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.

尽管最近声称许多受试物种缺乏自我意识的证据，但在镜子中认出自己的能力在动物界似乎极为罕见，但可能并不是检查动物自我的唯一方法-意识（即成为自己关注对象的能力）。一种基于不同感官方式的新测试方法（例如自我识别的嗅探测试，STSR），最近被证明对狗有效。我们将这种嗅探测试应用于一组四只圈养灰狼，它们生活在美国印第安纳州沃尔夫公园的两个不同围栏中的雄性和雌性夫妇中。在这项初步研究中，狼显示出一些通过“嗅觉镜”识别自己的能力的迹象，并展示了一些标记导向反应的线索，特别是气味滚动，