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Comment by jononomo | Hacker News Reader

"For example, we often say that dogs are intelligent. But what do we mean by that? Some dogs, like sheep dogs, are very good at performing certain tasks. Most dogs can be trained to sit, fetch, and do other things. And they can disobey. The same is true of children, though we’d never compare a child’s intelligence to a dog’s. And cats won’t do any of those things, though we never refer to cats as unintelligent."

I, for one, definitely think of cats as unintelligent. A cat is like a potted plant compared to the companionship and relationship a dog offers.

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Having grown up with both, I strongly disagree. You can build very strong bonds with cats, but you have to earn their trust first. Just because they don't feel that the purpose of their existence is to please their owner doesn't mean they're not intelligent.

The inability of a cat to communicate with a human being is what makes cats unintelligent. People like to think that cats are above communicating with humans when the fact is that they're just too stupid. It's not like cats could follow instructions if they wanted to but they just don't want to -- it's that cat are dumb and they can't follow instructions.

This is just flat-out incorrect. Scientists have found cats are plenty intelligent and simply don't cooperate with testing. https://www.science.org/content/article/cats-rival-dogs-many...

Apparently dogs have been objectively measured to be twice as intelligent as cats: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/dog-cat-b...

Dogs might might be better learners and problem solvers than cats but your statement doesn't make any sense.

That's not what that article says. It says that dogs have been objectively measured to have twice the number of neurons as cats. And that is speculated to mean they are roughly twice as intelligent.

With that in mind, dolphins have 2x and elephants have 3x the number of neurons as humans.

> It's not like cats could follow instructions if they wanted to but they just don't want to

You can teach your cat to use the toilet, come when you call its name, roll and jump. They can even open doors which requires understanding how a door knob/rail system behaves. We had a cat that would follow us everywhere even if we went for a walk outside the house for several miles.

Additionally, cats are not nurtured like puppies are. There are considerable amounts of information and know-how from breeders on how to socialize puppies to develop their ability to follow instructions and respect their master. Kittens on the other hand are mostly raised in small cages in pet shops and treated as glorified hamsters that can jump high and purr. Going further, canines are pack animals which are naturally predisposed to work with others and understand complex hierarchies. Felines are mostly solitary and only really get in groups during mating season.

Another counter-example (unrelated to cats) are birds. Birds are incredibly intelligent, they can learn to solve puzzles, talk, and answer to their name. Yet if you ever get a budgie (or similar) you'll notice that your animal seems dumb as a rock. That's because birds require a lot of work in order to learn those tricks because they are naturally distrustful of humans. If you put ~1hr a day on training your budgie as you would with a young pup, you would see incredible improvements.

As a final note, I would concede that a cat's intellect is no match to a dog's, but using "follow instructions" as a metric to define intelligence and concluding "cat are dumb" is an oversimplification.

Cats will let you know if they want to be petted, brushed, for you turn on the sink so they can drink from it, or of course be fed. They will also make it clear if they are excited or if they feel threatened. They can communicate just fine when they want to.

There are animal handlers and zookeepers who have trained cats to perform complex tasks on obstacle courses repeatedly & reliably, just like dogs and other animals. I saw this first hand at a zoo myself (I think it was San Diego but I'm not positive).

On top of all this, if you have interacted with a lot of cats, it becomes obvious that there is a ton of diversity in their personalities & behavioral patterns, even between siblings. There is no point in discussing 'smarter or dumber' here, their intelligence is just different-- it's unique to their species, as with pretty much every other animal capable of being trained.

Forgot to mention, in a house with 10 cats where I once lived, each would respond individually & separately to their name. So they can understand verbal direction.

I think it's reasonable to go back to the original inquiry: How are we defining intelligence here? Is it reasonable to define intelligent as the ability to communicate with human beings?

"A team of researchers counted the number of neurons in dog and cat brains and found one had twice as many as the other."

Guess which one!

The answer is found here: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/dog-cat-b...

Isn't that as pointless as comparing clock rates of different CPU-families?

