One of my cats, a sweet, placid ginger boy, once caught a bat out of mid-air, seconds after it had entered a pitch dark bedroom.
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And I bet he looked cute with the dying creature in its maw!
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If I slept 18 hours per day (like cats), my constant wooziness could be mistaken for stupidity.
PS: I firmly believe that cats are smart enough.
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The best dodge I’ve heard from a scientist when asked how smart cats are is “Cat’s are very smart about being cats.”
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It’s probably simply that the cat associates its “name” with receiving food. (Don’t most owners call their pets to a meal if the pet’s not there?) An owner calling a pet’s name: who cares? An owner making a noise that means “food. now.”: you have my complete attention.
I wonder if most people equate animal intelligence with trainability (which are not necessarily mutually inclusive)… especially when the topic of dog vs. cat comes up.
Dogs have been domesticated (and along the way bred for what they could practically do for people) for ~30,000 years; a good deal of time to end up with dogs that do what we want them to do.
Cats have been domesticated for less than one third that time… and even then not bred behaviorally for much more than their acquiescence and companionship; I believe their aloofness and general resistance to training has a good deal to do with their still in-bred wildness… and survival priorities. Given enough time and breeding, though…? 
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I once saw a unionized mechanic (allegedly with an aircraft mechanic cert) working on a length of piping. The piping run had several joints along its entire length. His task: remove one continuous section from the run (to create a gap). At the ends of the one section were large B-nuts with unions. All he had to do was use two wrenches at each B-nut/union connection to loosen the joints and remove the section. Instead, he grabbed one wrench… put it to a B-nut… twisted it… then was surprised when the section merely rotated in place with nothing being loosened to the point of disconnection. His “solution”: put the wrench to the B-nut connection at the other end of the section… twist that B-nut… and lo and behold… the section merely rotated again. He then went back to the first connection and repeated the process, and then again. I had to show him how two wrenches would do the trick.
That certified a/c mechanic reminds me of this unfortunate dog.
True love inspires compromise and acceptance. 
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Listening closely to my cat and the neighbor cat conversing with each other, I infer their names are XXXKHFFFTT and YOWWWWLLL
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Though ancient Egyptians also mummified for worship other sacred animals like ibises, babboons and crocodiles.
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Anthrozoologist John Bradshaw posits that because of the success of spaying and neutering programs we are not selectively breeding cats for behavior - by the time we discover how awesome a particular kitty is it’s too late to breed them, and we have enough kittens needing homes as it is. Instead, we are selecting for adopted cats where one or more of the parents was feral or stray. (I’m probably not summarizing it quite right.) So cat breeding is going in the “wrong” direction because of very heavy selection pressures.
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Depends upon the individual cat, methinks.
Our little murderbeast has a strong prey drive and loves to play, especially with light and reflection.
Her overly-excited response to the sound or even the very sight of the laser pointer is absolutely Pavlovian; to the point that if I need to locate her, I just click the pointer on and off a few times, and she comes eagerly running.
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I agree. Given enough time and [the right] breeding…
Then again, one of the reasons I prefer cats over dogs is because of their aloofness and independent ways. Dogs are too easy to make friends with; no big challenge. With cats, though, they make you feel special and privileged when they eventually deign to accept you into their tribe. My niece has two cats, one very friendly, the other seemingly a born curmudgeon… until the latter kitty one day decided out of the blue to snuggle up to her, right of the blue. I would miss that in a dog-like cat.
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When she was younger and I spent more time talking to and playing with her, my cat knew the following words, as evidenced by her appropriate reaction:
- dot (looks around on the ground for the laser pointer light)
- bug (looks around at the walls - ok, I used to pick her up and show her bugs on the wall)
- mouse (if she had recently brought a live mouse in the house she would look at whatever piece of furniture it had last run under)
- bird (looks out window)
- treat (jumps up on specify counter for same)
- pee (jumps off of my lap so I can get up to …)
- fish or meat ( licks her chops)
The only ones she still knows are treat, dot and pee.
She’s never responded to her name (Snork).
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Cats have a terrific capacity for learning. My last cat learnt how to get sneakier and sneakier stealing food off the bench. From staying up there and eating there to taking the food away, but not far enough, or too much food (it’s obvious when a whole block of cheese goes missing), to taking one muffin from 2 dozen and hiding under the good table in the dining room where we never went.
We currently have 2 cats. An indulged tabby named Bella who is about nine years old and has never known anything other than warmth and comfort and love. She sleeps either on my bed or my daughter’s bed and night. She treats me like a kitten.
And an ex-street rescue cat. About 2.5 years old and tuxedo. She is thrilled to have home. In some ways she’s terribly smart and others is as dumb as rock. The little idiot smashed right through one of our windows on Monday. All she got was a tiny scratch on her nose.
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Dogs are stupid, violent, and good at following orders. That’s why you see so many working for the cops. Cats ain’t cops, which is one of many many reasons they’re the better pet.
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Which makes me think that “Local embalmer” was a profession where people just made up things about what creatures were sacred, just to stay in business.
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