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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."
Anyone who's trained a dog, or attempted to train a cat, could tell you this.
If being solitary makes you dumb, then the people around here must be pretty dumb.
To lull us into a false sense of safety.
How does it feel to be a liar with pants constantly on fire?
I wonder what the "none of the above option" (MS Word equivalent) is gonna be?
Best Slashdot Co
Unlike myself who can't even get a title grammatically correct!!
As Oxford University scientists, they should know that intelligence is inversely related to social behaviour!
Nerds are "socially disinclined" as well but popular belief tends to point to nerds as being "smarter". amirite amirite?
No dog I've ever had in the family or known of has been able to open doors by using the handle, nor had a personality as strong as any of the cats we've had. Dogs can be social all they want, but they still act dumb, and I really don't think it's to fit in.
There is no -1 Disagree.
You never see a seeing eye cat.
Can anybody say that about their dog?
I write sci-fi for metalheads
My pet lion is pretty social? Now what? (Lions are social animals and part of the same family as domesticated cats)
Because whales and elephants rule the planet.
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.
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
that's sitting on our garden wall right now, and appears to be rather enjoying the constant barking of the neighbours' little dog for the last 10 minutes or so.
Dogs have masters.
Cats have staff.
Summation 2
Cats are man's best friend that sometimes disappear for a couple days in the wilderness
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
I have four cats that respond to their names and pick up my social cues very well. They also learn what is acceptable and what isn't pretty quickly. You pretty obviously don't own cats, as you've only 'met' them. They didn't give a shit about you because you weren't one of their pack. Also, my four 'freeloading parasites' are cheaper to take care of than a single dog.
My two dogs, on the other hand, can obey a few commands but largely repeat the same stupid behaviors over and over again despite all my attempts to condition otherwise. Well, one of them anyway. The corgi is great.
How does it feel to be a liar with pants constantly on fire?
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?
...saying that dogs are smarter than cats is still a bit like arguing over the sprinting abilities of different species of garden snails. Depending on your personal preferences, both dogs and cats can be enjoyable pets, but no one gets either one for intellectual companionship.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Cats can respond to their name, but only when they want to.
//m
The reason you don't see helper cats is that cats are too smart to be exploited like that. Cats have helper humans.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
That socially overactive bimboslut who's flunking math class is actually much smarter than the super nerd in the corner who doesn't have any friends but aces all his math tests. Yes, that's right, being social and interacting with others is the new measure of smart!
I take it you suck with animals. Cats definitely do respond to their names to the extent that dogs do. What you're confusing is motivation to respond and capability to respond. Cats by virtue of being most active at night tend not to be up when we are. Which is probably one of the reasons why they were so useful at catching rats.
It varies quite a bit how much they're willing to do, but my parents did get a few "presents" from their pet cat, including a not quite dead squirrel that somehow he'd managed to catch. And this was a fluffy whit cat who you wouldn't expect to be able to catch a squirrel.
Also, it's easy to get people to like you if you're easy, it's quite a bit more difficult if you don't just give them what they want every time. It takes a lot less intellect to just do what you're told than it does to figure out if it's a good idea.
I will be sure to remind my dogs of this the next time I catch them eating shit off the ground. Literally, eating random dog shit, right off the ground. If you want to get into a pissing match over which animal is dumber, the one that excitedly eats dog shit off the ground or the one that licks itself until it's throat fills with hair, you go right ahead. Just don't throw the word "smarter" in there expecting it to mean something.
So all this posturing about "sheeple" means that we are getting smarter! I guess it also proves evolution too...
"Ones and zeros were everywhere. I even think I saw a two!" - Bender
Then I guess cats are better at math.
Dogs have owners. Cats have staff.
"The Situation"
Really, social ability is one thing, brain size is another, intelligence is another, there may be a correlation but the key word is "your mileage may vary"
Otherwise whales and dolphins would be much more smarter than humans.
how long until
You're obviously a dog person. Almost every dog person I've met actively hated cats; I think it's very sad. Most cat people are neutral at worst on dogs or actually, gasp, like them too. I'm an animal person, I don't see the need to side with one particular type.
I grew up with two very loving and intelligent shepherds, farm dogs, and loved spending time with them. I also grew up with a bunch of cats we tamed, basically live mouse traps that just showed up one day, and loved spending time with them just as much.
I don't have a dog anymore because it wouldn't fit with my current lifestyle, I don't want to go outside in the winter and I'm not home a lot, so I have two cats instead. Our cats come when you call them, stay off the counters, open doors to get to the room the litter box is in and pick up non-verbal cues just as well as my dogs did. The reason you don't have helper cats is because of their social structure: they don't actively try to make the leader of the pack happy, they decide if something's worth it on a case-by-case basis.
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
The article seems to imply that being more social implies greater intelligence. I agree there is "social intelligence"... but let's be honest here. The smartest people I know tend to be rather asocial or even anti-social. And some of the MOST social people I know are, well, kinda stupid :-) Think nerd vs party girl.
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
That's because dogs, god love them, will get fed, have a nice warm place to lay down, and still want MORE self-affirmation (given their pack nature.) They want to please you, they want you to reward them nonstop all day every day otherwise they feel left out. Cats have figured out that if they just shut up and sleep that they will be fed and tended to just fine. I would speculate that this is why you see a lot less abandoned cats at shelters than dogs (aside from a dog having a harder time living life as a feral inhabitant of an urban environment) but cats generally require so little maintenance that they are so much less likely to become a pain enough to have to get rid of.
Now which species is "smarter"?
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.
Also any cat large enough will probably not have an owner for too long after they forgot to feed it.
$ unzip, strip, touch, finger, grep, mount, fsck, more, yes,fsck,fsck,fsck,umount, sleep
I think that 'cat' should be a valid plural form. Maybe I should stop thinking of everything as food...
But the cats write all those funny captions over at the cheezburger thing! They can't be all *that* dumb. Stop picking on the funny kitties!!!
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).
It's not about absolute brain size, it's "a link between the size of an animal's brain in relation to its body and how socially active it was".
Even in a smallish human population, you can easily get a wide variation of (brain/body mas) x (sociability factor). How big is the intelligence variation?
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Oh, I think according to LOL-cat grammar rules, you nailed it ... "Cat Are Intelligent", and, yes, "you can has cheezeburger".
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Any married man can tell you the fallacy in your logic.
but he doesn't know how to program the VCR, silly kitty
Why do they go to such length to try an prove the cat/dog brain size? What does being a social animal prove? Wouldn't it be so much easier to go to the local pound and take all their strays? Over the course of a few months you could build up quite a collection of dog and cat brains to get an average size from.
