Whether cats or dogs are cleverer is a perennial question. There’s no denying dogs normally have bigger brains (especially if they’re a bigger breed). But pooches also have more neurons – one golden retriever was found to have 623 million neurons in its cerebral cortex, compared to 429 million for a smaller dog and 250 million for a cat. The dogs also had more neurons in their brains overall.
Of course, it’s not how many neurons you’ve got, but what you do with them that counts. There’s more research on canines than felines, so dogs’ abilities are better known. And, of course, studying pet cats is hard because they don’t like to go to new places, like a laboratory for example (think of how they hide whenever the cat carrier comes out).
Nevertheless, science has been able to measure up our favourite pets, based on three key types of intelligence.
Social intelligence
One way to assess an animal’s ability to understand others’ mental states (social cognition) is through something called the unsolvable task paradigm.
It’s a simple test. After a dog has learned to get food out of a container, the container is fixed shut so that the food becomes inaccessible. Scientists then watch to see if the dog will look to a nearby human for help. This looking, from a person to the container and back again, is a form of referential signalling or ‘showing’ behaviour – the canine equivalent of pointing.
When faced with an unsolvable puzzle like this, dogs do indeed look to a nearby person. When both their owner and a stranger are present, they look only to the owner in some studies, and they look to both in others.
It’s not clear why. But if one person always opens the container, while another always refills it, dogs notice this and look more at the appropriate person to solve their problem.
So far, so adorably clever. But what about cats? There are fewer such studies on felines, but in one experiment both dogs and cats could find a hidden piece of inaccessible food when a person pointed at it.
Unlike dogs, however, most cats didn’t ask for help. While some cats would gaze between inaccessible food and a human, the majority would simply keep trying to get it themselves.
Cats do have some skills in visual communication, though. Another study found that cats show marginally more gaze alternation between a human and a food container if the container was impossible to open, rather than one that could be opened by solving a puzzle.
This study also found that cats interacted more with the container and a human if that person was inattentive – and also that they can tell if a person is giving them attention or not (something dogs can also do).
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Counting
Suppose you normally give your pet three treats at a time. Then one day you just give them one treat. Will your cat or dog notice? Can they count? Absolutely, in both cases.
To test ‘quantity discrimination’, scientists offer different food options (one piece versus eight pieces of food, for example) and see which the animal chooses. If it’s always the larger amount, you know they can tell the difference.
These studies show that adult cats and dogs can discriminate quantity, as can kittens and two-month-old puppies, though not quite as well.
Importantly, both species rely on sight to ‘count’ the largest amount of food – other senses aren’t as effective. For instance, when dogs could only smell the food, they didn’t reliably pick the larger quantity.
Self-awareness
In the mirror test, a mark (such as red dye or a sticker) is applied to an animal and then they’re put in front of a mirror. The idea is that if they look in the mirror and try to remove the mark, it shows they recognise themselves. Bonobos, chimpanzees and cleaner fish are among the animals who pass. And cats and dogs? Well, both of them fail this visual test.
But what about a smell version? Biologist Dr Marc Bekoff tried a ‘yellow snow’ test with his dog Jethro. In a (slightly gross) experiment, Bekoff found that Jethro was more interested in snow marked by another dog’s urine than in snow marked by his own, even if it had been moved without Jethro seeing.
Prof Alexandra Horowitz formalised this ‘smelly’ mirror test by adding scent from the spleen of a sick, deceased dog to a healthy dog’s urine. She found that dogs spend longer sniffing their own urine when the odour was added, compared to the urine of a dog they didn’t know. In short, the dogs passed this test with flying colours.
And cats? Well, based on time spent sniffing, we know that cats can identify their own faeces and tell them apart from the faeces of familiar and unfamiliar cats.
This is kind of like Bekoff’s yellow snow test, but another odour would have to be added to make it a true ‘smelly’ mirror test. And unfortunately, this hasn’t been tried yet with cats in a lab setting.
Final verdict
Being smart involves a lot of different factors, in many varying scenarios. And we shouldn’t just consider intelligence from our human perspective. One way to think about it is to ask whether dogs and cats could manage without us.
In this situation, most cats would be fine and could easily provide their own food. Some dogs would be okay, but others would struggle.
Of course, there are individual differences and the dog or cat that’s next to you on the sofa right now may or may not be smarter than average. Their genetics, socialisation, early experiences and daily life all make a difference.
We can probably make them smarter by training them more (yes, even cats can be trained with positive reinforcement). We don’t know for sure, but it’s possible that the extra socialisation and training that dogs tend to get gives them the edge when faced with tasks that require help from others.
Breed likely makes a difference too. Take the Genius Dog Project, for example, which investigates which pooches can memorise the names of at least 10 toys.
Almost all of the ‘dog geniuses’ are border collies, but there are ‘geniuses’ in other breeds and mixed breeds too. There aren’t cats known who can do this, but it’s a rare ability even among dogs.
Ultimately, both dogs and cats are surprisingly smart, but in different ways. So the best thing to do is to simply love the pet you’ve got, for who they are.
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