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Oxford Scientists Say Dogs Are Smarter Than Cats
Velcroman1 writes "This again: scientists at Oxford University claim canines are smarter than felines. And the reason, according to the researchers, is that dogs are more social animals and therefore have bigger brains than the more solitary-inclined cats. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, charted the evolutionary history of various mammals' brains over 60 million years and found a link between the size of an animal's brain in relation to its body and how socially active it was."
If being solitary makes you dumb, then the people around here must be pretty dumb.
I think you're confused here.
When you attempt to train a dog, conditioning comes into play. The dog knows it will get rewarded if it does what it's told, and as such becomes trained. You train a dog similar to how you train a human, through a reward system.
When you attempt to train a cat, attitude comes into play. The cat doesn't care what you tell it to do, because it's a cat. Bribary doesn't work...you have to train a cat the way a mother cat would train her kittens. If you can read their body language (and learn how to physically communicate without the use of a tail), you can communicate with them on a fairly deep level.
I've had pets my whole life, both cats and dogs. In my own experience, dogs make for better companions, but cats are more intelligent.
Living With a Nerd
I've never met a cat that could respond to its name, let alone do tasks as complex as dogs.
That's because people tend to communicate with cats the same way they communicate with dogs, which just plain doesn't work. If you communicate with a cat the way other cats do (primarily through physical rather than aural communication), it works quite well.
Body language makes up 80-90% of communication between cats, whereas with dogs this is closer to 40-60%.*
*Numbers taken from my own experience.
Living With a Nerd
Because whales and elephants rule the planet.
Notice how, even in the summary, it says brain size in relation to body size. Elephants and whales may have huge brains, but their bodies are much larger.
When the cat can't get to it's litter box for some reason, it holds it's bowels until it can. When the dog can't get outside because nobody is home to open the door, it craps on the floor. I'll take the dumb cat every time and twice on Sunday.
Cats learn to use litter boxes. Dogs learn to hold it in until someone shows up to let them out. If your dog is crapping all over the house, I'd say you did a terrible job of training it.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
The co-evolution of humans and dogs is so wonderfully intertwined that canines are the only animals in the kingdom that can follow an extended finger to see where a person is pointing, rather than just staring at an extended finger. But if you point at a cat it quickly runs away. So, smarter who?
One of our cats plays fetch with Q-tips and has learned to jump through this tube like thing we got for them to play in when I hold it up in the air. He taught himself these tricks, no training required. All three of them recognize quite a few words of English even when said in a monotone and with no body language involved.
Trainability also != intelligence.
Having grown up with both dogs and cats I'm pretty sure they are both fairly smart species, but I really do think cats are the smarter of the two. You can train a dog, but cats train their humans.
Then you have the wrong dog. Our dog, a German Shepherd has an escalating array of "I need the loo" signs.
* First he'll just stare at you, and if you say "Show me what you want" he'll lead you to the front door. ('Show me what you want' will also lead you to bread (hungry), a piece of furniture (usually a toy has gotten stuck beneath it), a toy (he wishes to play) or anything that gives The Human a clue as to what he wants)
* Then he'll whine and wander between you and the door
* After he'll pat you with his paw to get your attention
* Then he'll scratch on the door and yip
Only after this, and simply not being able to wait any more will he go to the furthest place in the house and 'do' what he has to do.
He also has the decency to look guilty when you next see him after this.
Considering this is exactly what I would do in the same situation, I think he's pretty damn smart.
Zennyboy
So doing what you're told is now proof of intelligence? Does not compute.
As for anecdotal evidence, one of my parents' three cats used to trick the neighbour's dog into an ambush where the other two would pounce and beat the crap out of it. Somehow I think that's a better example of intelligence than fetching a stick after a human throws it away.
I worked with rats for a while in my research, and I thought it was very striking how smart a relaxed rat is. What's immediately apparent is how varied their personalities are, and how aware they are of their environment. They take an intense interest in the people around them, and unlike cats aren't easily distracted from they are engaged in. Cats seem to have their bodies hard-wired into the part of their optic system that deals with motion. No matter what a cat is doing all you have to do is make a sudden darting motion to override everything and have them staring, hypnotised, at the moving object. Rats react more like dogs, where they seem to ponder the event rather than react immediately to it.
