Cats Are Smarter Than Dogs Quotes

Cats are smarter than dogs. You can't get eight cats to pull a sled through snow.

I think Willim Shakespeare was the wisest human being I ever heard of. To be perfectly frank though, that's not saying much. We are impossibly conceited animals, and actually dumb as heck. Ask any teacher. You don't even have to ask a teacher. Ask anybody. Dogs and cats are smarter than we are.

Cats have the curiosity of a genius, while dogs have the intellect of a sack of manure covered in hair and mulch made from bark (so loud). Actually, that assessment isn’t quite fair. Sacks of manure are smarter than dogs, and make better best friends (I should know, because I’ve lost three best friends to landscaping incidents in the last year alone, which left me alone).

Cats are smarter than dogs. You can't get eight cats to pull a sled through snow. -Jeff Valdez

She poked the fire with a stick. “Hey, what do you think about Fyodor killing that rabbit? Do you think it was cruel?” I shrugged. “A lot of people eat rabbit.” “When I was a kid, I had a bunny as a pet. It was white with black spots. I called it Thumper, from Bambi.” “Thumper was brown.” “Anyway, I think it’s cruel to kill rabbits.” “If you had a chicken as a pet, would you never eat chicken?” “That’s not the same thing. Chickens are dumb.” “Rabbits are pretty dumb,” I said. “People don’t eat dogs,” she said. “They do in Korea.” “You know what I mean. You don’t cook up a Golden Retriever.” “Golden Retrievers are smart.” “So it’s based on intelligence, what we can kill, and what we can’t?” “Seems that way.” “Where do you draw the line? Why’s it okay to kill a deer but not a horse? I don’t think horses are any smarter than deer.” “What are you getting at?” I asked. “Nothing,” she said. “I just think it’s odd you can go around and kill a cute little bunny and nobody bats an eye, but if you shoot a dog or cat you’re sick, and if you shoot your neighbor, you’re really sick and get locked up in a cell for the rest of your life.” “It’s ethics,” I said. “Ethics is bullshit. There’s no objective right or wrong, just what’s allowed and not allowed. Which is subjective, made up, by us.

Logic evolved as a means of defending our passions in an argument. Most people reason to defend their position, not to change their minds or advance their understanding. “When it comes to sensational ideas, we’re like cats chasing a laser pointer. We’ll pounce on anything that’s shiny and new. Only unlike a cat, we can actually catch hold of these ideas. Then we turn and become like a dog with a bone, defending our newfound prize as though it were sacred. “Look at the madness during the pandemic. No one wants to be sick. No one wants to suffer. No one wants to die in agony. No one starts out as an anti-vaxxer, but there goes the red dot of that goddamn laser pointer. It’s racing along the carpet. Gotta chase it! “Somewhere along the line, there will be some vague point that appeals to our vanity, to the passions we already hold—and that’s all that’s needed to believe a lie. We become convinced against all logic to the contrary. We throw out any logic we don’t like. We have to. We have to justify the madness—not the logic, the passion! And the irony is, the smarter we think we are, the easier it is to be fooled. “We overestimate our own intelligence when it’s largely irrelevant. You don’t need a blistering IQ to drive a car, do the laundry, play golf or walk the dog. Regardless of how smart we think we are, we rarely use our intelligence to its full potential. And it makes no difference anyway. Our collective intelligence is far more important than any one individual’s intelligence. It doesn’t matter how smart someone is, anyone can own an iPhone, but no one person can build one from scratch.

However, there is a straightforward measure that scientists use to roughly compare the intelligence of different animals. It’s called the encephalization quotient (EQ). It’s basically a measure of the relative size of the brain compared to the size of the body (because, after all, bigger animals have bigger brains simply because of their body size: elephants have bigger brains than we do but are not more intelligent). The largest tyrannosaurs like T. rex had an EQ in the range of 2.0 to 2.4. By comparison, our EQ is about 7.5, dolphins come in around 4.0 to 4.5, chimps at about 2.2 to 2.5, dogs and cats are in the 1.0 to 1.2 range, and mice and rats languish around 0.5. Based on these numbers, we can say that Rex was roughly as smart as a chimp and more intelligent than dogs and cats. That’s a whole lot smarter than the dinosaurs of stereotype.