Step by step, she would lure me all the way to the kitchen and give me a look said that, "Now that we are here anyway, how 'bout some of that food?". A bit manipulative, I admit, but kind of clever.

Also, I suspect cats tricked humans into starting agriculture so they (the cats) would have a steady supply of mice.

We had cats when I was a kid, and I would observe that cats are very good at tracking prey, at opening doors or at getting humans to open them, at figuring out who is the boss, and at bearing very, very long term grudges, but otherwise they operate in a system where the world revolves around them (apparently quite literally in terms of how they map the world).

This utility-focussed view of the world means they always get fed, but it also leads them to get stuck when exploring -- never paying attention to the fact that the neighbour's garage door does not just open, it also closes, for example!

So I have tended to see them as well-optimised, intelligent, but not necessarily "bright".

But the cat-mirror-ears video -- where a cat sees a reflection in a mirror, apparently understands that it is its own reflection and then... realises it has ears... that changed my mind.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akE2Sgg8hI8

There is another "cat theory of mind" video where a mother cat purposefully and deliberately retrieves an object its kitten wants to play with, that scientists have talked about on twitter, but I can't find it.

A friend of mine has a cat that learned to play fetch as a kitten and never stopped playing. So unusual.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46rROBUDPYI

I was playing with them with a bird wand toy and then I wanted to get back to work. So I wedged the toy's handle in the chair.

Tulie had studied how I operated the toy, and she decided to work it herself to keep Sephie entertained.

At one point the feathers got stuck on the chair, and Tulie figured out how to unstick them!

Then the dogs came by to get some water, and the cats were like "nothing to see here, move along now."

And then with the dogs out of the way, they got back to business.

But as far as I know, she never regret her decision.

However, my dog is orders of magnitude smarter, and has taught herself:

- Lying. She barks "at the mailman" about 10 minutes before he arrives, so I'll put her out when he's in the area

- Mirrors. She understands that her reflection is only a reflection, and will look at herself to see if her fur is ruffled on her hindquarters

- Language. Dogs are often taught to communicate with buttons that trigger a word. The conventional wisdom is that it takes a dog about a week to learn to use them. She taught herself 5 separate buttons in 20 minutes, and uses them to this day, chaining them together to express her thoughts remarkably clearly. For example, she used "no" + "time for bed" in the morning when I hadn't refilled her water yet.

But that's why dogs are so popular: they're calibrated to our psyche. They understand human gestures incredibly well.

Also, our dog being a BC that means that, at times, he wants to herd our cat, after long bouts of staring at said cat. In response to all that the cat has invented and performed very smart avoidance techniques that he hadn't use with us before the BC came into our life (the cat was with us first, for about two years).

And that's just two quick things that sprung to my mind on learning the article, there are many others. There's also the misconception of "cats don't love/care about their owners" which is just a stupid stereotype.

After he passed, they now do this with my mum. In the mornings they will wake her up by licking her forehead, ever so gently.

I guess you can read in to their behaviour what you will, but to us it feels like empathy. Not sure what we would do without them.

* Phone ringing, getting on towards 3-4 rings

* Cat sprinting down the stairs, jumps up onto bookshelf and waits

* Cat listens to the machine pick up the caller and the message they leave

* Caller hangs up and the cassettes go all clickety-clack

* Cat then reaches with his paw around the bookshelf to smack the big blue button

* Message plays back again and is now marked read, light goes out, and no one knows we were left a message

Over the years we saw him do this a number of times! Once he hit the wrong button and overwrote the outgoing message with the sound of himself purring.

They generally do what they please when they decide to do so. And they know it. How many people in your household can say they have this unbridled freedom?

Once you realise that the cat(s) in your abode and life have the luxury to pick and choose their course of action, or lack of it, at their whim the more you understand that they rule and occasionally oversee and direct proceedings.

In my house the cat runs the show. Then my wife. Then my two dogs and then me. I'm sure others on here can relate.

