Both cat and dog owners have plenty of anecdotal evidence as to why their pet of choice is superior to the other. The killer metric is usually intelligence.
Dog lovers will point to their good boy or girl’s eagerness to interact with humans and ability to respond to multiple commands. Cat fans will reply that this ‘neediness’ isn’t smart and that cats have deliberation, subtlety and depth that reveal a mastermind at work. In such contested territory, we need science to make a call.
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Cats vs dogs: who's smarter?
One indisputable finding is that dogs have larger brain capacity than cats. In a study published in 2017 in Frontiers of Neuroanatomy, a typical cat was found to have 250 million neurons in its cerebral cortex, while an average-sized dog had double that figure. One golden retriever had 623 million neurons.
The cerebral cortex matters – it’s the part of the brain responsible for sensory perception, volitional movements (made out of choice rather than involuntary impulses), cognition, memory and emotion. Neurons are the basic information processing units – the more neurons you find in the brain, the more processing power.
But, say the scientists, a larger brain isn’t everything. Sarah Benson-Amram, a scientist at the University of Wyoming’s Animal Behaviour and Cognition Lab found evidence that large brain size in carnivorous animals, such as dogs and bears, leads to better problem solving; there is some evidence that domestic dogs may not be as smart as the wild wolves from which they are descended. Benson-Amram qualifies this by saying there’s little indication larger brain size universally leads to higher intelligence.
Pets vs babies: who's smarter?
Recently, there’s been a lot of press about a study claiming cats are cleverer than human babies. The study, by Saho Takagi, a comparative cognitive scientist at Azabu University, Japan, involved testing 31 cats using a programme of spoken word-image associations designed for 14-month-old humans. Takagi found that the majority of the cats had learned each word-image association after only two nine-second lessons. By contrast, most 14-month-old human babies needed four 15-second lessons. “Cats pay attention to what we say in everyday life – and try to understand us – more than we realise,” Takagi says.
But dogs are capable of something very similar. Some 15 years earlier, Stanley Coren of the University of British Columbia reported that, according to several behavioural measures, dogs’ mental abilities are close to those of a human child aged two to two-and-a-half years. However, Coren explains, “The intelligence of various types of dogs does differ and the dog’s breed determines some of these differences.”
Asking for human help
Another behavioural test, this time published in the Journal of Comparative Psychology in 2005, explored ‘the use of visual communicative signals between dogs and humans and cats and humans’. The study found that dogs were more likely to look for human help and actively grab attention from humans to help solve puzzles in order to receive food. In the real world, this is demonstrated by dogs’ ability to communicate to their owners when they are hungry or need the door opened so they can go outside.
However, cats were found to be far less likely to look for outside help and tried to solve the problems themselves, without success. Less clever or just more stubborn and independently minded?
The mirror test
Both dogs and cats fail, however, when presented with the mirror test. This was devised in 1970 by American psychologist Gordon Gallup Jr, who wanted to see if animals could recognise themselves. Essentially, the test involves putting a mark (a splash of dye) on the test animal’s head where it cannot see it without a mirror and then presenting it with its reflection. If the animal acknowledges the mark, it has passed the test. While chimpanzees, dolphins, Eurasian magpies and even cleaner wrasse (a species of fish) have aced the mirror test, both dogs and cats lack this level of self-awareness.
Though some of the above evidence suggests that dogs might have the edge in intelligence, there’s no conclusive proof. And do we need it? Our pets give us a range of support, loyalty, attention and comfort that goes beyond measures of intellectual capacity. And there will always be occasions when our dog or cat seems to read our minds or anticipate our emotions – no matter what the science says.
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