Because all brains are working the same? No difference in "architecture", strategies, neurons, biology, chemistry, whatever?

Yeah my brain is a netburst. Not even joking. Context switches make me have to completely flush my pipeline. But once I get going on something my pipeline is pretty deep and my clock rate can get pretty high.

Neuron count is strongly correlated with body size, and does not necessarily correspond to what we like to call “intelligence”

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4244864

Ok but body size also corresponds somewhat closely with what we call intelligence within similar classes of animal.

Great apes are smarter than small apes. Big birds are generally smarter than small birds. Elephants are smarter than deer.

African Greys have a brain the size of a walnut...mine is freekin' SMART.

Yes, but African Greys also have among the largest brains of all birds.

You can't necessarily compare bird brains to whale brains, but within birds (or really any similar class of animal) neurons seems to directly correlate with perceived intelligence.

A spermwhale's brain is about the size of a basketball. An infographic for all brains and how their neurons are divided up in special domains, the ratio of brain size to body size, etc, would be interesting to see.

> A spermwhale's brain is about the size of a basketball

Well said. Here's another expression I often use: Stupider than Jupiter!

Jupiter is big but not very intelligent as far as we know.

This is just wrong. My cats can operate light switches, open doors, recognize patterns, etc. They know the difference between me going to bed and me going to the bathroom. They'll know when I'm in my office. They'll demonstrate awareness of basic commands, etc. They have preferred people. One of our cats absolutely adores me. There is a very clear difference in how he treats each member of the family.

The thing I've heard is that cats are more like humans, in that cats operate on consent. Cats have to want the thing you are offering and they will make their desires known. They are conditional.

If you want worship, get a dog. If you want a low maintenance roommate/pal, get a cat.

Dogs can herd sheep, navigate subway systems with blind people, serve as scouts in the military, recognize seizures and call for help, and so on. It's just night and day how much more intelligent dogs are than cats.

You don't see many breeds of dogs doing any of those things either.

I think you both overestimate dogs and underestimate cats.

You don't see many people doing those things either, but that doesn't mean cats are smarter than people.

Doing tricks is neat, but I think dogs get too much credit for doing tricks and following commands.

A dog (or cat!) can show impressive signs of intelligence without having much inclination for tricks. Our dog knows who we are talking to on the phone, our daily routines and many "intelligent" things, like spoken instructions on how to behave the next morning, but hardly know any "standard" dog commands at all except "sit" and "stay".

It is true that some dogs are more intelligent than other dogs.

That's a lot of words to say you don't understand how cats work.

The way cats work is that they're much more intelligent than they ever let on, apparently. A cat is just too smart to stoop to the level of a human being!

Nah, they let on just fine. It's just that cats communicate in their own terms and tend to think we're kind of stupid, which from their perspective is fair enough. They don't look to us for validation the way dogs do, or go out of their way to make themselves legible; they don't much care what we think of them. Some people have trouble with that.

I never have, but I've also known cats most of my life, starting when my mom decided the best way for me to learn their manners was to let them teach me themselves. It worked well enough to make me one of those people who gets along perfectly well even with somebody's cat who "doesn't like anybody!" - I can't count how many times I've heard that or variations on it. So maybe I'm biased, or maybe I'm speaking from greater knowledge. Make of it what you like, I suppose.

I could say the same about cockroaches.

I can respect a cockroach, though I don't welcome their company. You could say the same about wasps, and I get along fine with them too. Granted, like cats, wasps don't play on easy mode for humans. Nor should they; it's good for us to be reminded every now and again that we don't actually own this planet, no matter how much we like to think we do.

But really, we could say the same about almost any other animal on Earth, because almost no animal on Earth has been as extensively modified to suit human preferences and purposes as has C. familiaris. Absent the most extreme provocation, and sometimes even in its presence, they like us no matter what we do. Why not? We've spent several thousand years seeing to it that should be so.

So I'm not really sure what you're expecting you're going to prove with this whole line of discussion beyond that you like dogs and have some very strange notions about cats, neither of which points I think by now requires any further elaboration.

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