Many pet owners wonder if their furry friends see cars and trucks as big metal animals roaming the streets. With their loud engines and swift movements, it’s not hard to see why someone might think their pet mistakes vehicles for beasts.
As curious creatures, animals perceive the world differently than we do. But do they really see automobiles as alive? Read on as we examine the evidence behind whether animals think cars are animals.
How Animals Perceive the World
Visual Cues
Animals rely heavily on their vision to understand their surroundings. Their visual systems have evolved to detect important cues like movement, shape, color, and contrast. Many animals, like birds of prey, have extremely acute vision that allows them to spot tiny prey from far away.
Others, like cats and dogs, see well in low-light conditions. Visual cues help animals identify food, detect predators, choose mates, and navigate their habitats.
Some animals, like bees, can see ultraviolet light invisible to humans. Many fish have excellent color vision vital for finding food among coral reefs. Horses have wider fields of vision than humans, allowing them to spot threats approaching from the sides.
So an animal’s visual perception of the world can differ dramatically from our own.
Auditory Cues
Hearing is another essential sense for animals. Sensitive ears allow them to detect faint sounds, identify calls of their own species, and listen for predators or prey. Bats use echolocation, emitting sounds too high for humans to hear and interpreting the echoes.
Elephants communicate with infrasonic rumbles below our hearing range.
Many animals have better hearing than us at both high and low frequencies. Dogs hear high pitches up to 45 kHz compared to our 20 kHz. And cats hear the high-pitched squeaks of mice. Animals like owls with asymmetrical ear placement can even locate sound sources precisely.
So the animal kingdom is alive with sounds we rarely perceive.
Olfactory Cues
Smell is the most ancient and primal sense for animals. A hypersensitive sense of smell is essential for tasks like finding food, avoiding predators, scent-marking territories, and reproduction. Some animals, like bears and sharks, can smell prey miles away.
Dogs have up to 300 million smell receptors compared to our 6 million.
Pheromones are chemical scent signals vital for animal communication and reproduction. Bees release pheromones to mark sources of food. Ants use pheromone trails to guide each other to food sources. Many mammals identify each other by smell.
So smell gives animals critical information about their world inaccessible to humans.
Animal Reactions to Cars
Fear Responses
Many animals perceive cars as potential predators and react with fear or avoidance behaviors (source). Deer, for example, often freeze or flee from approaching vehicles. One study found over 50% of deer-vehicle collisions occurred when deer attempted to cross roads, despite the imminent danger posed by traffic (source).
Other animals like squirrels and rabbits also frequently dart or run in apparent panic at the sight or sound of a car.
This reaction suggests cars trigger the same self-preservation instincts animals rely on to evade predators in the wild. The size, speed, and loud noises of automobiles likely signal a major threat to small animals.
However, despite these fear responses, many creatures struggle to accurately judge the danger cars pose, tragically resulting in high rates of roadkill in some species.
Curiosity and Arousal
While cars frighten many animals, they also spark curiosity in some species, especially intelligent mammals like dogs, bears, and primates. Studies show zoo chimpanzees exhibit signs of arousal and engagement when observing video footage of driving cars, suggesting an innate interest in deciphering mechanical motion (source).
In residential areas, some bold urban wildlife even directly approach stationary cars. Bear cubs, for example, have been filmed climbing on top of parked vehicles to explore potential food sources inside.
Such inquisitive behavior reflects animals’ drive to investigate novel elements in their environment, even when the object’s function remains mysterious in function or origin.
Indifference
For species like cats, rodents, and birds living in highly populated cities, cars become ubiquitous elements of the landscape. Constant exposure to passing traffic leads many urban animals to habituate to the presence of cars altogether.
A survey tracking wildlife roadkill rates found pigeons and squirrels were killed far less frequently than predicted based on population size, suggesting these adaptive species have learned to coexist with busy roads by ignoring benign passing vehicles (source).
Thus for some animals, the appropriate response to cars is no response at all – when cars are perceived as neither predators nor curiosities, urban wildlife shows the environmental wisdom to carry on as normal despite the steel beasts in their midst.
The Concept of Animate Versus Inanimate
The ability to distinguish between living and non-living things is a critical cognitive skill for both humans and animals. Yet do animals really understand the difference between animate objects like people or other animals and inanimate objects like cars and trees?
Researchers have investigated this fascinating question using innovative experiments on animals ranging from primates to birds.
Studies show that some animals do seem capable of making animate-inanimate distinctions. Great apes like chimpanzees and orangutans appear to recognize that humans are living beings with goals and intentions.
In one experiment at a zoo, an orangutan quickly learned to beg for food from a person walking by, but ignored a mechanic rolling a wheelbarrow past its enclosure. This suggests the orangutan could tell the difference between a conscious being and an inanimate object.
Other research finds that some animals even treat robotic or animated objects as if they are alive. In an experiment with young chicks, the baby birds showed signs of distress when a robotic hen appeared to struggle, suggesting they attributed life-like mental states to the fake hen.
Studies also find that both dogs and cats can be tricked into thinking images on screens are real animals or people, indicating they don’t fully grasp the difference between living beings and digital representations.
So do animals really think cars and other man-made objects are alive? Probably not in most cases. But the cognitive line between animate and inanimate may be blurrier for many species than previously assumed.
With continued research, we may gain a deeper understanding of how diverse animal minds comprehend and interact with the living versus non-living world around them.
Evidence That Animals See Cars As Inanimate Objects
Lack of Social Interaction
Studies have shown that animals generally do not interact socially with cars in the same way they do with other living things. Dogs will bark at cars driving by, but they do not attempt to play with them or sniff them like they would another dog.
Cats seem indifferent to cars, not seeking attention or interaction from them. Even highly intelligent animals like primates do not gesture or vocalize at cars as if they expect a response. This suggests they understand cars are inanimate objects not capable of social interaction.
No mating behaviors
Perhaps the clearest sign that animals view cars as inanimate objects is the total lack of mating behaviors directed toward them. Animals use cars for transportation, but they never attempt to mate with them. Dogs will hump many things in their environment, but not cars.
Birds sometimes build nests in parked cars, but they do not perform courtship rituals toward the car itself. Even animals that attempt mating with highly unnatural objects in captivity, like certain primates, leave cars alone.
The lack of any sexual interest in cars strongly implies animals categorize them as non-living things.
No caregiving behaviors
Research shows that some animals extend caregiving behaviors like feeding, grooming, and protecting the young to objects they are attached to, like dolls or stuffed animals. However, these behaviors are never directed toward cars.
Monkeys do not try to groom cars or carry toy cars the way they do with their dolls or stuffed toys. Dog mothers do not attempt to nurse, cuddle, or protectively stand over cars as if they were their puppies.
The fact that animals reserved for their young are not at all extended to cars indicates that cars are solidly categorized as objects in their minds.
Conclusion
To conclude, while cars share some superficial similarities with living creatures, they lack the complex cues and behaviors that allow animals to recognize one another. Instead, pets likely rely on cars’ predictable movements and their differences from biological organisms to categorize them as inanimate objects.
Still, some individual animals may anthropomorphize automobiles when overwhelmed by loud noises or swift approach speeds. But the bulk of evidence indicates most creatures understand cars are machines, not animals.