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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.
I wonder what the "none of the above option" (MS Word equivalent) is gonna be?
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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.
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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.
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The reason you don't see helper cats is that cats are too smart to be exploited like that. Cats have helper humans.
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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!
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
Then I guess cats are better at math.
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.
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There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
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).
Any married man can tell you the fallacy in your logic.
They love lulling us into a false sense of security.
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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.
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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
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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To lull us into a false sense of safety.
Exactly!
Please, for Humanities sake, read this guide that details How to Tell if Your Cat is Planning to Kill You.
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.
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Because they got tired of their old toys.
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.)
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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.
I think they crap out of their anus like all other mammals.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.