What gave away his game was that sometimes his hind leg didn't quite get off the sofa. It was like a kid that took cookies for the cookie jar, even managed to get it back where it was supposed to be but then left obvious crumbs.
What I did notice was that dog sclerae are more visible than wolf sclerae, and I believe that to be for similar reasons, so a human can read where exactly the dog is looking.
What really blew my mind was learning that the "puppy dog eyes" look was due to extra orbital muscles that dogs have and wolves lack. Dog faces evolved to respond to human sensitivity to facial expressions.
My dog does this too, and it's endearing.
They understand making a specific sound produces a specific result. It's a bit far from language.
She goes out and comes back when i call her and understands that she can wander outside only if she comes back when called. I put bells at the door that he uses to tell me when she wants to go out and rings the bells on the otherside when she is ready to come back in. Plays hide and seek, fetch ect with my nephew. And above all i feel like her emotional intelligence is on another level. She knows how to read minds. Best cat I've ever had!!!
Also, what breed is your dog? Is it one of the famously clever ones like a Border Collie?
She did plan an escape for over a week once, but that's a different story...
He gets spooked when he sees his faint reflection in glass, for example in front of the fake fireplace.
Part of it is that dogs and cats identify each other by smell as much as, if not more than, sight. A reflection may not register as a real dog/cat to most of them.
(err, that's what you meant, right?)
(NB, I don't know where I saw it but if you look at <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test#Mammals_3> about pigs: "Pigs can use visual information seen in a mirror to find food" - someone recently found dogs doing the same; finding hidden food with mirrors with distinctly better than chance).
However, my dog is orders of magnitude smarter, and has taught herself:
- Lying. She barks "at the mailman" about 10 minutes before he arrives, so I'll put her out when he's in the area
- Mirrors. She understands that her reflection is only a reflection, and will look at herself to see if her fur is ruffled on her hindquarters
- Language. Dogs are often taught to communicate with buttons that trigger a word. The conventional wisdom is that it takes a dog about a week to learn to use them. She taught herself 5 separate buttons in 20 minutes, and uses them to this day, chaining them together to express her thoughts remarkably clearly. For example, she used "no" + "time for bed" in the morning when I hadn't refilled her water yet.
But that's why dogs are so popular: they're calibrated to our psyche. They understand human gestures incredibly well.