And where are squirrels in all this? I've seen a video where they set up an assault course for squirrels, where they had to do a long list of obstacles to get at nut feeder. These were WILD squirrels, not domesticated and trained animals. The assault course was simply set up and then all comers were taken from the wild populace. So the animal without any prior coaching was able to figure out the whole thing itself, while a dog needs to be shown multiple times, with rewards, how to run through a simple tunnel then jump a fence.
Dogs right now are about in full blown intelligence ( mutts and not pure breads ) as well as mature enough with a few years to assimilate common sense issues such as repetition and innovation, can be said to be equal to about a 4 year old if not maybe even 5 year old in some cases....
Even though they do not have proper hands, they pick things up with their mouths as if it was a hand, so they can drag another dog that has been hit from the road by dragging them by the scruff of their necks...and bringing them to safety. They can use their vocal cords like voices to alert people when certain things are urgent to them (this being the kicker, how do they know what is urgent and what isn't)
So much intelligence, and yet so many people treat them as non intelligent. I would love for some alien race to come down and make us feel the same as we do to dogs, because we are not AS intelligent as their race, treat us like cows for food source (wraiths) because our level of intellect according to them seems to low to have value.
Dogs are amazing creature, and cats too, although I used to like cats when I was younger, i prefer dogs today, because they do have personalities, and intelligence , they know sadness and love, and even fear and many other emotions, what I can not comprehend are those people that actually set them on fire, use them in dog fights or even just throw them in a lake in a garbage bag because they can't take care of them. That to me is pure evil, atleast humans deserve what they get, they are destructive to the planet, and to themselves, so it is fitting that so many wars break out and situations arise when gangs collide or tribes, whatever the case....
It is just pretty sad that animal life has to suffer because of our existence, and our need to cementify everything around us.
yes I just made up this new word to explain man's behavior as a whole on the planet.
They love lulling us into a false sense of security.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
A species which is not only not inclined to being trained, but also dislikes being trained or being made anything, 'getting trained' cannot be a measure of smartness.
Its really stupid anyway. The argument is totally biased in regard to societal biases of the current human civilization : "if you do what i tell you to do, you are smart". thats the gist of it, and such is the result of the 'research' that comes out of it.
Read radical news here
Dogs beg for attention and do whatever we want them to, cats simply don't care what we want and ignore us.
Anyhow, brain-size is not a good predictor of intelligence. You need good behavioral testing with food in boxes or on ledges or hanging from strings.
I saw how crows were tested for intelligence when they put food at the end of a string hanging from a stick, it had to figure out how to lift the string, hold it with it's foot while reaching down further and repeating. Many other types of birds couldn't figure it out.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
We communicate with dogs the way w communicate with intelligent creatures.
And if your numbers where any more wrong, they would be letters.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The corgi is great.
Well, of course. Corgis are among the most intelligent dog breeds.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
you are bullshitting. its evolution. cats are local creatures, living in an area they picked. dogs are migratory creatures, living in plains as herds, migrating from place to place. for a dog, shitting wherever it wants wont do any harm. for a cat, it will litter its environment and curb his smell sense. thats why cats evolved to bury their shit, while dogs crap out of nowhere.
Read radical news here
We communicate with dogs the way w communicate with intelligent creatures.
By giving them biscuits when they do what you tell them to do? Sounds more like oppression to me.
Living With a Nerd
I would speculate that this is why you see a lot less abandoned cats at shelters than dogs
I would speculate this is because shelters don't get dogs as often as cats so they keep dogs longer and euthanize cats more frequently.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
I agree that dogs are most likely smarter, but I disagree about the social thing. Cats are very social creatures.
I saw a show on tv about cats on a farm. The females grouped together and mutually raised their kittens to keep the males from harming them. They coordinated their efforts and they even worked in shifts.
We have 3 cats here and they definitely socialize and coordinate effort. An example: My wife got each cat their own litter box thinking that would make them comfortable and happy, having their own place to take care of business. Didn't work out that way though. They as a group decided that one box was for #1s, one was for #2s, and the third one is for when you have to do both. How on earth they came up with this system is a mystery. Or why. But it definitely is intelligent and social - they are all in agreement as to which box is for what.
The really interesting bit is that we originally had two cats and two boxes. They decided one was for #1's, and one was for #2's. Then we took in a stray and got the third box. She originally wasn't even litter trained. The other two cats schooled her, and collectively they decided what the third litter box was for. Again, I have no idea how this happened or why. I just know that they do have a well defined system, and that system absolutely implies a fairly deep social interaction.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
HP Lovecraft said it best, in his long winded essay
"..One hosts to look them up, one DNS to find them, and in the darkness BIND them."
I just want to know who funded this study, because there is some stuff I'd love to research and I think I might able to talk them into giving me some money.
10: PRINT "Everything old is new again."
20: GOTO 10
I dunno about the rest of you, but I'm sure glad that one's FINALLY been settled.
Now we can get on to the important follow up research, like:
Of dogs and cats, which are cuter?
Can a woodchuck ACTUALLY chuck wood?
I'm excited to see what these researchers choose next.
More people are killed by dogs then wild animals AROUND the ENTIRE world.
Your kitten? Wouldn't hurt a fly... oh okay, maybe a fly but nothing else... except mice... and spiders... but you are perfectly safe... unless it can find a way to kill you without leaving a trace.
Oh and you do have helper cats. A cat purring is proven to lower blood pressure. So people do get them to help them instead of medicine with side-effects. Making people live longer and happier seems pretty helpful to me. They also help by bringing home kills they make to help in feeding their family. That YOU don't like your mouse extremely rare that is your problem. It does try. What do you expect, it go out and get an accounting job to help pay the mortgage?
Cats CAN respond to their name. They just don't. In children we see the moment that they start to think for themselves, say NO, as an important step in their development. Cats got this down from 0 seconds. But really, cats can be trained. Just not the same as dogs. If I trained you as a dog, that wouldn't work either would it? Or were you toilet trained by your mom rubbing your nose in it?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Cats are smarter than Oxford Scientists
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
"Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Only pigs treat us as equals."
Churchill, if I remember correctly.
Just because we can't see or hear the giant ninja orgy happening in the shadows doesn't mean there isn't one. We assume they're solitary since we only ever see one at a time attacking.
Evidence of the possibilities:
http://media.photobucket.com/image/ninja+girl+/Renegadethomas/ninjagirl2.jpg
http://static.funnyjunk.com/pictures/female_ninjas00.jpg
most dogs have had all the smarts bred out of them. a better question would be "which is smarter, wolves or lions?"