One of my cats wakes me up every day around 5-6AM to get food. She does so by making just enough noise to wake me up, but not my partner (she's doing it on my side of the bed, etc). She also does that when she's not hungry, but her sister is.

What we now know as domesticated cats have extra special set of skills..they know how to create and retain memories. They understand reward based stimuli.

There has been enormous research done in the field of cat genetics. UC Davis leads with the cat genetics lab and esp for their work on cat coat genetics.

But we also know what genes changed and evolved for their intelligence as they morphed from feral to domestic.

The most relevant one to intelligence are glutamate receptors that aids learning and memory. Domesticated animals have evolved to developed more coat variations and pigmentations than wild animals. This is why you don’t find a calico tiger but not only are there calico cats, but we also know that their genes guarantee that almost all are also female. Male calicos are sterile and short lived.

It is in the area of cat coat genetics that UC Davis VGL has made enormous strides. There are five key traits that facilitate domestication and one of them is the wide variability in pigmentation/texture of coats.

Even though cats have been around humans, they were allowed to be ‘wild’ and have resisted the intense pressure to adapt for full on domestication.

In a way, they have been more useful in agrarian societies in their undomesticated state and largely due to their hunting instincts…..which once tamed and trained is no longer as effective. Hunting rodents is a far different job that herding docile domesticated sheep.

For years, my rescue cat has had an annoying habit of gently plucking at my clothes with her claws for no apparent reason. Then one day I had an epiphany. I discovered that scritching the top of her head made her stop plucking my clothes. Now she gets head scritches whenever she wants.

So from her perspective I am thoroughly stupid, yet capable of learning simple tricks given enough repetition and reinforcement.

“Whereas dogs have been bred for utility, cats have been bred solely for appearance.”

My understanding was cats largely served as pest control from the human perspective. It’s probably why they continue to hunt even when well fed.

- Have you ever seen a "cat raised by dogs"? They develop the same mental schemas around socialization that dogs do; begin to understand the sort of "pack" structure and reward norms that dogs think in terms of; and so end up trainable exactly like dogs, using e.g. social-status gratification/reassurance as a substitute for food. And often, you won't actually have to explicitly train a "cat raised by dogs"; cats are seemingly highly skilled at modelling (i.e. witnessing others earning rewards for a behavior, and then self-motivatedly learning to mimic that behavior), and so a cat that hangs around trained dogs may teach themselves "tricks" it observes the dogs doing.

- Have you ever seen a cat taught human language using AAC (Augmentative and Alternative Communication) devices, a.k.a. "button training"? They can very quickly absorb human mental schemas, learning to not just to favor "using their words" to signal their needs, but also, through that, to begin modelling the world narratively, telling stories about what they witnessed other-person A doing to other-person B. If you communicate the terms "soon" and "later" to them, they will begin asking about the future, expressing a curiosity about whether events (e.g. a person coming home from work) will happen near or far in time. These are not things that cats seem to instinctively think about, until they have the mental schemas to think about them; but once they absorb these schemas, they do engage with these topics!

I think human style intelligence we appreciate so highly is useful mostly in relation to other humans.

There was one cat who lived permanently at the clinic. She would be crated every night before we left. She would often get out of her crate and we'd find her roaming around the clinic the next morning. The cage required that you press two pins towards each other. It's surprising that she figured this out but also that she had the dexterity to reach outside the cage and do this.

She was one of the smartest animals I've ever interacted with. You could see the gears in her head turning when she wanted to figure something out.

One of them has learnt to do basic tricks for treats, and has also learned to turn on two different robot hoovers by pressing the right button - she only does this late at night, which I take either as attention-seeking or just boredom? The other one is the Zoolander of cats.

Beyond this, they seem quite limited: sleep, eat, wander around, watch the world go by, occasionally hang out with us, sometimes play or hunt.

For instance, my experience is that they can quickly understand the function of a door handle and even learn to operate it in order to open the door.

> Other tests include the ability to learn and remember. Is the ability to learn by rote a sign of intelligence? If so, any avian mimic is intelligent.

