Cats Intelligence Superior

Cats know they are intelligent. They do not need to perform tricks to remind the humans in their lives they are smart. And although treats are nice, it is not worth losing their dignity just to get a snack. Truth is, cats will get treats anyway, simply by making “the eyes”  directing their humans to get them what they desire.

There is lots of chatter lately about dogs being more intelligent than cats. And as we discussed in our Dogs Smarter Than Cats Study Flawed series, the article in New Scientist was biased towards the dog’s willingness to serve humans. Now a study out of the University of Oxford claims that socializing led to bigger brains for some mammals, including dogs.

For the first time researchers attempted to chart the evolutionary history of the brain across different groups of mammals over 60 million years. They discovered that there are huge variations in how the brains of different groups of mammals have evolved over that time. They also suggest that there is a link between the sociality of mammals and the size of their brains relative to body size, according to a study published in the PNAS journal (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America). These researchers claim that dogs have developed bigger brains than cats because highly social species of mammals need more brain power than solitary animals.

The Lazy Leopard Research Institute disagrees and here is why:

1) The average dog brain weighs in at 64 grams and the average domestic cat’s brain weighs 25 grams. This stands to reason as dogs on average are much bigger than the typical house cat.  What is more important than simply brain size, not a reliable measure of intelligence, is to take a look at the brains information processing capacity: the number of neurons in the cortex, known as the executive brain. Cats clearly rule with 300 million neurons compared with a mere 160 million in dogs.  So you see, the house cat is small but mighty!

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