(no subject)
Dogs, like humans, are social animals. They think in terms of how they relate to others. Domestic cats are not pack animals, which is why people laugh when someone trots out the old expression, "It was like herding cats!" This is also why many people, Coren included, make a strong case for dogs being smarter, paws down.
"The reason is very simple," he says. "If you have two animals that are roughly at the same evolutionary level and roughly the same [classification]--cats and dogs are both carnivores--the one that has the more complex social structure is almost always brighter."
Pack animals have to read signals and anticipate the effect of their actions. It's kind of like being a chess player. If you look at it in human developmental terms, a dog is about equivalent to a human two-year-old, which means it knows about 260 words or signals. The average cat, meanwhile, is more like an 18-month-old, which means it knows about 50 words. The more words a creature knows and the better it's able to communicate, the more it is apt to succeed in a social environment.
It's not that cats are too regal to perform tricks or obey commands, Coren says. It's that they don't understand how to do them. They just aren't able to learn language and read social cues as well as dogs.
"The reason is very simple," he says. "If you have two animals that are roughly at the same evolutionary level and roughly the same [classification]--cats and dogs are both carnivores--the one that has the more complex social structure is almost always brighter."
Pack animals have to read signals and anticipate the effect of their actions. It's kind of like being a chess player. If you look at it in human developmental terms, a dog is about equivalent to a human two-year-old, which means it knows about 260 words or signals. The average cat, meanwhile, is more like an 18-month-old, which means it knows about 50 words. The more words a creature knows and the better it's able to communicate, the more it is apt to succeed in a social environment.
It's not that cats are too regal to perform tricks or obey commands, Coren says. It's that they don't understand how to do them. They just aren't able to learn language and read social cues as well as dogs.