Or not…
6 Likes
One of my step-mother’s cats loved to sleep on the cable box and would turn it on or off at inopportune moments.
For instance, a player was about to catch a long pass during the Rose Bowl–and the TV went off. I had never seen my dad move so fast.
In later years this mostly meant my dad yelling “CAT” at the top of his lungs in the middle of the night. By the end I’m pretty sure the cat was messing with him.
5 Likes
This is the third time in the past few weeks that Stella has combined “good” and “bye” to say “Goodbye” instead of just “bye”!
Come on, how can you doubt that the dog is constructing proper English on the fly, as dogs are wont to do.
6 Likes
His keeper wrote a book about the whole experience, including several instances of apparent higher-order thinking, like actual jokes Alex made, which haunt me to this day.
Though I remembered Alex’s name, I’m blanking on the professor’s, but she was a woman.
3 Likes
Border collie!
My cattle dog cross brought her favorite ball out when she met some friends of mine for the first time. I said “Where’s your blue ball?” She looked around; no blue ball. I said; “Your blue ball is in your bed in the bedroom”. She went into the bedroom and got her blue ball. Of course, she doesn’t know it’s blue, she just knows the name of the toy is “blue ball”.
11 Likes
I must track down that book! 
2 Likes
Pepperberg, Irene (2009). Alex & Me: how a scientist and a parrot discovered a hidden world of animal intelligence and formed a deep bond in the process . Scribe Publications. ISBN 9781921372728.
6 Likes
Mucho Thx!
1 Like
I have a border collie/Boston terrier mix. It turns out mixing a Boston terrier with a border collie takes all the smarts away. He’s cute AF though, so it’s ok.
ETA proof of said cuteness.
14 Likes
Specifically, that little experiment shows undeniable simple deductive logic. Very well-done, too, with a clear result and no fooling around.
1 Like
have you ever seen the sheep dogs do what that breed does…
clearly in there but the sheep do go in the pen with no ink
2 Likes
I know this is just a joke/meme, but to take it seriously for a moment - cats have great many ways of communication, too! It’s just that most people don’t notice or understand them. I suppose it’s partly because they’re a lot more subtle than dogs’ ways of communicating with people, and partly because humans are just not as attuned to cats as we are to dogs. (There’s an amazing study where researchers played various types of barks to people, asking what the dog is trying to communicate, and most of them got the answers right.)
Apparently cats tailor their communication to the people they’re most often in contact with, and as anyone who’s lived with a cat for long enough can tell, it doesn’t take very long to figure out what a cat is trying to say with meows, tail swishes, etc. My old cat developed a certain type of meow to let us know he wanted his water replaced. When we didn’t understand it (or pretended not to) he would eventually start meowing with - for lack of a better word - more articulation, like when people think a person who doesn’t speak English would understand what they’re saying if they say it slowly and loudly. “M-E-O-W, I said M-E-O-W, do you understand it now??”
Anyway, interspecies communication is awesome.
And then there’s this:
9 Likes
That’s a bit boring, this repetitive dissing of cats as uninterested. There’s research done that proves that they not only have a rich communication system, but it’s tailored to their owner.
What this means is that if you are not communicating well with a cat you own, the problem is with you, not the cat.
8 Likes
Part of the difficulty with stuff like this is that without rigorous tracking, we have no way of knowing how many times he presses a nonsensical combination of buttons. Selection bias can make it appear that he is using syntax which seems unlikely to me. Considering how often dogs bark incessantly, I’d guess that even with his level of understanding, he is more likely to say Outside Outside Outside Outside than to form any kind of coherent sentence.
1 Like
Not to mention, the dog using words like “now” and “later” would assume that she has a concept of not only time but also “now, as opposed to sometime later”. And well, I’m no scientist but I’ve never seen a dog exhibit anything that would point at that being the case.
