisis. Although it is unclear if Bunny was actually aware of her own identity in the mirror, the incident raises questions about animals' self-awareness — and whether dogs can pass the "mirror test," considered a defining test of animal intelligence that distinguishes some creatures' cognitive abilities from others.
For the unfamiliar, the mirror test is used to determine whether an animal has the ability of visual self-recognition, which is considered a marker of intelligence in animals. Scientific evidence has previously suggested that dogs do not recognize themselves in the mirror, at least as far as previous mirror test experiments on canines found.