One of my friends recently got a kitten to take care of his mouse problem. He's a dog person who never really liked cats but the cat was cheaper than pest control. The other day I was visiting and he had the cat in his dog's cage b/c he was trying to train it not to go upstairs by putting it in the cage whenever he caught it up there. This made me laugh, and I explained it to him this way, "The cat will never learn that it's bad to be upstairs, it will only learn that it's bad to be CAUGHT upstairs."
It's this resistance to conditioning that not only make cats more intelligent than dogs, but also makes them psychologically more similar to humans than dogs. We both find it degrading to be manipulated by another and will fight against such manipulation even to our own detriment.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
Naturally, one's preference in the matter of cats and dogs depends wholly upon one's temperament and point of view. The dog would appear to me to be the favorite of superficial, sentimental, and emotional people -- people who feel rather than think, who attach importance to mankind and the popular conventional emotions of the simple, and who find their greatest consolation in the fawning and dependent attachments of a gregarious society. Such people live in a limited world of imagination; accepting uncritically the values of common folklore, and always preferring to have their naive beliefs, feelings, and prejudices tickled, rather than to enjoy a purely aesthetic and philosophic pleasure arising from discrimination, contemplation, and the recognition of austere, absolute beauty.
HP Lovecraft
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Feral cats are also much harder to catch and take to the shelter.
I have a dog. He likes to eat shit. When he was younger, he used to eat his own shit until there was enough negative reinforcement to break the disgusting habit. My neighbor's dogs used to try and raid the litterbox too, so it's not a behavior unique to my own lovable retard.
I also have two cats. Neither of them eat shit. Q.E.D.
A host is a host from coast to coast...
Unless it's down, or slow, or fails to POST!
Dogs require extra smarts to maintain social interactions necessary for forming and organizing packs. This includes such complicated processes as leader election, hunting coordination, and group oriented behavior and survival instincts. Further, complexity of interactions goes up as a square of the group size (specifically there are n*(n-1)/2 relationships in a group) so this would further necessitate a larger brain to deal effectively with all of this.
Cats on the other hand are generally solitary predators and rely on being able to do everything themselves. Social interaction is more limited (lions are a kind of exception to this, but their level of social interaction is still less than canines), but individual resiliency is increased.
Dogs are built to be in a pack, cats are built to survive on their own. Both are well suited to different individual human personalities, but dogs require more intellect to function.
Cats do it in doggy style and dogs like pussy too.
So if it's share anecdotes about one's pets day, I'm so down with that. Anyone else currently have a cat that knows what buttons to push (figuratively speaking) to get you to do what it likes? I've got a cat that is merciless about manipulating our household. If we don't get up to feed her in the morning, she'll complain for a bit, and if we ignore her she starts knocking things off of dressers or tables until one of has to respond. (Usually when she starts nudging the glassware or lamps.) If you lock her out of the bedroom, she'll tear the household plants out by their roots and leave them like horse heads in the kitchen.
Dogs, meanwhile, seem to crave their owner's approval. They'll scratch and whine, but I've never met one that seemed vindictive.
If there was an all-out war between dogs and cats, dogs would win.
Cats have built-in ninja power. In a one-on-one fight, a cat might easily take a dog. But DOGS would get together and go "Hey, lets group up" or "Lets build these machines" or whatever. It wouldn't even occur to cats to work together as a team.
And just because I know this is slashdot and people will yell, that's a joke and a generalisation.
I have both dogs and cats and I love 'em both.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.
Because they got tired of their old toys.
Ever seen a cat eat feces?
Didn't think so.
eleven plus two / twelve plus one
Assuming that there is an innate quality called "intelligence" and leaving aside specifics and the problems with designing experiments to determine it, I suggest the following.
1. The positions and shapes of the curves depicting the distribution of intelligence in cats and dogs vary significantly by breed. My observations leave little doubt that the median doberman is at least one standard deviation dumber than the median golden retriever.
2. Considering ALL cats and dogs, the latter are disproportionately distributed on the DUMB end of the curve, but the high end doesn't trail off nearly as precipitously as a standard bell curve. As for the felines, I think they follow a much narrower distribution with the median cat well above the median dog, but with the high end trailing off much more sharply. i.e. The vast majority of dogs are morons, but the geniuses can be rather impressive.
Seriously. I wish I had my cat's job. All it does is walk around the neighborhood all day, then comes home, eats yummy food, gets a massage, and watches the fish tank. And, unlike many human Americans, it enjoys full medical coverage.
I am also skeptical about cats being less social than dogs. Sure, dogs have a pack mentality and often (but not always) hunt together when in the wild, but cats are known to congregate in great numbers, seemingly for no reason other than socializing. And if one watches cats interact outside, where territory matters, one can see that there is A LOT of posturing and highly emotional exchange, and also teaching, learning, and games.
The blinking you are referring to is generally accepted as a friendly gesture meant to signify safety and contentment. If their ears are half-flattned and loose, they are not only content, but almost completely uncaring of their surroundings.
For a better effect, don't look directly back at her/him when you do it...look slightly to the right or left of their head. Feline pack leaders rarely look at their subordinates directly in the eyes, even when their subordinates stare directly at theirs.
It's tempting to treat a cat like your equal, but that's a mistake a lot of people make...no matter how much you think that cat cares about you, if you treat it as an equal, it will walk all over you (sometimes literally!)
Living With a Nerd
Every cat I've ever owned knew its own name... they would look at you if you simply mentioned their name in passing, whether or not you were talking to them.
Of course, that's not saying much... I used to have a very sociable pet rabbit that knew its own name too, and would even come hopping over when you called him in fact, but rabbits are about as stupid as mud.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I saw how crows were tested for intelligence when they put food at the end of a string hanging from a stick, it had to figure out how to lift the string, hold it with it's foot while reaching down further and repeating. Many other types of birds couldn't figure it out.
Stupid bird, doesn't it know it can FLY?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"This continual “brain exercise” has stimulated the dog’s brain to grow bigger over thousands of years."
It sounds like the author believes in Lamarckism.
Generally, potty training one of the first more advanced skills a child has to aquire. So if dogs are that much smarter then cats, then why is it that my cats were house trainined within a day, where as my dog still can't even walk himself?
