My dog is very stubborn and doesn’t like to be told what to do but, he is very intelligent. He is a yellow lab and loves the water. We live on a marsh and we have a big gate up so he can’t get down to the water because there is quick sand. He found a way to get down to the water by digging under the fence. When this happened we were out shopping and when we came home we were scared he could drown or something. So, we ran outside and got him out.

There used to be a dog who lived down the street who was an escape artist. Sometimes the dog would come to our front gate and communicate with our dog. Somehow our dog opened our gate when it was locked and ran away with the other dog. They only ran on the sidewalk. Fortunately, they never ran in the street. We eventually found our dog and the other dog and returned them both home.

Raccoons come out at night and they were eating our garbage so our dog marked his territory on the garbage cans to stop the raccoons from stealing our garbage. They never came back.

My opinion is that dogs are very intelligent but cats are very intelligent also. I’ve read many of your stories about how your cats used toilets and opened cabinets.

This test isnt very valid though because cats like to play with strings. Maybe they weren’t paying attention to the food? They should think of other kinds of tests.

I think the better question is, “Which animal gives a bigger shit about this dumb string test?” Dogs, obviously.

However, I think people often give cats too much credit, in particular. I find it interesting how many people attribute too much intelligence to cats and are convinced that the cat ‘doesn’t want to do’ something, rather than not understanding it. Not saying dogs are smarts necessarily, just an odd thing some people think about cats… putting them above humans for some reason. like the comment above,,, “They’re toying with the humans running the test, getting it wrong every time on purpose!” I dont know how serious this was, but I’ve hear this kind of mentality from a few people. It puzzles me.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/may/26/tool-use-birds-rooks-int elligence

You make some excellent points. “Intelligence” is a bit subjective.

Housecats may not be einsteins, but they are very well adapted to do what they do. They hunt alone, and their hunting/ambushing instincts are razor-sharp. I’ve witnessed a cat whose stealth was almost supernatural.

Dogs hunt by cooperation and brute force – like us. Of course we will have a greater affinity with them. Dogs have always been our greatest ally, but cats are up there with horses, as they protected us from rodents – both our food and health (rodents spread diseases).

“Well my cat’s very smart actually, he comes when I call him.”

Wow. Very impressive.

Everyone knows dogs are smarter. Just deal with it.

http://cordis.europa.eu/express/20030110/finally_en.html

My little guy is so smart, he wakes me up every morning at 5:50 +/- 2 minutes. He’s so accurate, I haven’t heard my alarm in a couple of years. He also opens cabinets, comes when called and plays fetch.

I personally don’t think that cats are built that way. If you look at the larger cats, their strategy is to conserve energy until it’s needed for great speed and/or strength to catch their prey. So devoting too much time toward problem solving is probably just a waste of energy for cats unless they really want or need something.

I also don’t think dogs should necessarily be considered “smarter” because of this test. It’s normal for them to dig and root something out that they want so it makes sense that they eventually ended up pawing at the string. If you really want to split hairs, cats don’t generally pull at strings anyway. We pull the string and they use their paws’n'claws to catch. This isn’t to say they never will though as their equipment does allow them to be versatile.

While house cats are trainable and I’ve known many who have a few tricks up their proverbial sleeves… these cats probably knew that someone would be feeding them after the test so it wasn’t worth the effort. Dogs on the other hand are built to cover and pursue prey over long distances so it makes sense how each meal is of greater importance to them and are therefore more persistent.

Anyway, one could make conjectures about this all day long as it’s really a case of apples and oranges.

hmm reading that, maybe we hoomins need to be tested.

-Learned how to open every cabinet and drawer in the house, thus necessitating the use of safety latches on all of them, even though we don’t have kids.

-Learned to do 3 different tricks on command to get the treats he LOVES.

-Took only a few minutes to figure out the “Scat Mat” we use to keep him from jumping onto the DVD player. (After he broke the first DVD player, we got the mat and when it’s on it gives an unpleasant tingling sensation to the feet of the cat or human that steps on it. The first time my cat stepped on it he of course jumped right off and began inspecting it. After a couple of minutes he figured out the little control box on one side had something to do with what happened before and he began pawing at it like he was trying to turn it off. Thankfully he doesn’t have thumbs or he’d have shut the thing off!)

-Learned to come when he’s called.

-Learned what it sounds like when I sit on the couch. He can be in another room, but if he hears me sit down he comes running to be on the couch with me. He doesn’t do that if my husband sits on the couch.

He’s not that smart?

This /proves/ that the cats are more intelligent! They’re toying with the humans running the test, getting it wrong every time on purpose!

(It’s like a multiple choice test; even if you guess on every question, the odds of getting them all wrong _or_ all right are much different than getting a statistical average