Australia does sound like it is a fantasy nation created by the laziest author in the history of fan fiction, “And, lo’, the Company of Heroes did cross the Great Sandy Desert, and thence came they to the Snowy Mountains…”
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My neighbors horse had a sense of humor. Every day it used to like to hide the muck rake so one couldn’t clean out the stall, and always in a different place. Then it would stand stock still while you searched for it, and hop its front hooves when you found it.
He would also allow us to ride him (it was a cart horse, not a race horse) and would shamble along in a slow circle. But if my youngest sister wanted to ride he would always walk backwards for the hell of it. If she got on facing rearward he would walk forwards. Just because.
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The clients who are physicists don’t know how many cats they have of course.
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Libel! 83 years we’ve been cat people trying to atone for that thought experiment! Will we never be absolved? 
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This study seems like an exercise in missing the point. Did anyone actually think that dogs were innately smarter than cats, dolphins, or chimps in the first place? I’ve literally never heard anyone argue that.
However, dogs ARE somewhat special (or at least different from cats) in that A.) They are social animals, used to forming family groups, assisting each other, and responding to cues from others, and B.) They are by far the oldest domesticated animal, having formed a symbiotic relationship with our species over many millennia. Cats are neither of these things - they’re solitary animals that are minimally altered from their wild cousins.
Thus, dogs are generally much easier to train and much more apt to perform helpful tasks, even complex ones, on our behalf. Isn’t that all there is to it?
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Yeah, well, you know, that’s just, like, your opinion, man…
I’m surprised this would be controversial.
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Yeah. There are countless examples both anecdotal and recorded of cats being affectionate and caring. The popular opinion that cats in general don’t care about humans is false.
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Can’t we all just get along?
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The dog is doing it for recognition in the pack social structure. The same way Ted Cruz will take a bullet for Trump.
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Why can’t all animals have their own sense of intelligence, sentience and speciality. Cats are wonderful and dogs are marvelous, horses are amazing and chimps are spectacular. Why is intelligence and capability only driven by our human brains? Yay for all sorts of animals. They make life worth bearing.
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Hooray!!!
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Hundreds of thousands of human beings have been arguing for years and years on the internet that dogs are much more intelligent than cats.
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There’s a video somewhere in the world of a cat saving a toddler from a pit bull. I’m just too lazy to bother finding it.
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Different is the key word here. All animals have their own special qualities that sets them apart.
Not really. The dog would actually do so - and wouldn’t snivel.
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Here you go:
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I always wave to our neighborhood crows, but my cats won’t let me make friends with them.
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Thanks for the link. Good grief, the popular take on this article is misleading. The author’s argument is that “expected” cognition can be predicted based on membership in various categories, and that canine cognition is not higher than expected for an animal in (all) three particular categories. However, none of the other comparison animals are in all three categories:
In other words, it builds a model of cognition with three categorical explanatory variables, using these other animals to estimate the parameters, then compares measured canine cognition to the predicted cognition and finds it not out of the range of prediction. So the article doesn’t say anything about cognitive comparisons with the animals in other parts of the Venn diagram.
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