Another cool thing is how rats behave in research. Decades ago, research in rats involved having a big writhing mass of savagely wild animals in a cage, which were picked out with long tongs to be manhandled around for tests. This was the same with dogs and apes, one researcher told me that they used to have an ape research centre in Sweden where it took a half dozen lab techs to hold down a screaming chimp to get weighted every few days (with obviously shitty results). They eventually realised how awful and unnecessary this was and instead trained the chimps to go stand on a scale in return for a banana (research on primates is now illegal in Sweden). It worked equally well with dogs, who were given treats after blood samples were taken, so they eventually would run to their cage doors and offer a paw out in order to give a blood sample in exchange for a treat.
When we took blood samples from the rats, they would lay quietly in our arms and stretch out their back legs, which we would shave and then prick with a needle. The lab techs had been training them for weeks to do this, by stretching out their legs, pinching them slightly and then giving them strawberry jam or chocolate spread as a reward. (Even that reward aspect was interesting, the rats had their own unique preferences between strawberry and chocolate).
I haven't seen any vibrant displays of intelligence from either cats or dogs, and I've owned many of both as you have.
My current cat (I've had several some years ago) learned how to open doors just by watching humans do it, with no training involved (we would have preferred if she never learned that). She also discovered on her own how to open the drawer under the fishtank in order to have a good place where she can sit looking at the fishes.
But after several months she haven't figured out that no matter how hard she tries, she can't catch the fishes through the glass, so there's that...
Anatomically modern human beings appeared on the scene 250,000 years ago. But their skulls were the "robust" type. But starting from 75,000 years ago, it started becoming "gracile" or thinner and less robust. It is an indication of reduction of violence and warfare among the various bands of hunter gatherers. Humans were developing the social skills to get along with extended families. But still they were extremely hostile to strangers. All the remnant hunter gatherer societies are marked by incessant warfare with their neighbors and extreme hostility. The Yamamono, the Fore, the Andamanese, the Koi-san all fight all the time and they fight to kill. With ambush imminent at any time and raids being very common, they could not develop sedentism, living in one place. They have to be constantly on the move.
But 25,000 years ago in central Asia, near Mongolia, Man finally found a night watchman. The dogs. They got the sentry duty. Once the dogs developed a symbiotic relationship with humans, we were able to settle down and live in one place. That is how we observed the connection between dropped seeds and the plants growing out of it. Just 15000 years later we had domesticated the einkorn wheat in the Fertile Crescent. Dog is the species that co-evolved with humans, and they are probably the only species that can follow the eye-movement of human beings and pointing by index finger by human beings and "understand" they need to look there. Compared to their wolf ancestors, dogs are orders of magnitude more sociable. Shows how much they have evolved in such a short period of 25000 years.
In short, dogs made man, what he is today.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
My last cat learned how to defeat the child-proof locks I had installed on my cabinet doors to keep him out of the cat food. They were designed in such a way that you could only open them so much before a small hook re-latched onto the sprin-loaded lever that kept the door shut. If you pulled the door out any more than an inch, you couldn't budge the lever.
Within a week, that damn cat had those things mastered.
I think it was also modded troll because it is a fallacy. You don't train a computer, you program it to do extremely specific commands. It is not *learning* anything. Even AI programs where you supposedly "train" the computer to do what you want is still not quite accurate in my eyes. According to the dictionary I just looked up, intelligence is "the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills."
But your fallacy is that you presume intelligence is the only factor in trainability. If I "trained" two people how to jump off a cliff ("you need to get a really good running start, like this..."), and one of them did it but the other refused, is the one who jumped more intelligent?
Maybe cats can't be trained because they don't find it in their best interest. (And I say this as a dog lover who can't stand cats.)
