(in households with multiple people)
People often touch vastly differently from one another. I would assume a dog would become familiar with those who pet them often.
My partner and I pet our cat in very different ways and I truly believe that were our cat blind, she would be able to tell immediately.
Not always. I was at my sister’s house and her cat was not over-fond of me. That bothered me because cats normally adore me. At one point, the cat was half-snoozing on a stool so I reached over to give him a pet. At first he started to purr and stretched out. Yes! Thought I, finally making friends. Then he looked over his shoulder and saw it was me. He hissed and ran to the other side of the room and started cleaning himself. I’d have been hurt if his expression hadn’t been so funny when he realized that it wasn’t my sister petting him.
I asked my dog and she said “shut up and pet me”.
You could be rich with that talking dog
What do you put on the top of a house? Roof!
Whats on the side of a tree? Bark!
Shes quite talented.
Nope. I lived with a girl, and we got cats. Lived with her for the next 4 years with those cats.
We fell apart as a couple. I assumed she was going to take the cats. I wasn’t stopping her. But she wanted nothing to do with the cats.
Which, truth be told, was the outcome I wanted anyways. The cats always loved me more than her.
But for the next 10 years, anytime they’d be sleeping, and I’d pet them, they always snapped their heads up to see who it is.
It’s me. It’s always me.
I can get why they’d have that reaction for the first year. Still in the habbit of multiple people living with them.
But they ALWAYS checked, everytime, until the day they died. They were happy to see me, everytime, but they still checked.
they would do that even if you were single their whole life. if someone touches you, you just look at them, that is natural reaction, that doesn’t mean they wonder who is petting them.
and that is for cats. asking if dog, who can track 24 hour old track using just nose, knows who is petting them, is just laughable.
Not the best answer as I’m no biology major, but from my understanding, they can smell just as well. So they likely know who’s closest to them and figure it out.
I had a deaf cat a while back and when she was just chilling in her tree seat looking out the window and I would let her, she would flip out and bite at me until she could see me lol.
I would assume many dogs could but IDK about cats or others. Most dog breeds could smell you coming without seeing or hearing you.
Of course, at least under normal circumstances.
Like humans or wild animals, a pet is going to have their full sensory array available. Even a blind and deaf animal can pick up vibrations as someone approaches then, feel changes in air movement, etc.
Since hands are different sizes, even if they were asleep at the moment of contact, it wouldn’t take long to figure out whose hand was on them. Obviously , that might be negated if the hands are similar enough, but I would suspect that even then the differences in how a person pets them would be useful.
You could likely create a situation to bypass everything and “fool” a pet, but that’s what you’d have to do.
I would imagine so - smell alone probably gives them a pretty accurate idea, but people also pet differently (probably not as uniquely as a fingerprint but differently enough)
Some people are heavy petters some light, some only pet in one direction, some only pet certain areas (head only, flank only, etc.) And so on.
Yes
Source: am dog
Depends how smelly you are