I would argue this shouldnt just be dismissed like that. I would argue that mimicking is a sign of intelligence - The fact that a toddler can mimic an animal, even if that animal has vastly different anatomy, seems very intelligent. It suggests an understanding of the similarities between function of body parts, even if the form differs significantly. Why would an avian mimic not be a sign of significant intelligence, such as understanding vocalizations and how they happen? A bird rarely has to sit there for hours trying random sounds to mimic another sound, it understand and knows what to do, does it not?

You are likely thinking of https://youtu.be/whVMP6BqcqU

"That's my leg" or "that's my ear" seems a reasonable discovery for a cat. I doubt that there was a deep existential discovery because it happened in a mirror.

Of course, pets of a species will vary in ability, that's only normal variation. We love them because they are simple, pretty, calming, and sometimes even helpful.

The animals that we love less, we tend to eat.

There's an obvious cognitive limit compared to humans. The theory of mind in humans conjures intentionality everywhere. Despite the (sometimes wildly) erroneous notions that this can produce, there is value in cooperation. Assuming intentionality has been an evolutionary advantage for our species.

Our species domesticated cattle, horses, and dogs because we have what we call "empathy". It's our mind at work building assumptions about the other.

It doesn't take much for the human mind to start imagining intentionality and companionship. Jesse Bering [1] offers the example of the well-known film, The Red Balloon, in which a simple balloon becomes a little boy's companion.

https://slate.com/technology/2011/02/theory-of-mind-and-the-...

Humans love their pets and often project human cognition onto them. It's a human thing. People often project traits onto their children as well. Pets usually avoid some of the worst effects of this projection. ^_^

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Bering

The greatest moment is the head-turn and the wide-eyed look on her face as she is sitting down. Like: "oh this changes everything".

No, cats do not recognize themselves in mirrors. Very few animals do.

It's just very easy for us to see all sort of human behaviors in our pets.

What gave away his game was that sometimes his hind leg didn't quite get off the sofa. It was like a kid that took cookies for the cookie jar, even managed to get it back where it was supposed to be but then left obvious crumbs.

They understand making a specific sound produces a specific result. It's a bit far from language.

She goes out and comes back when i call her and understands that she can wander outside only if she comes back when called. I put bells at the door that he uses to tell me when she wants to go out and rings the bells on the otherside when she is ready to come back in. Plays hide and seek, fetch ect with my nephew. And above all i feel like her emotional intelligence is on another level. She knows how to read minds. Best cat I've ever had!!!

Also, what breed is your dog? Is it one of the famously clever ones like a Border Collie?

He gets spooked when he sees his faint reflection in glass, for example in front of the fake fireplace.

Part of it is that dogs and cats identify each other by smell as much as, if not more than, sight. A reflection may not register as a real dog/cat to most of them.

When I was in high-school, I had a fish, a Banded knifefish, who welcomed me home every afternoon by standing upright on its tail by whatever side of the aquarium I was. I gave it food at the end of a stick and played games where it would hunt the food. If sometimes, if I stopped moving the stick it’d come to my side of the aquarium and stare at me until the stick started moving again.

    I guess you can read in to their behaviour what you 
    will, but to us it feels like empathy

I felt quite certain "empathy" wasn't part of this set of skills.

But something recently made me question it.

A few weeks ago I saw a video from the Russia/Ukraine war that made me visibly upset. I became distressed and said "no no no NO" and hastily pounded the keyboard to close the window and went into an adjacent room to sit down, actually crying a bit.

My cat became very alarmed and followed me into the other room, looking at my face, and urgently rubbing himself against me.

I'm very close to my animals and I try very hard not to anthropomorphize them. I think it's actually a big disservice to do this. I try very very hard to think about how they experience the world in their own unique ways with their unique, non-human minds.

But this felt utterly unmistakable. He saw that I was upset and comforted me.

And he did this with no real prior data to work with. At least from me. I had never been visibly upset like that around him before.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

https://youtu.be/Y1GMlXuvdic