11 ms·

I had a conversation recently with a friend about the classic cats vs. dogs, which species is more intelligent. It was surprising to me how dismissive he was ab

• formerkrogemp 4y ago
  Famously, jazz musician Charles Mingus trained his cat to poop in a toilet. He even authored a pamphlet about it. Not that I'm advocating that people to do that of course. I'm just noting how intelligent cats are.
• meristem 4y ago
  Your friend confused intelligence with obedience + desire to please.
  • Barrin92 4y ago
    I was about to say, we host and feed cats in every corner of the globe yet they have us run around to fetch their stuff and both the ancient Egyptians as well as modern day internet user revere them like gods. If that's not intelligence I don't know what is.
    • theplumber 4y ago
      >> If that's not intelligence I don't know what is. Maybe it's just luck. If they were to taste good their faith could be different.
      • pif 4y ago
        > If they were to taste good But many people report they do!
        • theplumber 4y ago
          Imported answer from 3rd party: " Texturally it's similar to goat or pork. Almost like chicken but stringier. Same color as pork, same general fattiness. That's where the similarities end. Granted both times were in seaside towns, but the flavor was akin to the way it smells when you open a can of tuna. Fishy, pungent and strong. Basically cat tasted like cheap cat food smells. "
• cpsns 4y ago
  > I find myself shocked by how little regard people have for the intelligence of other animals. If people readily accepted the intelligence of many mammals, much less other animals, they would have to confront some very serious cognitive dissonance and moral dilemmas. That said, I've found many dog folks are super dismissive of the idea of cats being smart and I'm not sure why that is. Perhaps part of the problem is the sheer stubbornness of cats, you can't force them to do anything if they decide they don't want to do it.
  • dhzhzjsbevs 4y ago
    I always thought that was a sign of their intelligence over dogs.
  • mromanuk 4y ago
    > If people readily accepted the intelligence of many mammals, much less other animals, they would have to confront some very serious cognitive dissonance and moral dilemmas. Not sure about that, lot of people are completely fine with human being killed for several reasons (punishment for robbery just to give you an example).
    • sweetheart 4y ago
      Sure, but people generally have a problem watching extreme senseless violence perpetrated against innocent people, which is more analogous to what happens to the animals that carnists eat.
      • prometheus76 4y ago
        I grew up on a farm. We were always grateful and a little sad when we slaughtered an animal, and we said a prayer for it when we slaughtered it. We always did our best to make our animals comfortable while alive, and made their death as quick as possible with as little suffering as possible. Life survives on life. Something died so that you could live today. I think about that often, and I think that growing up confronting the reality of surviving as a person by eating food that was once alive in a very immediate way helps me not take food for granted and to always be grateful for the daily sacrifices that are made so that I can live. In my will, I have outlined that I want my body to be put into a burlap sack with no embalming fluid and be returned to earth as soon as possible after my death so that I can be part of the same chain of life for other living things. Life lives by the death of other living things. We cannot change that, but we can at least be grateful and present with that reality.
• samatman 4y ago
  I agree with your friend. Dogs have around twice as many cortical neurons as cats, and it shows. Interestingly, raccoons, which are the size of cats, have a comparable number of neurons in the cortex as dogs. And act like it as well. Which isn't to say cats are like, dumb creatures, and it's fine you like them more. Dogs are smarter though, according to me, your buddy, and zoologists, who unlike the three of us know what they're talking about.
  • jcims 4y ago
    I caught a young mother raccoon in a live trap a few years ago. The process of releasing her was interesting. She maintained eye contact with me the entire time i was handling the cage. She used her front paws to stay upright and positioned to maintain said eye contact with incredible hand-like dexterity. It was clear she was trying to predict how i was going to move the cage and was doing a good job. In my limited experience oldet raccoons tend to be much more aggressive, making lots of noise and showing their teeth.
  • groby_b 4y ago
    Uhuh. They have more neurons. This does say exactly nothing about "smart". There's also the small matter that while dogs have more neurons than cats in general, they have significantly less neurons allocated to their cortex. The study you likely refer to talks about total brain matter. It is, in short, a dog lovers argument.
    • throwaway675309 4y ago
      I don't really have a dog in this fight, no pun intended, but you would be wrong. The only modern study that looked at neurons of carnivorous animals including cats/dogs found that dogs have nearly twice the number of neurons in the cerebral cortex, and the ratio of cortical neurons to overall neurons is also higher (~20% vs ~23%). https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnana.2017.00118/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnana.2017.0011...
      • jazzyjackson 4y ago
• bitwize 4y ago
  My cat spent the first year or so of his time with us plotting a Mission: Impossible style ingress into my home office. The tricky bit has been finding a way to the exposed ventilation pipe in our loft, from which he could hop through the high-up, paneless window into my office. He attempted literally climbing the walls, and investigated the possibility of hopping on the blades of the ceiling fan to reach the pipe. (Thankfully, he never hopped on said blades, only stared at them and attempted to trace a path back to a perch he could reach.) I'm fairly certain he knows one could simply use the door handle. It's only a question of height and weight. He can reach it with his paws now, and it's only a matter of time before he figures out how to shift his weight to pop that door open...