Just to add my little bit - I regularly observed my dog (a miniature poodle, now passed on - I acquired him by chance, and came to appreciate poodles - they're good dogs!) to get an idea of what his cognitive abilities were. Among other things, I realized one ability that we tend to take for granted. When out walking on a leash (usually one of those extending leashes), he was very good about always going between me and obstacles such as trees. In fact when heading on his own path, he would realize he was about to go on the wrong side of a tree or post, and backtrack to where he could go between, keeping the leash from wrapping around the object. He did not do this when he was off the leash.
This behavior requires some interesting cognitive ability - he had to understand and act on the concept of 'betweenness', in addition to understanding the difference between the leashed state and the unleashed state.
I would like to see more research done on related subjects of spatial reasoning as well as relational reasoning. I think that evaluating the ability to hold and act on such abstract concepts could give us a valuable insight into the intelligence of critters as well as ourselves. We already know that dogs have picked up some very good relational reasoning - they're better at reading our social cues than we are. (Although I have to say some dogs are not so gifted - my daughter's dog is pretty clueless, but he's young so we'll see.)
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Right. I have both. My dogs are more easily trained, but my cats seem to figure out stuff by themselves. Dogs are baffled by things like cupboard doors, but most cats solve the problem fairly quickly.
But squirrels and birds are able to solve very complex obstacle courses themselves. In this sort of thinking, they put dogs to shame.
http://www.maniacworld.com/squirrel-obstacle-course.html
Funny, I have a similar method with my parent's dog. She's been so well trained that you never have to yell at her or lay a finger on her if she is doing something wrong. You just point at her and lock eye-contact. She'll stop exactly what she is doing and stare at you until you dismiss her with a wave or telling her to "Go on." We never had to touch the dog to train her, we just had to tell her no with a tone that made it clear, in no uncertain terms, who the dominant creature was.
I read some of your earlier posts regarding how cats look at you with a, "I don't care," look in their eyes. I know what kind of look you are talking about as I've raised my own cats before. However, I do want to point out that some of that attitude you are reading may very well be anthropomorphizing your cat as has been pointed out earlier. I used to think cats had attitude, but then I met a few cats raised on ranches and farms which very clearly did not. I think the only reason modern house cats appear to have attitude is because they have not been given a clear role to perform in their homes. So they tend to stare at their owners in expectation. We just see the, "I don't care," theme because of their facial structure which resembles that attitude in the faces of human beings who have made their position clear in the past.
For cats that have been trained on a ranch or at a farm (to be mousers, or whatever), they never show you an "I don't care," attitude. They act very similarly to a dog in that they treat you as the owner and master and they obey your commands. I think the modern idea that cats have attitude just stems from the prevalence of spoiling of cats by modern families. That's just my two cents though.
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A hypothesis is that dogs became domesticated through captured wolf cubs being trained, whereas cats started hanging out with humans when we started storing grain and they found a ready supply of rodents. Cats got used to being around humans, rather than being actively domesticated.
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Well how about this. When my cat wants to go outside, usually in the evening, he scratches on the (glass) door at the back of the house and then stares at me. Simple enough so far, he scratches the door, I open it. However, when I'm upstairs and I can't see him doing it, he will come up and scratch on any piece of glass, a window or a mirror. It seems like it went from 'let me through this door' to 'when I scratch on glass it means I want to go outside', a bit more complex concept.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Cats are fairly trainable. The big disconnect comes from requiring a different approach than one uses with dogs. For whatever reason, many people seem unable to read a cat's body language; which is an absolutely must. While I do agree, in general, dogs are smarter than cats, both have fairly large vocabularies to which they can comprehend and attempt to emote.
Remember, on average, dog = three year old human. A cat = two year old human.
(Now, cats in America in 2010, that's a different story.)
[sarcasm]Yes, it's a blessing that rodents took the twenty-first century as the one to stop living in cities.[/sarcasm]
We didn't have much of a problem with mice in the city where I live until they passed a law where people could live-trap stray cats. The next year had a huge jump in the mouse population.
