Originally published at: My cat is smarter than your baby - Boing Boing
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“it doesn’t necessarily prove that cats are more intelligent than babies, but cat people know the truth.”
I don’t know about the cat people, but…
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contributed by Gail Sherman, Author at Boing Boing
eta:
i might have a biased opinion on this one, but…
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Buncha know-it-alls, always demanding answers to their riddles and whatnot.
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Babies are food for cats.
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My cat isn’t.
She’s very sweet but…
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I’m always fascinated by these tests designed for babies. There are a bunch of them in the book What’s Going on in There?, some on zero-day old babies. E.g. if you show them a face, then drag it sideways out of their field of vision, they’ll track it further than if you show them a rearranged assemblage of facial features in the wrong order à la Beschizza’s pictures of ■■■■■. Which is to say, they know what faces are supposed to look like without ever having seen one – it’s in the AGTGCGCGATTGCA somewhere.
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Orange?
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You perhaps have misunderstood.
The continuation (the part after the ellipses) was meant to be…
…the cats certainly are.
She’s a tabby. To be fair on Minnie we had a pair of black cats, Bubbles and Sparklea, sadly no longer with us and she’s kind of a genius compared to them. Apart from one thing, the magpies made their lives miserable with guerilla warfare and one of them used to sit on the garage roof pretending not to see them as they eyed up a surprise assault while the other crouched around the corner all steely cat eyed and a little furball of potential energy…
But she is smarter than the (orange) dog.
But still on the dumb end! I blame the parents myself.
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Cats are not in the top 10 smartest animals, probably not the top 50. They’re bird killing, hairball puking little monsters.
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My sister had a cat who would get curious about what was behind the washing machine, jump down there to see, and have to be rescued. Every single day, for two years. Cats might be somewhat intelligent on average, but Mickey broke the curve for all of them.
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That cat looked plenty smart to me swiping the toxic orange turd off its shelf….
Reminds me of a picture I posted here the day that turd left office and my mate down the road’s clever boy caught the helicopter on the TV right under his paw…
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Either way, countless cat owners like me enjoy the emotional benefits from their pet’s presence. Of course, the animal’s qualities, especially an un-humanly innocence, makes losing that pet someday such a heartbreaking experience.
Still, many non-cat-fans don’t care for the innate resistance by cats to heeling at their masters’ command. And their reptile-like vertical-slit pupils and Hollywood-cliché fanged hiss when confronted, in a world mostly hostile toward snakes, cause cats to have a seemingly permanent PR problem, despite their Internet adorable-pet dominance.
Cats, especially those additionally unfortunate enough to be born black, were demonized thus ordered to be slaughtered by the early Church — until, of course, humane citizens strongly protested that death warrant on innocent cats. Quite poetically, preying cats were/are known to keep plague-spreading rodent numbers significantly down.
Today, it’s likely that only when their over-populations are greatly reduced in number through consistent publicly-funded spay/neuter programs, might these beautiful animals’ potentially soothing, even therapeutic, presence be truly appreciated rather than taken for granted or even resented. Until then, cats likely will remain beautiful yet often misunderstood, prejudged and unjustly despised animals.
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I’ve found that human nature thus conduct is mostly predictable, especially the flawed aspects (e.g. a sense of entitlement or laziness).
I’ve also found that along with human intelligence comes the proportionate reprehensible potential for evil behavior, i.e. malice for malice’s sake.
While animals, including cats, can react violently, it is typically due to reactive distrust/dislike. But leave it to humans to commit a spiteful act, if only because we can. Indeed, with our four-legged friends there’s a beautiful absence of that undesirable distinctly human trait.
Also, it’s hard not to notice how unusually nice people with, for example, Down Syndrome are — all to their credit, of course — when compared to the average and high(er) IQ population. I doubt it’s coincidental.
It brings to mind a really beautiful movie I once had the pleasure of watching, starring Harrison Ford, titled Regarding Henry. And, of course, there’s I Am Sam, with a talented-as-usual Sean Penn.
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Not sure about cat intelligence, as much as I adore them, but studies have shown that New Caledonian Crows are very smart (even among other crows, and that’s saying something). They have an innate understanding of certain engineering concepts (like Archimedes Principle) that most human children don’t grasp until ages 5-7 years. In encourage all readers to check out the research on New Caledonia. I wonder what a crow would do with our brain mass 
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It seems that avian brains are folded in ways that let them get more processing power in a smaller space.
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Tagaki points out that the cats are learning passively, without training or a promise of reward, the same way babies do.
I feel like this is a swipe at dogs, even though they didn’t even test those
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