You can often hear cat owners claim that their pets are smarter than good-natured but stupid “dogs”, but that this claim is actually true?
From a scientific point of view, there is little evidence that cats are smarter than their four-legged friends.
A simple look at the brain structure of these animals can reveal a lot about their intelligence. The cat’s brain makes up 0.9% of its body weight, while in dogs it is 1.2. However, some scientists claim that the size of the brain is not the key to intelligence. The difference in the number of neurons between these two types tells a different story.
There are 300 million neurons within the cerebral cortex (the area of the brain responsible for, among other things, processing information, solving problems, and perception), compared to a dog that has “only” 160 million neurons.
Recently, various studies have been published that show how intelligent a dog really is. Dogs, for example, can sort objects by categories (which is proof that they are able to think abstractly), and to some extent understand what a person thinks.
This means that they have specific cognitive characteristics that we call the theory of mind (the ability to understand and empathize with others).
As for cats’ cognitive abilities, which may have something to do with the fact that cats are very difficult to work with.
Are cats able to distinguish objects with different quantitative values – an ability previously determined in fish?
Cats can vary in quantity, but they themselves are not as developed as some other animals.
Cats, like dogs, can follow the movements with which we show them something, which shows that they also have a rudimentary theory of mind.
Both cats and dogs can solve simple tasks in order to get food, but when their task becomes unsolvable, the dog will ask for help from the man, while the cat will continue to try.
However, that does not mean that dogs are smarter than cats, but only that they have more developed interaction and social skills with people, which is not surprising when we know that a dog has become domesticated long before a cat.
