Pooch Cafe by Paul Gilligan for December 09, 2010
December 08, 2010
December 10, 2010
Transcript:
Boomer: Cats are a blight! A disease! Well, lemme show you what we dogs do with cats. Woof woof! Bark woof bark! Woof! Poncho: And then what? Boomer: That's pretty much all of it.
“Cats CAN learn tricks, they just don’t WANT to.”
I’ve heard that a million times, but I don’t buy it. Canines as a class have a greater capacity for learned behavior than cats, simply as part of their nature. There’s a reason you don’t see many Seeing-Eye Cats around.
Dogs, being a highly social species, are tremendously aware of and responsive to cues given by their pack members, and the hierarchal nature of a dog/wolf pack makes them predisposed to follow orders. If you’ve ever seen Border Collie field trials, with the dogs responding precisely and efficiently to subtle and intricate signs given by their handlers, it’s impossible to imagine cats doing anything even remotely comparable. Cats are solitary hunters; they can learn pattern recognition to an extent, but cooperative behavior simply isn’t in their wiring.
The question of whether dogs or cats are “smarter” is probably unanswerable, because most of the criteria that researchers used are adapted from standards of human intelligence. But what dogs and cats require of their brains are very different (not only from each other but from humans), and each is suited to those requirements.
Neither dogs nor cats are capable of “thinking they’re people”, because neither is remotely capable of comprehending what a human being is. Dogs think their humans are other dogs, and cats think their humans are other cats, and respond to them accordingly.