Do you ever wonder how your dog / cat can recognize that it is you? They can distinguish you from others in different ways, but they do that differently from people! If you see your cat high up in a tree, you can recognize him / her by its external features. But with our pets, with a completely different system of senses, recognition works differently.
Dogs: mainly scent
A dog recognizes you anyway by your smell and this goes further than you think. A trained dog can track the even scent of a complete stranger for miles, and then recognize the person when standing among others.
What is special is that dogs can also store scents in their memory of people and animals that they have not seen for a long time. In a 2015 study, 10 dogs were trained to sit still in an MRI machine. Then scientists made them smell scents from different people and dogs. One person they once lived with, one dog they once lived with and also one person and dog they never knew. Their current owners did not participate. The dogs clearly showed more brain activity on the MRI scan in the vaguely known person / dog, in contrast to the completely unknown human and dog. The response of the brain was also greatest with the smell of the known human, versus the known dog.
Also by sight?
We tend to think that dogs rely only on their nose for human recognition, but it seems that they actually work a lot with their eyes too. This is shown, for example, in a study from 2010 in which researchers let dogs sit in a room, while their owners and strangers also walked through the room. The dogs looked much more at their owners than at the strangers. But once the owners and strangers wore a bag around their heads, the dogs looked much less at their owners! There is also a study released in 2014 from Austria showing that dogs can distinguish happy and angry human faces. The dogs had to press their muzzle against a screen if it showed a smiling person or an angry person. They scored well in 70 to 80% of the cases. Things like this show that dogs pay more attention to your face than many initially thought!
From an evolutionary point of view, this can also be explained, according to some animal experts. The ancestors of dogs depended on humans. In the old days, when their packs needed warm places, they often looked for them near human campfires and they needed to get along well with people. For this they had to develop a lump for reading facial expression / body language.
And cats?
It is also clear that a cat recognizes you. Behavioral experts and animal owners have both observed that cats know exactly who feeds them in the morning, who has a bag of candy and who knows the right place to scratch them.
Cats probably don’t really look at our face to recognize us. According to a 2005 study from Pennsylvania, they are not really able to distinguish faces like dogs. When cats saw pictures of human faces, only 54.5% of cats could distinguish their caregiver from strangers, compared to 88.2% in dogs. The cats, on the other hand, were better at recognizing faces of conspecifics, which they did successfully in about 91% of all cases, but 85.1% in dogs.
Your voice
That’s why it’s been said by some animal experts that faces just aren’t that important to cats. Cats have entered society on their own terms. Rodents came to villages to loot the granaries and cats came to this, but were able to fend for themselves fine for the rest. For cats, it has probably never been necessary to read human expressions the way dogs did.
It is therefore more explainable that cats recognize us in other ways, such as smell, touch and sound. Your voice in particular appears to be an important indicator. For example, a 2013 study showed that cats pricked up their ears when they heard audio recordings from their owner, but they did nothing with strange audio recordings. However, the cats did not go looking for their owners, but slept well.