And to anyone who says cats are not social as dogs is comparing apples to oranges. Cats social skills are highly developed and they are geared towards keeping other members of the species off their turf/away from their food. While this is a smaller set of social skills then dogs (which will work together in packs, usually due to need), they seem to be more developed and focused. I would say that again, the advantage goes to the cat, that relies on no other member other then itself to provide for itself and its young.
And lastly, wasn't there a barbaric, outdated practice to judge how smart a person was by the size of their cranium? What happened to that again?
"The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."
Back in the middle of the last century, IQ tests were big. Then, as the century wore on, more research came to the conclusion that they were culturally biased.
How does this study remove social bias? For that matter, how does it figure in that cats have their own agendas, which are *not* yours, as opposed to dogs falling in with your agenda.
I've long said that cats peak about equivalent to humans between 7 and 10, while dogs peak like humans between 3 and 5.
mark "they were so much older then,
they're younger than that now"
She has clearly exhibited the following behaviors 1. she will bring me her mouse to get me to throw it for her. if i make a bad throw (it ricochets off a wall and bounces near her, or throw it into a box) she will get it and bring it to my wife 2. She mimics the sounds smaller prey animals make when she knows their near by and shes in hiding. You've never seen the look of shock on a birds face when it thinks one of its fellows is calling for help and finds a cat there. 3. my cat will 'sit' and 'come' on command, we just had to learn that she was very food driven, and how to reward her in a way she would find valuable. 4. my cat wont let my wife and I fight, if we are arguing she will get in between both of us and meow and paw us till we calm down. Just as a test my wife took a swing at me. She had 12lbs of cat attached to her arm, biting but not hard enough to pierce skin. the cat knew what was happening and showed enough awareness to try to stop the fight.
-Ours is the wisdom of Solomon, the magic of Merlyn, the fall of Icaris.
Both my cats respond to their names. They also understand other sentences like (in spanish) "food!" (obvious), "time to nap with me!" (she runs like lighting to the bed), "want to go outside?" (goes to the door), "GTFO!" (she goes out of the room), "stop it!" (used usually when they're harassing birds or the neighbor dogs), "not today" (when I don't want to have cats in the bed at nighttime), etc.
Oddly enough, despite your characterization of dogs and cats, it turns out that the conditioning you are talking about in your dog example (Operant Conditioning) was first studied by Thorndike... in cats!
Really, it just has more to do with the way pet owners tend to treat their animals than "conditioning" vs. "attitude".
You don't train a computer, you program it to do extremely specific commands.
You are doing the same thing with a dog, you are programming behavior by wiring actions basically "burnt" into a dogs mental circuitry with treats. It's like programming an FPGA.
How many dogs learn to sit just by watching other dogs sit? Now that would be impressive.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yeah, mine knows his name, but doesn't necessarily respond to it as much as you'd like. About half the time there's a yawn and a turning of the head, and then back to sleep. Always got the "What? Oh, it's just you" vibe from that.
Have you ever seen a cat eat dog shit? No? Can you say the same about dogs and cat shit? Pretty obvious which one is smarter now, isn't it?
Yes, I have owned both cats and dogs.
"But this one goes to 11!"
...because they are lazy, selfish and react to any attempt at coercion with the feline equivalent of "fuck you, where's my dinner?"
In other words, they mimic human nature perfectly.
Sure, dogs can learn to help people cross the road and "sniff out drugs" (i.e. bark at the foreign-looking guy with the rucksack when the TSA man tugs your lead in a particular way) but they're basically subservient and frankly a bit pathetic. How can you respect that?
If you've ever watched a massive Rottweiller being intimidated by a kitten then you need to ask yourself, what's happining here? Is the kitten demonstrating its superiority, or, is it demonstrating that it is too stupid to realise the dog could bite it in half, while the dog has the smarts to know that killing the cute kitty is likely to result in a one-way trip to the animal shelter?
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
So they took a link between social behavior and brain size and extrapolated the size of the animals brains. How does this make sense when we know the actual size and neuron counts of these animals? Cats actually have far more brainpower where it counts?
Cats have about 25% of the capacity of an adult human brain in terms of raw neurons in the right place. They are probably the most intelligent non-human animal you will encounter outside a zoo in the USCats are very capable of learning but inclined to doing tricks.
are dicks... end of story.
What *is* intelligence? We have a difficult enough time quantifying it for humans, in all its various nuances and dimensions. Then, how does that apply to animal intelligence, when the issue of interspecies communication looms large? How do we know if a creature is intelligent if the failing is ours for not fully understanding how it communicates?
Is a chimpanzee intelligent? An African gray parrot? An octopus? An elephant? A pig? A dolphin? A dog? A cat? How can you rank the intelligence of these very different animals when they each have radically different ways of relating to the world, and therefore, to us?
The real premise that the article raises is not that dogs are more intelligent than cats, but that the degree of sociability can serve as a proxy indicator for intelligence. The logical position on this hypothesis is that it is probably reasonable, but considered in isolation of other known measures of human intelligence, it is also unlikely to be sufficient.
The anthropocentric view of intelligence is that something or someone is "intelligent" if we can understand it, or relate to it. This is a similar claim to the one put forth in the article. Because dogs do exhibit social characteristics that humans can relate to and work with, they are "more intelligent." But as I've pointed out, this isn't necessarily a complete characterization of the nature of intelligence, as for example, hypothetical alien beings from another planet might possess the technology to visit us, yet if we could not understand them or relate to them, we would consider them stupid under such a criterion.
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/
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.
Yes and no. Dogs are descended from wolves and have an innate desire to be part of a pack. A pack is an extended family unit and is not restricted to other dogs, any household members may be considered family in this context. More importantly a pack is a hierarchical structure. In the wolf setting there are never peers, every pack member has a distinct rank and shows dominance or submission accordingly. In the dog setting things are a bit more relaxed and through unnatural selection dogs have been bred to naturally look to humans for some direction (assuming the human offers any). A dog will do what it is told if it recognizes the human as higher ranking, no immediate reward is necessary. Conditioning is only needed to the extent that a spoken word or gesture correlates to a desired action. Treats and toys are only necessary when the person giving the command is not recognized as higher ranking. IMHO praise or a quick affectionate gesture are better rewards but I tend to use these at the end or a walk, workout or training session. I don't want to create an expectation of immediate reward for obedience.
Now I am not against treats and toys but I am careful to only offer them in play time to avoid associating them with obedience.
I thought phrenology was thoroughly out of fashion since Gould debunked Morton and Broca in "the Mismeasure of Man".
But who cares about that. The Internet is made of cats! On with the cat stories!
Our eight-year-old ginger tabby taught himself to use the toilet. I'm not kidding.
