Slashdot Mirror
Oxford Scientists Say Dogs Are Smarter Than Cats
Velcroman1 writes "This again: scientists at Oxford University claim canines are smarter than felines. And the reason, according to the researchers, is that dogs are more social animals and therefore have bigger brains than the more solitary-inclined cats. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, charted the evolutionary history of various mammals' brains over 60 million years and found a link between the size of an animal's brain in relation to its body and how socially active it was."
I wonder what the "none of the above option" (MS Word equivalent) is gonna be?
Best Slashdot Co
You can easily make robots and computers do what you want. Does that make them smarter too?
Likewise, I wonder how well you'd have been able to train Einstein to jump over fences and run through tubes on your command.
Dogs are stupid lol.
Agreed. By this logic, Facebook and Twitter users are the cream of the intellectual crop.
I weep for mankind...
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
I think you're confused here.
When you attempt to train a dog, conditioning comes into play. The dog knows it will get rewarded if it does what it's told, and as such becomes trained. You train a dog similar to how you train a human, through a reward system.
When you attempt to train a cat, attitude comes into play. The cat doesn't care what you tell it to do, because it's a cat. Bribary doesn't work...you have to train a cat the way a mother cat would train her kittens. If you can read their body language (and learn how to physically communicate without the use of a tail), you can communicate with them on a fairly deep level.
I've had pets my whole life, both cats and dogs. In my own experience, dogs make for better companions, but cats are more intelligent.
Living With a Nerd
That was what I was wondering about. Cats have convinced us to keep them around and feed them without them having to do anything for us, that seems pretty smart. Whereas we seem to expect dogs to do tricks, work and reciprocate. Cats sort of get by just by being cute and not having to contribute anything else.
...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 sort of get by just by being cute and not having to contribute anything else.
I think we could all name a few co-workers who employ this same strategy.
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 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.
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
Hey. Catching and eating mice around your grain stockpile has, historically, been a really big deal. (Now, cats in America in 2010, that's a different story.)
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
You can easily make robots and computers do what you want. Does that make them smarter too?
Likewise, I wonder how well you'd have been able to train Einstein to jump over fences and run through tubes on your command.
Dogs are stupid lol.
Why was this modded troll? Other than that last comment (okay, that was a bit inflammatory, and not really justified) this AC brings up a good point.
Ability or desire to follow orders <> intelligence
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
All my cats respond to voice and gesture commands, easily.
That's easy when your commands are "sit still," "nap," "blow me off," and "lick your ass"
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've always considered it thusly:
If you take a human being of very low intelligence, and throw a stick and ask them to go get it for you, s/he'll trot off happily, pick it up, bring it back to you, and possibly drool in the process.
If you take a very intelligent human being, and throw a stick and ask them to go get it for you, s/he'll look at you like you're daft, and get on with doing something else.
Ergo: the difference between dogs and cats, and why I consider cats more intelligent :-)
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
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.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
I haven't seen any vibrant displays of intelligence from either cats or dogs, and I've owned many of both as you have.
My current cat (I've had several some years ago) learned how to open doors just by watching humans do it, with no training involved (we would have preferred if she never learned that). She also discovered on her own how to open the drawer under the fishtank in order to have a good place where she can sit looking at the fishes.
But after several months she haven't figured out that no matter how hard she tries, she can't catch the fishes through the glass, so there's that...
Anatomically modern human beings appeared on the scene 250,000 years ago. But their skulls were the "robust" type. But starting from 75,000 years ago, it started becoming "gracile" or thinner and less robust. It is an indication of reduction of violence and warfare among the various bands of hunter gatherers. Humans were developing the social skills to get along with extended families. But still they were extremely hostile to strangers. All the remnant hunter gatherer societies are marked by incessant warfare with their neighbors and extreme hostility. The Yamamono, the Fore, the Andamanese, the Koi-san all fight all the time and they fight to kill. With ambush imminent at any time and raids being very common, they could not develop sedentism, living in one place. They have to be constantly on the move.
But 25,000 years ago in central Asia, near Mongolia, Man finally found a night watchman. The dogs. They got the sentry duty. Once the dogs developed a symbiotic relationship with humans, we were able to settle down and live in one place. That is how we observed the connection between dropped seeds and the plants growing out of it. Just 15000 years later we had domesticated the einkorn wheat in the Fertile Crescent. Dog is the species that co-evolved with humans, and they are probably the only species that can follow the eye-movement of human beings and pointing by index finger by human beings and "understand" they need to look there. Compared to their wolf ancestors, dogs are orders of magnitude more sociable. Shows how much they have evolved in such a short period of 25000 years.
In short, dogs made man, what he is today.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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!
So your premise is that doing nothing requires more intelligence than performing a task? Makes one wonder what your definition of intelligence is.
Trainability requires intelligence, but it also requires motivation. Just because cats lack one of these doesn't mean they automatically have more of the other. I'm not claiming either side of the cat/dog intelligence debate but your reasoning is stupid.
You would go get the stick wouldn't you?
What's my motivation?
For bacon I might get you a stick.
For a paycheck I might flip your burgers, or design your nuclear plants. (depending on my intelligence and your paycheck)
Eschew Obfuscation
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/
Funny, I have a similar method with my parent's dog. She's been so well trained that you never have to yell at her or lay a finger on her if she is doing something wrong. You just point at her and lock eye-contact. She'll stop exactly what she is doing and stare at you until you dismiss her with a wave or telling her to "Go on." We never had to touch the dog to train her, we just had to tell her no with a tone that made it clear, in no uncertain terms, who the dominant creature was.
I read some of your earlier posts regarding how cats look at you with a, "I don't care," look in their eyes. I know what kind of look you are talking about as I've raised my own cats before. However, I do want to point out that some of that attitude you are reading may very well be anthropomorphizing your cat as has been pointed out earlier. I used to think cats had attitude, but then I met a few cats raised on ranches and farms which very clearly did not. I think the only reason modern house cats appear to have attitude is because they have not been given a clear role to perform in their homes. So they tend to stare at their owners in expectation. We just see the, "I don't care," theme because of their facial structure which resembles that attitude in the faces of human beings who have made their position clear in the past.
For cats that have been trained on a ranch or at a farm (to be mousers, or whatever), they never show you an "I don't care," attitude. They act very similarly to a dog in that they treat you as the owner and master and they obey your commands. I think the modern idea that cats have attitude just stems from the prevalence of spoiling of cats by modern families. That's just my two cents though.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
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 an easier test of intelligence is to point at something. A dog will look where you're pointing. A cat just looks at your finger...
A hypothesis is that dogs became domesticated through captured wolf cubs being trained, whereas cats started hanging out with humans when we started storing grain and they found a ready supply of rodents. Cats got used to being around humans, rather than being actively domesticated.
need a free COBOL editor for Windows?
Well how about this. When my cat wants to go outside, usually in the evening, he scratches on the (glass) door at the back of the house and then stares at me. Simple enough so far, he scratches the door, I open it. However, when I'm upstairs and I can't see him doing it, he will come up and scratch on any piece of glass, a window or a mirror. It seems like it went from 'let me through this door' to 'when I scratch on glass it means I want to go outside', a bit more complex concept.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Cats are fairly trainable. The big disconnect comes from requiring a different approach than one uses with dogs. For whatever reason, many people seem unable to read a cat's body language; which is an absolutely must. While I do agree, in general, dogs are smarter than cats, both have fairly large vocabularies to which they can comprehend and attempt to emote.
Remember, on average, dog = three year old human. A cat = two year old human.
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.
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.
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.