  • mcswell 4y ago
    My daughter had me replace the lever-style doorknob on her bedroom with a round doorknob, since her cat had figured out how to open the door.
• epgui 4y ago
  > I find myself shocked by how little regard people have for the intelligence of other animals. This observation can be generalized quite far: humans in general have abysmally poor empathy skills and generally have very little respect for everything outside their in-group. Other humans in the out-group are similarly less intelligent or less worthy. And yet despite this, humans also think overly highly of themselves.
  • theplumber 4y ago
    Maybe this is part of the evolution. A kind of decentralisations of the human species in smaller groups. If we would be one big world governed by the same policies we could all die by the same mistake. Not to mention that too much empaty would be highly detrimental to any innovation and even survival. You would never fire someone and would use all the reasources to "help the poor" instead to invest into high risk high reward projects(i.e computers, space exploration). You would die of starvation instead to slaughter the cow because you are too empathic.
    • wolverine876 4y ago
      > Not to mention that too much empaty would be highly detrimental to any innovation and even survival. You would never fire someone and would use all the reasources to "help the poor" instead to invest into high risk high reward projects(i.e computers, space exploration). You would die of starvation instead to slaughter the cow because you are too empathic. This is a fantasy of objectivism, reactionaryism, and the like, a transparent attempt at justification for their selfishness. Empathy makes you care about the people you will feed with the beef, including yourself (empathy starts with yourself) - it doesn't turn you into an idiot, except in the imaginary strawperson fantasies of the aformentioned groups. > "help the poor" Why is that in scare quotes? Also, if you invest in people, many more will eventually invent high-reward things.
      • theplumber 4y ago
        >> Empathy makes you care about the people you will feed with the beef, including yourself (empathy starts with yourself) - it doesn't turn you into an idiot, except in the imaginary strawperson fantasies of the aformentioned groups. >> empathy starts with yourself That's not empathy. Empathy starts with the animal/person by your side otherwise you are just a selfish person. If you can eat grass/vegetables and survive why would you kill the poor animal? Help the poor is in quotes because it's a relative term. People who can afford food and shelder could still be considered poor. Poor people in the U.S are rich people in Yemenn. I always wondered, if investment in poor people provides good returns why there is not enough investment? (i.e unsecured loans provided by the private sector)
• paganel 4y ago
  Not sure about your friend but we have a cat (he's almost 4-year old now) and a border collie (almost 2-year old). We've professionally trained our BC, he is a very smart and especially loving animal, but the cat is "smarter", so to speak. It is the cat that initiates and, I dare say, invents the games they sometime play with each other.
• qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
  We mistake programmability for "intelligence" but not only for animals, but for humans too. If it does not execute the program it is stupid. Our estimate for intelligence is a heuristic in the brain, firing on the same networks we would use. Which is why intelligence only ever can behave like us, exactly like us and in no other way. Mirror Neurons. If they do not fire that way, we early out and call it a day. Its energy efficient and i assume most animals do that too. The tools with which we look for and on intelligence are deformed and often incapable of detecting it. Same goes for cats too though, they have zero empathy with prey. Mirror neurons are not firing for mice, but firing for their own kittens. Somewhere there is a switch.
• LocalH 4y ago
  I consider cats more intelligent than dogs, frankly. Dogs seem to have evolved or been bred for obedience, as they are much easier to train than cats. I consider cats to be much more autonomous than dogs. As an ADHD human, I strongly identify with cats. Sometimes I wish I could experience life as a comfortable, loved house cat. Maybe I will next time
• mistercow 4y ago
  My cat also knows a few tricks. A few years back, he had fatty liver disease, which is caused by a vicious cycle where the cat won't eat, which makes them sick and suppresses their appetite. The first thing you try when this happens is to jump start their appetite by encouraging them to eat however you can. Ultimately, I couldn't get enough calories in him, and we had to do a feeding tube. But before that, I was able to get him to eat some treats. He wouldn't eat them if I just gave them to him, but if I had him do "shake" first (the only trick he was up to), and then gave the treats as a reward, he would eat them. I found it fascinating that the reward had taken on its own meaning for him. You might naively model training with rewards as "the cat is hungry and knows that treats bring food". But he didn't want food. After years of practicing tricks, it's like being rewarded became its own positive experience for him, and the ritual of eating the treat is part of that experience, independent of whether or not he actually wants to eat.
• pxc 4y ago
  > I've clicker trained my cats to sit and also to follow my finger. Dogs are so invested in human approval that even abuse can be an effective training 'method' much of the time. As you likely know, before scientific training methods started gaining popularity, this was the predominant tradition for training dogs. And in an anthropocentric way and from a position of utter ignorance, that somehow became the cultural standard. If you can't yell at or pinch or shove an animal and still have it be interested in pleasing you, it's 'not intelligent'. It's absolutely absurd. It's not fair to dogs or to other animals, and erases the massive, fundamental similarity in the way dogs, cats, and other creatures of all kinds actually learn. All because humans struggle to separate the notion of intelligence from being interested in or useful to ourselves.