PickleQuack

I have found myself very intrigued by animal intelligence lately, and I’ve been doing a lot of research on it. Quite frankly, a lot of people talk about it, but have no idea what they’re talking about, and I just want to smack them upside the head.

First off, an animal’s ability to learn tricks doesn’t make the animal smart. You can teach a goldfish to swim through a hoop, for pickle’s sake. All animals have the ability to learn through classical and operant conditioning. To use a human example, ALL babies learn to cry for attention, because they associate crying with attention. It doesn’t make them particularly smart, it just makes them babies.

Intelligence has many, many factors, and different creatures are smart in different ways. I spend a lot of time researching the three most popular companion animals: dogs, cats, and horses. None of these animals are even remotely alike, and so they are going to think and act in very different ways.

Cats rely more on instinct than dogs or horses do, and they really don’t rely on humans to survive. This is why you don’t see “cat sports,” as cats are quite independent, and really don’t care about pleasing people in any way. This is largely due to the fact that they are solitary hunters. It is not in their genetic makeup to want to cooperate, because they do not have to. Their hunting style consists of stalk, leap, and kill, as opposed to pack animals, who have to think and plan an attack. According to several experiments I have read, as well as personal experience, cats do not have a great understanding for cause-and-effect, as my cats repeatedly fall in the bathtub without learning from the experience. On the plus side, they seem to have a decent observational learning capacity, as I have seen cats jump at doorknobs after seeing that they make the door open.

Horses are interesting, as, despite being livestock, they have a much higher ability to work with humans than, say, cows or sheep. There are two things in particular that horses are good at: memory, and cause-and-effect. It’s well known that horses have GREAT memory. Cause-and-effect is pretty easy to see too; compare a horse and a cow. When a cow sticks its nose in a fire, it will often continue to do it. On the other hand, horses will do it once, then will generally learn from their mistake and never do it again. However, they are a bit below average in problem-solving, which is not surprising, considering they are grazers who don’t really have to think in order to survive. When it comes to working with humans, they are very good at distinguishing among tones and words, and subtle cues when riding.

Dogs, being pack hunters, are the best at problem solving, though it largely depends on breed. Retrievers and collies, for example, rely a lot on humans commands, whereas dogs like mastiffs and livestock guardians rely on their own brains, and are much better at complex thinking and assessing individual situations. They also work the best with humans, shown by their desire to be with and please humans, their almost complete lack of self-preservation, and them being the only animal that looks to a person’s face for cues. However, due to their lack of self-preservation, their understanding cause and effect (depending on the breed) is often ignored, and I would place it above cats, but slightly below horses.

Overall intelligence can be hard to measure. Dogs tend to have the greatest variety, cats are on the lower end, and horses are on the higher end. What I mean is, the smartest dog is smarter than the smartest horse, but the “stupidest” dog is stupider than the “stupidest” horse, while cats are pretty consistent, but below horses and dogs.

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