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Agreed. I'm a big believer in animal intelligence and I've lived with both cats and dogs, and this setup seems to me to be difficult for cats to understand, to
by jbotz 6y ago
Agreed. I'm a big believer in animal intelligence and I've lived with both cats and dogs, and this setup seems to me to be difficult for cats to understand, too abstract and removed from cat's natural capacities. They made no effort to establish that the subject animal had any understanding of what was happening before varying the experimental parameters. Basically I would say this experiment is useless as it is; it's just not good science.
- btmcnellis 6y agoI don’t think it’s necessarily bad science. The null hypothesis is that cats would react the same as dogs, and the study suggests that’s not true. While this is not surprising to most people, it is still a more rigorous attempt to understand the differences between cats and dogs than simple intuition and anecdotal experience. I do think the experimenters should probably have done a follow-up study more attuned to cats’ natural abilities, but they likely feel the same way.