As I said, it probably has to do more with our aggregate personal connection to animals in a given culture, because that will influence how we perceive their in

As I said, it probably has to do more with our aggregate personal connection to animals in a given culture, because that will influence how we perceive their intelligence. If you've read the studies I did, they're not very good. For instance, the test that asserted a pig is smarter than a dog was where they were tasked with moving a joystick designed for a monkey that controlled a cursor that they wanted moved into a blue region on a screen. I'll let you make your own judgements about how sound the testing with respect to the assertion is. My dog certainly has eyes that can be tuned to manipulate me, but she also has a sizeable vocabulary, a lot of tonal intuition, and this little heat seeker in her nose that quite literally syncs her heart rate with mine. There's a good amount of theory that says this adds up to empathy.