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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."
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.
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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.
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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.
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