Dogs more intelligent then cats

Dogs more intelligent then cats

Dogs more intelligent then cats

According to a research on a pets finds, "Dogs are smarter than cats". A researcher had devised a simple experiment where the animals were asked to pull bits of string with their paws in order to receive a reward.

Dogs performed better at the task, and the conclusion was that "there was no evidence that cats understand the function of the strings."

Cat lovers would interpret the results differently. The cats didn't perform well at the string-pulling test because they didn't want to perform well. After all, why should they do what the researcher wanted them to do? No self-respecting cat should be expected to carry out random human demands.

Animal intelligence scientists are in the news again now days, and that same headline is up there: "Dogs are smarter than cats". This time, the researchers are based at Oxford University. They've analysed the brain size of different groups of mammals as they've evolved over the past 60 million years, looking at the brain and body size of over 500 species of living and fossilised mammals. The brains of monkeys grew the most over time, followed by horses, dolphins, camels and dogs.

They've concluded that it's the social behaviour of the "big brained" groups of animals that makes the difference. Dogs need to use lots of brain power to deal with complicated dog-to-dog interactions. This continual "brain exercise" has stimulated the dog's brain to grow bigger over thousands of years. Cat, on the other hand, like other solitary species, have not experienced the same type of brain growth. Their brains don't do the same type of mental exercise, because they don't need to deal with complex social situations.

Again, the headlines claim that this "proves" that dogs are brighter than cats. And once again, cat owners will interpret the research results in a different way. So what if dogs' brains have grown bigger over the past thousands of years. This may make them a little less stupid than they used to be, but it still doesn't make them smarter than cats. Cats have always been sufficiently intelligent; if there's no need to develop a bigger brain, why bother? And brain size isn't everything. Dogs have a huge olfactory lobe on their brain, so they have a very sensitive sense of smell. How, precisely, does this contribute to their IQ?

Even when looking at brain sizes of modern animals, it's not obvious that dogs are ahead. The average human has a brain weighing 1.4kg, or 2.5 per cent of body weight. A cat brain weighs around 30g, which is around 1 per cent of body weight, and although dogs have bigger brains, from 64g upwards, their bodies are also bigger, so the brain makes up a smaller percentage of body mass than cats. Neither does a more detailed analysis of the brain help the case for dogs: if the number of neurons in the cortex (the thinking part of the brain) is analysed, humans have ten billion, cats have 300 million and dogs only have 160 million.

Dogs and cats are smart in different ways. Perhaps the folk who issue press releases on behalf of researchers are the ones who are lacking in intelligence.

samaylive

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