“Are dogs smarter than us?” inquired Patrichia?
“Why do you ask?” asked Pawline.
“Because some guy on TV said so,” replied Patch.
“Ah ladies,” said Lamont rising to occasion, literally, arching his
back, stretching out to his full length and assuming and intelligent post atop
of climbing thing. “It just so happens I have been doing some research on this
very thing. I was paging through Psychology
Today and found this small treatise by Stanley Coren, PhD.
“Now one could easily conclude the larger the brain the smarter the
animal, but with a small amount of thought that is obviously false.”
“Why” asked Patch.
“If it were true an elephant whose brain weighs 6,000 grams would
be the brightest animal on earth. Our furless servants have brains about 1,400
grams and they are very bright, and trainable by we cats I might add. As to the
dog it cranial capacity is about 72 grams and our brains range from 25 to 30
grams. But one may deduce since humans are smarter than elephants it does not mean
that dogs are smarter than cats because of brain size.”
“Wow,” good thinking said Paw, “so, are we smarter than dogs?”
“Before I reply,” said Lamont, “I must note the work of Harry J.
Jerison who in the 1970’s developed what he called Encephalization Quotient or an EQ which compared body mass to brain
size. From this equation he concluded that the brightest critter on the planet
are indeed human beings followed by great apes, porpoises, and elephants with
the dog close behind. Down the list we find cats, followed by horses, sheep,
mice, rats, and rabbits. Also animals that hunt for a living are generally
smarter than those who don’t.
“Furthermore,” continued Lamont with an imaginary academic
mortarboard on his head, “we also have to include the social factor. Social
animals are smarter it appears than non-social animals. Dogs are very social
living in packs is in general more social than we cats. Now I’m not sure I
agree with Jerison at this point. Many intelligent beings spend time in
individual thought.
“However work by Suzanne Shulz and Robin at Oxford University bring
some additional information to the EQ concept.”
“Pray tell us what that is,” mewed Paw.
“One reason dogs are rated as smarter than cats is that they are
often trained for various functions to develop their thinking ability. For
instance we have seeing eye dogs and police dogs, and drug sniffing dogs but not
seeing eye cats and police cats, or drug sniffing cats.” Said Lamont.
“Humph,” sniffed Patch, “Has anyone even ever tried to train us to
do those things? I think we would be very good at that. We have better noses
than dogs, we can see in the dark, we can outfight any dog that comes around,
and as for drugs, we can sniff out a bit of catnip anywhere in the vicinity.
That just stupid.”
“I concur,” added Paw. “It’s just that we prefer not to be at the
beck and call of humans. Afterall, we know they are our servants a concept the
silly dogs just cannot grasp.”
“I agree,” nodded Lamont, “plus we must remember our logic as in
the logic dictum just because some S is P does not infer all S is P. In our
case, just because some dogs may be smarter than some cats does not infer that
all dogs are smarter than cats. Just look at us, we are obviously of superior
intelligence than any dog I can think of.”
Vernn Diagram
“Agreed!” added Patch and Paw.
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