Question: Ask people if their cat or dog is smarter and opinions will fly. What do the hard data say?
Answer: Been asked this lots of times, says Katherine A. Houpt, animal behaviorist and clinician in Cornell's College of Veterinary Medicine. A cat's brain is about 1 percent of its body weight, a dog's 0.5 percent (brainy humans: 2 percent). Smaller dogs do better, with Toy Poodles more than 1 percent, Great Danes around 0.2 percent. So on average, cats seem to win on this one.
In "delayed response" trials, a dog can remember for five minutes which of three containers holds a treat, a cat for six minutes. But in "multiple choice" trials, when given four door choices to escape an enclosure, dogs got the correct door more often by figuring out that the unlocked door was never the one unlocked the time before. And in an "avoidance-response" experiment, dogs learned to jump up on a ledge after only four tries, cats took 12, more than any other species tested. Finally, in maze-running, dogs on average made fewer errors than cats, who were actually outscored even by sheep, an embarrassing defeat for the cat.
So that makes our final score, an IQ of sorts: cats 2, dogs 3. A close win for the dog, who undoubtedly jumped up on his owner, barking with glee at the news. The cat however just lifted her tail and calmly walked out of the room, since there are more important things to life than silly experiments designed to amuse humans.
"I guess in the end it all depends on one's definition of intelligence, doesn't it?"
Courtesy from Richmond.com
Answer: Been asked this lots of times, says Katherine A. Houpt, animal behaviorist and clinician in Cornell's College of Veterinary Medicine. A cat's brain is about 1 percent of its body weight, a dog's 0.5 percent (brainy humans: 2 percent). Smaller dogs do better, with Toy Poodles more than 1 percent, Great Danes around 0.2 percent. So on average, cats seem to win on this one.
In "delayed response" trials, a dog can remember for five minutes which of three containers holds a treat, a cat for six minutes. But in "multiple choice" trials, when given four door choices to escape an enclosure, dogs got the correct door more often by figuring out that the unlocked door was never the one unlocked the time before. And in an "avoidance-response" experiment, dogs learned to jump up on a ledge after only four tries, cats took 12, more than any other species tested. Finally, in maze-running, dogs on average made fewer errors than cats, who were actually outscored even by sheep, an embarrassing defeat for the cat.
So that makes our final score, an IQ of sorts: cats 2, dogs 3. A close win for the dog, who undoubtedly jumped up on his owner, barking with glee at the news. The cat however just lifted her tail and calmly walked out of the room, since there are more important things to life than silly experiments designed to amuse humans.
"I guess in the end it all depends on one's definition of intelligence, doesn't it?"
Courtesy from Richmond.com
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