And then there’s the “Goodbye” thing which just assumes that the dog has an understanding of not only what the words “good” “bye” and “goodbye” mean, but also knows how “good” modifies the meaning of “bye”, and the significance thereof, and, yeah.
In general, this “experiment” is cute and the dog is adorable, but I really wouldn’t put a whole lot of weight on it proving anything. Dogs are highly intelligent and generally very eager to please, so I think that, more than anything, what’s happening here is the dog randomly pressing buttons (because she knows that her owners like it when she does that), and then watching the owners’ reactions, tailoring her own following actions accordingly.
I’ve no doubt that dogs understand certain words if they understand the connection between “I hear the word” and “thing happens”, and understand that certain words refer to certain objects or beings. But assuming that their own thought processes are similar to humans’ way of thinking and communication is just a bit too far-fetched at this point, I think. Much has been said about how dogs don’t really think the way humans do - like when dogs seem guilty over having done something bad they don’t really understand the moral aspect of “I did a bad thing”, they’re just picking up on your tone and body language and react accordingly; or that search and rescue dogs simply want to please their owners, and when they feel sad if they don’t find survivors it’s because they know that finding living people makes the humans happy, and make the connection between dead bodies and the team’s disappointment and sadness. (There’s been similar studies on drug sniffing dogs, where it turned out that yes, dogs can in fact sniff out the drugs but more than anything they understand that acting like they found something = satisfied owner = treat, so some dogs would act as if they found drugs even when there were no actual drugs to be found.)
2 Likes
I would argue that is an evolutionary adaptation to living as a pack animal. “The leader (and by extension, the rest of the pack) is unhappy with me.” is not only the root of dogs’ “guilty” or “submissive” behavior, it is also the root of our own morality. We are able to synthesize a more consistent set of behaviors into some sort of morality, but feeling guilty because we have wronged others in our group in some way is the motivation for us to behave well enough that we CAN live in a group. And evolutionarily that came way before any kind of moral code. Indeed I find it interesting to look at animal behavior as a dusty-imperfect mirror into the more non-rational elements of our own behavior.
2 Likes
This makes a lot of sense. Dogs don’t necessarily parse that what they did is “bad” (or even completely understand what exactly they did that made the owner angry with them) but they do understand that the pack leader is angry so they act submissive - and being very attuned to humans, they’ll pick up what set of submissive behaviors pleases the human the most, so they’ll behave the same way the next time the human is angry. Humans have a concept of morality so we know that doing certain things is “bad” and “not right” but as you note these concepts have likely evolved from a need to be able to function as a group. Which is why, I guess, the finer definitions of “bad” and “not right” can very much differ not only from culture to culture, but also evolve with time as society and societal dynamics change.
This is likely also why cats come across as indifferent. Not being pack animals, cats don’t have an urge to please other members of the pack, or to show submission as part of pack/relationship dynamics (as cats usually only show submission when it comes to fighting, or to avoiding a fight). But who knows, maybe after a few hundreds or thousands of years of evolution we’ll develop a special dynamics with cats as we have with dogs.
(My brother’s cat is kind of amazing in this respect, I’ve never seen another cat that was so intent on making this “living together” thing work as she is. She’s very attentive to her humans’ moods and behavior, and she clearly does her best to be considerate of them, in her own way. For example she never bothers people when they sleep - even if she’s hungry, she’ll wait until the human is actually out of the bed, and then she’ll start meowing and climbing the human, demanding food. She also picks up on even subtle body language, and will come to you when she thinks you want her to, and won’t bother you if she thinks you don’t want her to.)
3 Likes
I think that with cats especially (since they aren’t pack animals) the social behaviors that we reinforce are those of the young when they are being raised. We don’t want our pets to grow up and exhibit more adult behaviors (challenging for pack supremacy in dogs, independence in cats) And those behaviors are probably linked to some of the neotony displayed ind dogs compared to wolves (shorter snouts, floppy ears, etc)
3 Likes
