This is fascinating and well written.
I tried the unrotated sofa image on Wolfram's ImageIdentify and it correctly identified a settee [1]. So it presumably gathered that from the shape of the image rather than the pattern. It is peculiar though that it can't see the shape under a simple rotation. Or perhaps the margin of confidence levels between sofa and leopard were so narrow that a rotation was enough to tip it in favour of the leopard? I'd be interested to see the inner workings of this.