Cats aren’t smart? When I was growing up, we had a cat and a dog, and they were both quite smart in their own ways - and they teamed up to steal goodies. The cat would stick her paw under the cupboard door and open it, and the dog would drag out the treats.
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I wonder how many dead bodies found in alleyways were mistakenly attributed to mob hits just because the victim had a dead rat stuffed in his mouth.
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I think we should add “knock stuff onto the floor”.
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- Assist with hunting all manner of game animals
- Private security guards (protecting against human and animal threats alike)
- Serve with police and military
- Inspect airports and ports of entry for contraband
- Perform search and rescue operations
- Corral herd animals
- Pull sleds across snow-covered terrain
- Provide critical assistance to people with disabilities
- Bring you fucking booze when you’re freezing to death in the Alps
I believe cats would do these things for people, but they just don’t think we are worthy of their efforts. After all we are nothing but “the help” to them.
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Ruin nice furniture
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This is why cat owners can’t have nice things.
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These are our 4 mutts. When my wife and I met, I had two dogs and she had one. They’re in doggie heaven now, but were great girls.
These 4 are a funny pack. My wife being the alpha, of course…
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With a lot of fortuitous common herd instinct at a critical stage we evolved together. Protect my young and i’ll protect your family. Now on to the corvids. Don’t we want sky dogs? Make drones look like clunky noisy things. Fun loving too.
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There’s a compelling argument that much of what we value as “making us human” was actually prosocial behavior that reproductively prevailed because it made those humans better able to work with dogs, which significantly helped our survival chances. We didn’t just direct their evolution, they also directed ours to some extent. Google “lupification of humans” and you should be able to find some papers on it if you’re interested.
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Even virtual ones!
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My cat stares at walls for hours and hours on end. Not sleeping, not laying down, not eyes closed. Sitting up standard cat style, unmoving, eyes wide open, unblinking staring. For hours. We joke about him being a zen cat. Real talk? Not very bright.
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Your glorious accent from the motherland has been infiltrated by dirty capitalist “the”. FTFY.
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I love cats and dogs and having both in my life have made it more bearable. Both are light breaking through an overcast existence.
Neither are as “smart” in human terms as we anthropomorphize them to be, but that’s because they’re not the same as us. Intelligence isn’t a linear metric and humans tend to vastly overrate ours. (As just one example: Who’s making our homeworld uninhabitable for themselves?)
Each require different concessions because family takes work. No one unwilling to do that work deserves pets. Pets are not objects or accessories to a lifestyle.
If humans want my love they need to get their cats and dogs fixed so there aren’t countless domesticated friends being abandoned or destroyed.
I offer this as a counterpoint to arguing about ranking the delightful creatures we as a species have accepted into our hearths as allies of the heart.
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I haven’t checked if anyone else brought this up but if you know your history what we did to deserve dogs is kill the sabre-tooth vampires.
I like to see cats as akin to the ninja mercenary you pay to go take out the enemy agents. You let the merc go do his thing, he works best alone, sneaky, silent. Pay him, but don’t tell him how to do his job.
Dogs are the loyal samurai soldiers. Are adept at following complex orders and filling all sorts of roles. Working as a team is so deeply ingrained that when not working for us, they are like ronin, on the edge and looking like they would welcome a new lord.
I also think that this is part of why cats have more preprogrammed cleverness, and dogs more adaptive memory. Dogs need more communication skills, cats just needed the skills to report in once in a while.
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That’s what you think. He’s really doing n-dimensional math in his head, using the wall as a visualisation space.
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Obligs:
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Now I want to see a remake of The 47 Ronin with dogs.
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FWIW only a few specially trained dogs really do these things, and most people’s pet dogs aren’t capable of them. The attendant behaviors of those skills are undesirable to me personally, but that’s why I don’t have a dog, cute as they are.
Cats are just as fulfilling and loving as pets for their owners as dogs are for theirs. I’ve never understood the hostility towards cats- although I suspect that it comes from comparing cats to dogs- It’s bound to to result in negative judgements, as apples and oranges comparisons always do.
All animals deserve our empathy and kindness, and they are all delightfully clever and caring in ways beyond their utility and proximity to humans.
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