I was wondering why I kept finding the toilet unflushed, and little splashes on the rim. The kids claimed it wasn't them, but I didn't really believe them.
Then one day I walk in, and there's the cat sitting on the toilet. He looks up at me with a perfect "Excuse me, can a guy get some privacy around here" expression on his face and keeps right on peeing.
My dog taught herself to dig up cat feces and eat them.
Dogs beg for attention and do whatever we want them to, cats simply don't care what we want and ignore us
You can test a mushroom for poison by seeing if it blackens a silver spoon, you can catch a cold by exposing yourself to low temperatures, and gay people always talk with a lisp. What other ridiculous unfounded unproven bits of superstitious folk wisdom shall we discuss this morning?
If dogs are soooo smart, then explain this!
Meh, I reward my girlfriends with chocolate when they don't act like irrational, crazy human beings....oh wait, I see your point.
(And just to help, mods, this one is deserving of flamebait, even if it was just a joke). =P
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
"Nature" on PBS has a show on crows the other week. It was fairly impressive.
They set up an experiment where a piece of food was between two sheets of plastic, about 10 inches in. The sheets were so close together the crow couldn't stick its head in. A stick 12 inches long was put behind bars in a way that the crow wasn't able to retrieve it, about 6 inches in. An 8 inch stick was placed at the end of a string tied to a branch. Crows were able to pull up the string, retrieve the short stick, use it to retrieve the long stick, and use that to retrieve the meat. Not only were they using tools - something very rare - but were able to use tools to get other tools, which apparently hadn't even been observed in primates.
Crows also learn from one another. A crow was watching another crow bend a piece of wire to retrieve food. It started doing the same thing.
...a dog tied to a post will walk around it in circles until it's wrapped the rope around the post tightly and can't move, and will then whimper for human assistance.
A cat will open cupboards with its paws, and will even jump to open doors with lever-style handles.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Its easier to do what the crows did than to fly and try to grab the food from the string. Besides, they can't hover, they have to be moving to generate lift.
I'd agree with the cat body language, but I've found that with dogs it can be just as much if not more so. My dogs are all trained to hand signals for the basic commands, and often take cues from posture alone Watching them interact with each other, it's much the same - sure there's some barking at play time, but you can see who's in charge by the way they interact non-verbally with each other.
"Solitary-inclined cats"?
That's a myth. Cats might be territorial, but they are very sociable within their group once the pecking order is established. Their body language might be a lot more subtle, but it is there. They groom each other very briefly, but it does happen. Ever see one cat staring at the other one who's just sitting there and ignoring it? That's a huge battle of wills going on right there.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Per this logic, Paris Hilton is smarter than Nikola Tesla. Or that she would produce smarter offspring.
So very many otherwise brainy people in this thread equating the posture and disconnection of a cat with "being disdainful" and "knowing what you want but not caring". That argument is practically religious in that it can't be proven.
A complete lack of understanding looks exactly like not caring.
Not to mention many nerds get a large amount of social interaction from forums, slashdot, mmorpgs, ect. Nerds aren't really any less social than socialites, they just get their social interaction from different sources.
Except social interaction in "forums, slashdot, mmorpgs, ect" is generally deemed less relevant to success in a real-world business than more traditional forms of social interaction.
Feral cats are also much harder to catch and take to the shelter.
That's what firearms are for.
And before some animal lover shows up and condemns me, have you ever seen what feral cats do to the other animals in their environment? Felines are one of the nastiest invasive species you'll ever find.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
The nerd in the corner started out pretty much with the same genes as the "bimboslut", he could have gone along the same way as him (and vice versa).
Not necessarily. It could be that the bimboslut was born neurotypical and the nerd was born with Asperger syndrome.
Their (cats and dogs) brains are wired very differently, and therefore they react differently to training.
I once sat in on a session with a "cat trainer" for a well known show in Las Vagas, and their words of wisdom were to "train the cat to do what it wants". No, really. It means you look at the personality of the cat and notice what it likes to do, and then you train it to do that action on command. If you try to train a cat to do what *you want* then you will always fail to have a predictable show.
Dogs on the other hand have lived in packs for hundreds of thousands of years, and realize there is a social order. They, by nature, want to please the dominant animal/master/friend.
If aliens came to take over the Earth and thought all they had to do is conquer the human race, well then they have another thing coming when they discover cats.
"I just can't sit while people are saying nonsense in a meeting without saying it's nonsense" J Watson, Sci Am 288:(4)51
The "trolls" were modded by the cats around here.
Pfff, whatever. The very idea that scientists even know what intelligence is seems questionable to me.
On the other hand, the relative number of times that dogs vs. cats have urinated, defecated, or vomited in my bed? Easily quantifiable. Cats are way ahead here.
-- "Oh. This guy again."
A study confirmed that the short term memory of the average ordinary housecat is 16 hours, which gives them the longest short term memory of any non-primate, beating out canines by several hours.
That said, cats are perfectly capable of being trained, depending on the breed. Much like dogs. There are some breeds which are nearly impossible to train, and others that take to their training without any problems. Other dogs have had the brain size bred right out of them over the generations in an effort to get a streamlined face (look at collies who have very little frontal lobe left), and still others have been so inbred that even with larger brains they're about as intelligent as Charles II of Spain and have critical health problems (the most famous recent example being Uga VII of UGA, who died of a heart attack at the age of 2, forcing them to outbreed the line for his successor.)
Tabbies, or cats who have reverted to "wild type," tend to be the most intelligent and social cats, probably for the same reasons that dogs whose lines are closer to their original wolf lines are smarter than toy poodles.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Pfft...try biscuits DURING sex.
She knows me too well -_-;;
Living With a Nerd
It seems I've done it again and misrepresented what I meant :/
I didn't mean to imply that physical gestures don't work on dogs, but rather that physical gestures work far better with cats than aural gestures. I was using the dog example for what I have to say next:
From my own experience , training a dog through aural gestures alone is usually easier than through physical gestures alone. Of course, a combination of both is ideal.
Living With a Nerd
Having owned both cats and dogs, I can say that yes, dogs are much smarter and learn faster. Also, acts of discontentment evidenced by both leads me to think dogs are smarter. Dogs when upset will display social mannerisms such as whining, groveling/placation. Cat's will typically defecate and/or show agression.
Having had both dogs and cats as pets I'd say dogs definitely have the edge but generally they're comparable. I've seen some massively stupid dogs and some genius cats.
They problem with cats is that they don't normally do something when you ask them, they get around to it when they feel like it. They also don't convey emotions quite as openly and certainly aren't always as expressive as dogs. But it doesn't mean the feelings aren't there.
