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Oxford Scientists Say Dogs Are Smarter Than Cats
Velcroman1 writes "This again: scientists at Oxford University claim canines are smarter than felines. And the reason, according to the researchers, is that dogs are more social animals and therefore have bigger brains than the more solitary-inclined cats. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, charted the evolutionary history of various mammals' brains over 60 million years and found a link between the size of an animal's brain in relation to its body and how socially active it was."
I wonder what the "none of the above option" (MS Word equivalent) is gonna be?
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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.
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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!
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.)
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All my cats respond to voice and gesture commands, easily.
That's easy when your commands are "sit still," "nap," "blow me off," and "lick your ass"
I've 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
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.
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You would go get the stick wouldn't you?
Funny, I have a similar method with my parent's dog. She's been so well trained that you never have to yell at her or lay a finger on her if she is doing something wrong. You just point at her and lock eye-contact. She'll stop exactly what she is doing and stare at you until you dismiss her with a wave or telling her to "Go on." We never had to touch the dog to train her, we just had to tell her no with a tone that made it clear, in no uncertain terms, who the dominant creature was.
I read some of your earlier posts regarding how cats look at you with a, "I don't care," look in their eyes. I know what kind of look you are talking about as I've raised my own cats before. However, I do want to point out that some of that attitude you are reading may very well be anthropomorphizing your cat as has been pointed out earlier. I used to think cats had attitude, but then I met a few cats raised on ranches and farms which very clearly did not. I think the only reason modern house cats appear to have attitude is because they have not been given a clear role to perform in their homes. So they tend to stare at their owners in expectation. We just see the, "I don't care," theme because of their facial structure which resembles that attitude in the faces of human beings who have made their position clear in the past.
For cats that have been trained on a ranch or at a farm (to be mousers, or whatever), they never show you an "I don't care," attitude. They act very similarly to a dog in that they treat you as the owner and master and they obey your commands. I think the modern idea that cats have attitude just stems from the prevalence of spoiling of cats by modern families. That's just my two cents though.
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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.
A hypothesis is that dogs became domesticated through captured wolf cubs being trained, whereas cats started hanging out with humans when we started storing grain and they found a ready supply of rodents. Cats got used to being around humans, rather than being actively domesticated.
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Well how about this. When my cat wants to go outside, usually in the evening, he scratches on the (glass) door at the back of the house and then stares at me. Simple enough so far, he scratches the door, I open it. However, when I'm upstairs and I can't see him doing it, he will come up and scratch on any piece of glass, a window or a mirror. It seems like it went from 'let me through this door' to 'when I scratch on glass it means I want to go outside', a bit more complex concept.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
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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