Tangled Web.

[Chris]

cats telling everyone they meet that they are cold, staving, abandoned waifs, when in fact they have a home and were given a good meal just that morning!

Cats sitting on the stairs, looking like they are completely disinterested in the dog nervously wanting to pass. Dog finally gets courage to pass, and when nearly passed, cat reaches out and swats it.

Cuttlefish, mating. Small males pretend to be females in order to sidle up to a female in company with a large male to mate. I think females also lie, half coloured to repel, half coloured to attract.

Some snakes do something similar.

Hedge sparrow females will offer themselves to low ranking males, but high ranking males peck out the low rank deposits. This means the chicks carry genes from high ranking males peck males, but the low ranks help feed them like they are their own.
Cuckoo are deceptive by instinct and evolution.

Octopus use deception…and may have humour.

Dogs known to pretend that healed injuries still hurt in order to continue receiving sympathy.

Whenever anyone goes into the kitchen my cat always acts like she is starving no matter how many times she's already been fed.

 

[Chris]

My dog definitely makes deliberate choices to try and mislead people for his own personal gain.

Pretending he no longer has something in his mouth so that he is allowed to keep it. He doesn’t get his dental chew until he’s finished his breakfast, so sometimes he’ll go back to his bowl and chew up the food and spit it out nearby to pretend it’s all gone.

He also does things I’d call deceptive with considered planning. He loves socks. I was sat on the sofa with my socks next to me, went up to use the loo and he followed me up and waited until he could see I was on the loo, then ran downstairs directly to the sofa where he knew there was Crime to be had. It’s quite clever for him to have put together the memory of where the sock is, with the situational awareness to know that I was going to be distracted elsewhere for long enough to carry out the Great Sock Heist of 2025.

I think humans tend to lie for their own personal gain, that’s probably tied in to a perceived survival benefit similar to how animals do. The main difference I see with humans is that we often use spoken language to commit the deception, whereas animals tend to use body language and actions to commit it (though we do that too!) due to being too lazy to learn English.