Whether cats or dogs are cleverer is a perennial question. There’s no denying dogs normally have bigger brains (especially if they’re a bigger breed). But pooches also have more neurons – one golden retriever was found to have 623 million neurons in its cerebral cortex, compared to 429 million for a smaller dog and 250 million for a cat. The dogs also had more neurons in their brains overall.
Of course, it’s not how many neurons you’ve got, but what you do with them that counts. There’s more research on canines than felines, so dogs’ abilities are better known. And, of course, studying pet cats is hard because they don’t like to go to new places, like a laboratory for example (think of how they hide whenever the cat carrier comes out).
Nevertheless, science has been able to measure up our favourite pets, based on three key types of intelligence.
One way to assess an animal’s ability to understand others’ mental states (social cognition) is through something called the unsolvable task paradigm.
It’s a simple test. After a dog has learned to get food out of a container, the container is fixed shut so that the food becomes inaccessible. Scientists then watch to see if the dog will look to a nearby human for help. This looking, from a person to the container and back again, is a form of referential signalling or ‘showing’ behaviour – the canine equivalent of pointing.