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
I've concluded that any consistant ethical framework needs to pass the 'fiction test.' It needs to be able to handle even situations which are, and may always be, impossible. Designed creatures, simulated minds, brains in jars, people-copying, the discovery of alien civilisation, uplifting of animals. Not because these are likely to occur any time soon, but because failure to handle them in a consistant and acceptable manner indicates a flaw in the underlying rules.
Clearly someone failed to pay attention to the Discovery Channel when shows about big cats was on. Big cats are not 100% solitary hunters. Many of them *do* hunt in packs, in coordination, and much better than any dogs. Most wild dogs just run the prey down. Big cats set traps and herd prey to other waiting members of the pack. I'd say the win goes pretty solidly to the big cats on who's more intelligent.
... being social and interacting with others is the new measure of smart ...
Actually social is the old smart. They've found that the part of the brain used for reading is also the part of the brain that recognizes faces, facial expressions and body language. We have new skills with respect to reading, math and science but the same old brain. Devoting brain cells to these new activities has to take brain cells away from something else. Maybe the socially challenged nerd stereotype has a basis in science. ;-)
I have a friend who worked for a while on a lion breeding programme in Zimbabwe, reintroducing captive-bred animals to the wild. He's got no end of hair-raising anecdotes about the scrapes that the lions in his charge got him into as they learned to hunt and so on. But he's very lucky in that during his time there he seemed to be a magnet for wild dogs. They're pretty rare, and most people never get to see them, but he was fortunate enough to have several encounters. He says that you knew when the wild dogs had rolled into the area because everything else left. Animals will put up with lions hanging around, even in really close proximity, because most of the time they're no threat. But the dogs? Relentless hunting machines that always got what they came for.
Just one man's point of view, but an interesting one.
All my cats respond to voice and gesture commands, easily.
That's easy when your commands are "sit still," "nap," "blow me off," and "lick your ass"
I've had a cat that could fetch different stuff for you. I don't think he relied on a large knowledge of human vocabulary, more like mind reading (or more likely reading human body language). You asked him to go get just about anything small enough for him to carry and he would go and get it for you, or herd it in if it was an animal or a child. He also tried to mimic different human behavior and speach. You could predict when he was up to one of those ideas, usually he studied you intensively for weeks whenever you did what he was attempting to mimic. He was also a "big" game hunter, mostly Great Black-backed and Herring Gull, which he usually imprisoned alive in the cellar, he also caught and sometimes killed hare, fox, rats, hedgehogs and occasionally dogs (largest one was weiner dog), fortunately he was very proud of the big game he got and showed it off to us, so we where able to stop him from killing or badly hurting any dogs (that we know of, if he killed any outrdoors he wouldn't have been strong enough to drag the carcass home), he also, in general, liked dogs and treated most of them like friends, he was also always very friendly towards humans and other cats (or we would have been forced to kill him, as he otherwise had been very dangerous). He was a very small cat, only 2.5 kg as an adult, the game he catched and killed could be ten times his size. He also had the habit of "feeding" the humans in the house, whenever they was bed ridden with a cold, with a continuous delivery of very small, carefully gutted, mouse. That was the most insane cat I've ever had and the only one with a genuine interest in human behaviour, other then food giving and petting. If you think ordinary cats have a delusion of grandeur, it is nothing compared to what he had. Unfortunatly, he was a bit to cocky for his own good and as he was not afraid of cars at all, he ended his life as a roadkill.
The Internet is made of cats!
Then there might be some hope for the future...
As to cats and their toilet habits, it may or may not be a comment on them that they almost universally prefer at least a little privacy when they are performing their ablutions.
They're almost... human... in that respect; excepting a considerable amount of paranoia, the sort that still has the human race segregating bathrooms according to gender, anyway ;)
I have a 23 lb furball here who will swat the bathroom door closed if he wants his privacy. He doesn't seem embarassed about it, either. ...
After reading so many comments tonight, I do have to remark that the "cat doubters" that are so often prevalent when these discussions come up elsewhere, are noticeably absent here... *g*
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.