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This video of a deaf man teaching his cat to sign for food shows is a tiny yet profound glimpse of a unique relationship. The two are obviously in tune with each other, despite their obvious differences.
As commenter Yoongurt notes: The impressive thing about this is not the way the cat puts its paw in its mouth to ask for food. Is the way it pats its owner to get his attention. You cannot get deaf people’s attention by calling them because they won’t listen, so, instead, you pat them softly so they can see that you want them to pay attention on you. And the fact that the cat knows it, is the most amazing thing in the world. It could just meow to call its owner, but it knows that it won’t work. Amazing.
Commenter rodazi adds: I think there may be something more to this video than the cat simply repeating a learned gesture to indicate that it wants food. The cat “grabs” the air and brings its paw to its mouth, which is what it must have been taught. But at 0:17, the man taps his mouth after the cat does the gesture a couple times, and this time the cat responds not by repeating the previous gesture, but by tapping its own mouth. The cat seems aware that the human’s mouth is analogous to its own mouth. To me, this seems like a possible indication that the cat is on some level aware of itself as an individual, which reminds me of how the mirror test is used to determine self-recognition in other species. No cats are known to have passed the mirror test, but that moment appears to be perhaps a kind of “mirroring” and something more than just performing a learned action for a reward…
If you are wondering which animals CAN pass the mirror test, there are apparently nine of them according to AnimalCognition.org: Asian Elephants, Great Apes, Bottlenose Dolphins, Orca Whales, Ants, Magpies, Jays, and Nutcrackers—and possibly Manta Rays.
Here is an Orangutan most decidedly passing the test:
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