Up until about two years ago we had 5 cats. The cat who died was respected by the others and he carried himself with authority. Two of the cats, who are extremely close, clearly deferred to him probably because they tended to perceive him has a parent of sorts who had cared from them since they were kittens. Also, when two cats started arguing with each other, he came running to break things up, although he was normally more protective of those two particular cats. That cat was respectful towards kittens and I had seen him back away from food in order to allow kittens to eat first. When he died there was a noticeable change in the household and there was a bit of disarray for a good while.
The cats all are eager to be around us humans, even if it's simply to sleep nearby. They're not the sort who crave attention only when they're hungry. Whenever we get home late, they get excited and start running around the house, running around us and playing with each other and myself, particularly the cat most attached to me.
As I've mentioned, the funny thing with cats is that they normally aren't expressive, especially to strangers. I have friends who have cats, and even with my own experiences many of them come off as expressionless, but cute, beasts. In the strange environment of a research lab, or merely with strange people around, I can't imagine they're getting honest results from cats. My own experiences with cats, and given the benchmark applied to this research, would imply they're a lot smarter than these guys are suggesting.
I am a "dog person", but not in that weird recluse, live with 10 dogs in the woods howling at the moon way. I did get a cat a couple years ago though. I was living alone and thought it would be nice to come home to something if not someone. My place is way too small for a dog and I wasn't home enough to walk it a lot. I though, "I'll get a cat. They're independent and don't like a lot of attention." Was I surprised.
My cat has learned the new name I gave him after he'd had one for 2 years (Humane Society rescue). He comes when I call him. He climbs on my lap or will hang out on the arm or back of the couch when I'm sitting on it. He paws at me for attention like many dogs I've known/owned, it's his way of saying "Please, let me sit on your lap." He's very social. Unlike a dog he does not eat shit. He gets annoyed when his litter box is too messy and lets me know by sitting in front of it until I scoop or change it. My cat has learned that when a toy is circling him, its best to turn into it rather than go after it. He calls for me if he wakes up and is alone in a room and comes to me when he figures out where I am. He's social and has learned a great deal.
I have seen similar behavior from a lot of cats, I've seen cats use door knobs, urinate into toilets with the lid up (we caught a cat we owned doing this when I was kid - came home from shopping, there he was straddling the bowl, no training).
I think we humans simply underestimate cats. We leave the cat at home and take the dog camping or hiking or on road trips. To the mall, our friends BBQ. The cat meanwhile, sits at home, eats, sleeps. And they don't come to us for affection in these cases. And then we call the cat anti-social.
Sorry, this is crap "science" or biology I feel and more a sociological conditioning. Sure you'll get retard cats that just aren't smart or social, but you get dogs like that and people. But saying one is smarter than the other is BS.
Still, can't wait to get a bigger place so I can have a dog :D
No sig for you!!
So I may well be one of the greatest minds on the planet as long as you go by how much time I spent socializing (read:sleeping around) in college. My GPA might lead you to believe otherwise, but now I know better!
It isn't absolute brain size they're talking about, it's brain size in relation to the body. Crows are highly intelligent, and their brains are larger in ratio to their body than most (if not all) birds. This would support the argument that dogs are more intelligent since they have a higher brain-body ratio compared to cats.
Cats seem to read my expression and gestures. The result is they seem to just know if I actually intend to put food in their bowl, or let them outside. Where I've tried to teach them "Food?" or "Outside?" they don't actually fully react until I actually make a move to do it, and then aren't necessarily fooled by pretending to do it.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Like humans dogs and cats' intelligence vary so much and the trainer will make a difference too. I've had cats that use the toilet, know how to open doors via the knobs and how to open under the counter refrigerators (luckily they lacked the strength). I've had dogs of equal intelligence. I've had both cats and dogs that struggled with basic concepts like how doors work.
From my experience cats are more intelligent but they're arrogant and certainly don't try to please you in any way because they don't have to. Dog's generally, form my experience, aren't as intelligent but work their ass off to please you and want to be involved with you in anyway. So they can appear more intelligent because they'll put more effort into doing what you want even if they fail at it. A cat will just think fuck you and feed me.
So cats are more intelligent because dogs are more likely to fall for simple misdirection?
That's only a valid argument if the cat is aware of the misdirection and chooses to ignore it. Since most cats always ignore it this implies they are unaware that they are even being directed. A better test is to look at the wild relations of dogs and cats.
Wolves hunt in packs. They will attack wild herd of deer/elk/caribou/... and plan the attack well in advance by scaring the heard towards small, pre-arranged groups of wolves which take up the chase once the current pursuers tire. In this way the wolves gain the ability to outlast the greater stamina of the herd beasts with the entire pack moving in at the end to capture the prey. This shows clear intelligence: anticipation of future events, advance planning to overcome the obstacle of the prey's greater stamina and some form of rudimentary communication. Compare that to wild cats who, in general, tend to hunt alone and just use their stealth, strength and speed to sneak up and jump on prey. This requires great skill but not really intelligence. Of course this is because cats have the natural weapons and strength to be able to survive this way. Canines have taken a different evolutionary path evolving brains instead of brawn presumably in a similar fashion to our own distant ancestors.
Actually cats, being smarter than dogs no matter what erroneous conclusion they reached, are not trained as easily as dogs for the same reason it is easier to get a person of average intelligence to accept the ridiculous than it is to get a genius to accept the same ridiculous conclusion. While dogs will readily succumb to your will, cats are just going to tell you to go screw yourself. In fact, according to my cat, while dogs are certainly not smarter than cats, they are smarter than people who conclude that being easily controlled by another sentient being is a sign of intelligence.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Cats can be trained to do the same tricks dogs do; plus others - witness their employment in many a show.
As an owner of many, many cats (currently eleven of them, 9 have their own 6000 cubic foot habitat, 2 others enjoy about 15000 cubic feet with the humans here) and many dogs, I would definitely say that there is a social difference, but that it is a difference we see on average -- there are exceptions for dogs, and exceptions for cats. I won't drop any anecdotes other than to say I've shared space with both gregarious cats and retiring dogs, though that is atypical.
I *will* say that the social difference generally inherent to the species affects the behavior a great deal, but isn't a direct reflection on intelligence. These animals naturally approach the world differently; they have different tool sets. Cats are stealthy, predators that kill from ambush using great precision and skill and this is evident in how they comport themselves in play, social settings and so forth. Dogs are pack animals, very comfortable in groups under almost any circumstance, and this is also evident in how they behave. Cats do what they please and this is a very successful strategy for them; dogs work well with others.
