CATS ARE AS CLEVER AS DOGS—THEY JUST CHOOSE NOT TO SHOW IT

Cats might not sit on command or fetch a thrown stick but it’s not because they don’t understand, it’s because they just don’t want to. This is according to a study by Japanese researchers that found cats perform as well as dogs in certain intelligence tests.

Scientists at Kyoto University conducted tests on 49 domestic cats in an attempt to better understand how their brains work. Their findings suggested that felines have an episodic memory, meaning they recall past events in a similar way to humans.

“We examined whether cats could retrieve and utilize incidentally-encoded information from a single past event in a simple food-exploration task previously used for dogs,” the paper’s abstract states. “The results suggest that cats retrieved and utilized ‘what’ and ‘where’ information from an incidentally-encoded memory from a single experience.”