Don't take it so personal people. It's a common method to test and correlate "intelligence" with problem solving skills. The higher ranked creatures are the ones who have the ability to manipulate their environment and work out solutions for attaining goals in unfamiliar situations (sometimes through the use of tools) like octopus, ravens, primates, etc.
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.
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.