If you want to go by brain mass, well, lions and tigers, end of story. But I think that's pretty silly. It has to be about brain sophistication (ever try to teach a cow? But then look what a horse can learn...), and we don't really know how to measure that. There are numerous soft science tests/benchmarks, like an animal recognizing itself in a mirror (both dogs and cats can do this, to my certain knowledge) to demonstrate what psycho-babblers like to call a "sense of self", but again, they make certain assumptions that may very well not be valid - one thing I will also say with great certainty is that cats and dogs are not human-like; while both species may evidence every emotion we are familiar with (and again, I can vouch for this quite confidently), the balance of those emotions is different, the things that stimulate them are different, the durations are different, and the tendency to hold a "chip" is different, though absolutely present.
Honestly, I don't think this question can be settled - or even successfully approached - with the technology and knowledge we currently possess. Personally, I suspect both species are a lot smarter than we think they are; we just don't care about the same things, and we're probably not measuring even close to the right things. That's strictly one fellow's opinion based on a lot of co-habitation.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I agree with you to some extent. There is indeed a high likelihood that it was modded as a troll because the person doing the modding does not know the definition of a troll.
You mean like sit, fetch, and roll-over?
OK. Now give us an example of how you have trained a dog to apply knowledge and skills.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Dogs have communication hands down. I've seen many dogs understand numerous commands and engage with humans well (we don't have bomb-sniffing cats).
On the other hands, I think dogs lack more "frontal" intelligence. The type of top-down intelligence that involves planning, top-down control. Perfect illustration: one of my stupid dogs trying to get to a squeaky toy with a fairly see-through blanket would try running through a blanket barrier to get to a squeaky toy. This was non-stop aggressive behavior lasting for many minutes with no top-down consideration. This would even continue if there was an opening in the blanket.
Its not the about size of the hardware, its the quality of the programming baby ;)
The question of whether a dog is smarter than a cat or vice versa is largely irrelevant. The human definitions of intelligence (and more specifically, our culture's definitions of intelligence) might match up closer with one animal or the other, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything.
Dogs are much more in tune with human behavior than cats are. They're better at reading body language, better at communicating with us, etc. Their social structure isn't exactly like that of humans, but it's closer to ours than a cat's is.
Cats are better at being cats, dogs are better at being dogs. Dogs are probably slightly better at being humans, so we declare them to be smarter.
The libertarian solution to the failures of capitalism is to apply more capitalism til the failures are fixed.
And that's the Border Collie. Nova ran a documentary on Man and Dogs recently. Showed a Border Collie with a "vocabulary" of over 300 human words. Truly amazing. Cats may be just as smart, but less "inclined" to obey, IMO.
Speaking of birds, while folding my laundry last night I turned on "America's Funniest Home Videos". One clip showed a bird grab a chunck of bread off the dock. It then crumbled the bread and dropped it into the water. When the fish came up to feed on the bread, it snatched one of the fish.
I was amazed. I've never had a dog or cat pass up a potential snack (the bread) because they knew they could catch a meal (fish) with it. Dogs will eat anything they cross paths with. Cats will either eat it or ignore it if not hungry.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
Gee I couldn't see the stories coming about how "smart" each and every cat owner thinks their cat is.
Two things are common with cat owners. One, they proclaim cats to be the best pet with superior intellect and two, they all claim to have the smartest cat know to man.
So do cats, especially the slower, more powerful cats that are comparable in speed to wolves. Most species of cats are considerably more deadly on a per-animal basis than any wolf - faster, more athletic, sharper claws, ability to climb, night vision - and don't require pack strategies to succeed. Wolves use those strategies because one wolf isn't all that effective, as compared to a cat of equal size.
Compare a lion to a cheetah and you'll see exactly what I mean. If the cheetah decides you're dinner, you're dinner, that's the end of it -- even if you're a gazelle. It's not so much a hunt as it is a murder. Lions will do very wolf-like surround and overwhelm, even to the point of co-operative pinning by limb and neck. Domestic cats - the little guys we're familiar with - are more like cheetahs than lions; they're incredibly fast and agile compared to their prey, and generally don't need pack behavior to be successful.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I think we have just witnessed concrete proof that Dogs Are Smarter Than Oxford Scientists.
On the contrary, cats have earned a place beside us for centuries by keeping down mouse and rat populations, particularly with regard to granaries, farms, etc. In fact, when people get confused about this, we get things like the black death - they were killing cats with the idea that they were responsible for the disease, when in fact the cats were keeping the rodent population down. Once they started killing the cats, they were basically doomed. Same thing happens in modern small towns, especially out west, where I live; little old ladies get all flustered because cats are crapping on their roses, the town starts trapping strays, and within a year or so, there's a huge rodent population explosion.
I live with cats in an old, very large building, and one thing I don't have is a rodent problem. I absolutely credit the cats for this. In terms of sanitation and keeping food safe for consumption, the cats are a far better deal than rodents. And if birds were stealing my seeds from the fields, presuming I had fields, the first thing I'd do is make friends with some cats, reward them for any birds they caught, and that'd be the end of the bird problem. You teach one cat to catch mice or birds, and by that, I mean reward them when they do it, and the rest of the cats will figure out it in no time flat.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
IANA biologist, but what I've read has made the point that socialization in a species causes increases in intelligence. If you're a socializing animal, you have to be able to recognize individuals, communicate with them through body language and sometimes vocally, and draw distinctions between your family and that of others. That's on top of what you have to do normally. I wish people would stop making the silly analogy to "well I live in my basement and *I'm* smarter than a bimbo with friends who parties all the time." You are a member of a cliche, not a subspecies of humans. Nineteenth century intellectuals were very social and you probably are too if you consider your virtual human contacts.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
What if I said I know a developmentally normal 2-year-old human who did not recognize his mother after she was away for a week? By contrast, my cats recognized me immediately when I came home after a month.
All I know is that dogs have owners, but cats have staff.
The Digital Sorceress
This study was obviously funded by dogs.
Cats suck. Dogs rule. Next!
Opinion:=TMyOpinion.Create(Me);
... 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. ;-)
Based on what you just posted? Impossible to say, none of it concerned intelligence.
...that this article has drawn nearly double the comments of any other topic so far today.
Say what you like about the economy or environment, but don't go dissing our OS's or furry friends!
<head shake>
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
Just because she humps everything in sight doesn't me we should draw comparisons of her to a dog.
