A photo from open sources
Owners of the two most common types of pets – cats and dogs tend to have a ton of evidence confirming the great reasonableness of representatives of that type animals to which their pet belongs. I wonder what they say about this scientists? Who is actually smarter: a cat or dog? A simple look at the structure of the animal’s brain can talk about his intelligence quite a lot. For example, the ratio brain mass to total body weight in cats is 0.9 percent, in while in dogs, the brain occupies 1.2 percent of body weight. By however, scientists say brain mass is not key factor determining the quality of intelligence. Most important a prerequisite for the development of intellectual abilities is the number of neurons and neutron bonds. And this parameter is like it turned out that cats are much higher. In the area of the brain responsible for information processing, cats have about 300 million synoptic neurons, compared with 160 million neurons in dogs. However, supporters that dogs are smarter than cats are not going to easily give up. Moreover, studies conducted in this area demonstrated an undeniable advantage in favor of these domestic pets. For example, unlike cats, dogs can teeth sort various objects into categories, thereby confirming the presence of the rudiments of abstract thinking. In addition, dogs, perceiving stereotypes of behavior and facial expressions of people, they can understand about what do we think, to a certain extent, shows their beautiful intellectual abilities. However, if we go back to cats, then here we are faced with a lack of scientific facts and research. Perhaps this is due to some well-known difficulties in the behavior of these pets. Back in 2009, scientists tried determine whether cats can distinguish between objects – a behavioral effect previously discovered in fish. Test to identify this ability is pretty simple. Researchers posted three black points above the desired object (plate with food) and two points above unwanted (empty plate). Then scientists focused on these objects of experimental animals. In addition to fish, a team of specialists worked with monkeys and birds. All experimental animals gave quite interesting and positive in terms of rating intelligence, result. However, working with cats, scientists had to admit your total defeat. The fact is that cats in their own way by nature very independent animals. Their style of behavior is not suggests such a vivid response to experimentally programmed reactions that we can observe in dogs. Simply put – they learn harder because they don’t want to learn, not because they have lower intelligence. Finally, studies have confirmed that cats can distinguish between number of objects and repeat guiding gestures, like dogs. In addition, it turned out that both cats and dogs can decide simple puzzles to get food. Difference in their behavior consists only in the fact that when the task facing the animals insoluble, dogs will look at people, waiting for help, while while cats will try to solve it on their own. Based the results of the experiments, scientists came to a fairly simple conclusion: in fact, dogs are not smarter than cats. Just due to more long period of collaboration with people (dogs were domesticated 20,000 years earlier than cats), they had much more close and long social connections than cats.
Dog Cat Time