Oxonian males seem obsessed by the volume of zombie Jello between their ears, but ignore the bone bucket it's stored in. Oxonian females are presumably well aware of the evolutionary cost -- either shorter gestation periods or flexible pelvic arches -- which may explain the perennial catperson vs. dogperson trolling. Simple evolution in action.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
It takes smarter animals to survive. Just look at humans we are at the top of the food chain because we are smarter. If you take a look a hunting strategies of felines they are no where close to sophisticate methods employed by canine packs.
Wolves trying to find the best prey and easiest prey. The wolves are organized, do not get hurt and even challenge a grizzly bear. I don't have the video but I have seen a video of pack of wild dogs split into two groups , one group chases the prey, the other group waits until the group one chases the prey to them. You don't see this with felines, they just hunt whatever is in front of them.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jXxtQRy47A
Lions/Tigers are opportunistic hunters, they don't really pick their prey they wait until something comes along and attack it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94zTqeCMl8o
Only problem is sometimes end up getting killed by their prey. So there you go felines get Darwin awards. Warhog kills lion, there are many other instances where lions are killed by their prey.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ibwgefdRVw&feature=related
Final tribute cougar meets pack of wolves , dead kitty. http://wolves.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/54blionkilledbyphantoms.jpg
Feral cats are also known to live in colonies, with numbers sometimes going as high as over hundred cats in one colony, and they have a social structure, they still hunt solitary though.
Dogs can pick up cues from humans and are extremely social animals.
Cats OTOH are just freeloading parasites. Occasionally they purr and rub against you to mark their territory.
I've never met a cat that could respond to its name, let alone do tasks as complex as dogs.
There's a reason you don't have "helper cats" for the blind.
Cats can open doors. They are extremely judicious about their affections, as opposed to loving anything with a ball. Sounds like it's obvious in the other direction.
postmodernsideshow.com
OR what Intelligence is. We apply the term "Intelligence" in a very human way. The dictionary defines it as;
capacity for learning, reasoning, understanding, and similar forms of mental activity; aptitude in grasping truths, relationships, facts, meanings, etc.
Even the article says
Maybe a dog is better at interacting and cats are better at problem solving, humans just happen to be better at both (good enough to be at the top of the food chain). I think the answer can be discovered by simply observing the behaviour of their wild counterparts. Dogs hunt in packs and are opportunistic and will scavenge and harass Hyenas. Cats are more spread out and have to employ problem solving so they can eat. To animals it's very simple, it's all about food - that's why animals stick around humans, we have food. Dogs and cats are smart enough to figure this out.
Case in point; A woman in Sydney owned 14 dogs. She became incapacitated - her dogs ate her. When I saw the news article of the dogs being led (actually dragged) away to be destroyed the dog had it's paws dug in in front of it and you could see, in that moment, the dog understood consequences. I know of a similar cat story but the point I'm trying to making is that intelligence only serves as a reference point for comparisons of individuals - not entire species. The woman was dumb enough to own 14 hungry dogs.
If we observe our own ancestors (apes etc) to learn about ourselves then we surely must have to apply the same reasoning to learn about our companions in this evolutionary journey, how adaptation and even emotion has played a part in that. I think the experience of "Intelligence" and the self awareness it brings maybe out of humans capability to define adequately.
Which begs the same question when we apply that reasoning to whether it's Artificial Intelligence or Human like Artificial Intelligence or dog or cat like "Intelligence".
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Dogs say Cats are smarter than Oxford scientists.
Basement dwellers are usually considered scum in social circles. No matter how intelligent they actually are, the "nerd" or "mom's basement-dweller" is considered stupid because of their failing/failed social interactions.
The only difference between a cat and a nerd is that cats are cute and fuzzy. A cat will only aim to please itself or survive by itself. Under that comparison, for a cat, you are the mom. Once in a while the cat will go out and meet other nerds (possibly LARPing under the starry sky) and occasionally, due to cats being a society of nerds, one of them will score and if you own a female cat...well, you got grandsons and granddaughters.
I wonder how the internets will look like if basement dwellers were cute. Photos with cute macros and motivational posters applied to nerds worldwide.
Nerds as icons. Every girl wanting a nerd near her bed.
Cats are creatures that, if being human, would self-diagnose themselves with Asperger's and waste their day grinding MMOs and sleeping near a steady supply of food.
Now seriously. I dislike cats as pets. And even so when I see a cat doing something cute I can't help feeling all warm and fuzzy inside, fully knowing they are egotistic creatures that don't give a damn about you in general terms. Many humans must be hardwired to like cats for some reason. Must be the shape or the movement or something.
However, note that varying races of cats and dogs have different personality patterns. So of course your mileage may vary.
Why do they eat cat shit?
If its not Linux vs Windows , its Dogs Vs Cats - which is nice for a changes.
For the record i'm on the cat camp with this one.
OTOH - I do think it matters what breed of Dog ,
Sheepdogs / Border Collies for example are very intelligent . OTOH , Shelties are just plain stupid.
N.
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
Big cats are not 100% solitary hunters.
Apart from the fact that I no longer watch the discovery channel because they seem to have almost completely forgotten what science actually is, I was careful to say "in general" specifically because there are exceptions - the most notable being lions. There are also exceptions the other way e.g. foxes. However IN GENERAL what I said is correct.
As someone who has had many dogs in his life I can tell you that there is a very wide differential in the intelligence of dogs. I have found that there are three primary factors in how smart a dog is. Genetics, nutrition, and social interactions with humans and other dogs. Genetically it seems to me that the smartest are hybrids, AKA mutts I guess, of herding dogs. All the smartest dogs I have known were crosses with Border Collies or Australian Shepherds. The smartest I have owned were 3way crosses between these two breeds and Blue Heelers or German Shepherds. Nutrition is very important especially while they are still pups. I train my dogs using real high quality protein like beef, pork, fish or later on preferably vermin, varmint or snake trimmings as the reward. I start training at whelping one at a time on individual pups as you need their focus on you. Later if at all possible I bring litter mates or other pups together in sessions to establish orderly behavior in this mixed social environment. If possible the pups sire and dame can be useful but only after you establish the human/pup relationship. Early on I have involved other family members in the the process, especially kids, but the play time must be separated from the training or at least be last. Of course all I am training them for is general obedience to humans, watch/warn/alert and varmint/vermin eradication and of course a few fun games like good old fetch and hide and seek. There is of course a structure of teaching from the simple to the complex, but basically all that is necessary is to be consistent, persistent, patient, kind, but always be the boss.
matthew