DOGS WERE DOMESTICATED 20,000 YEARS BEFORE CATS
When I was growing up in Portugal, I had a wonderful dog called Farrusco. Farrusco was remarkably intelligent. He responded to his name, understood a few words and protected me when people tried to hurt me. Then, 25 years later, I adopted this: a cat called Nereus, who looks completely stupid in comparison. He doesn't respond to his name, he seems incapable of understanding anything, and I have a feeling that if someone were to attack me, he would continue to eat his kibble as if nothing had happened. Faced with all this, I ended up thinking that dogs were much more intelligent than cats. But then, is it true? Well, let's find out.
Well, one thing's for sure: dogs are very intelligent. For example, when you point at something, they understand that it's the thing you're looking at, not the finger - something even chimpanzees can't do. What's more, they can recognize dozens, even hundreds of words, like this Border Collie named Chaser, who can recognize a thousand different toys. But recently, we've realized that cats are also capable of many things. Like dogs, they understand the pointing finger test, and like dogs, they can recognize their names if they want to, which is not the case with Néréus. Admittedly, no one has yet succeeded in training a cat to recognize 1,000 different words, but it's highly likely that, on the whole, they're no less intelligent than dogs.
What gives us this impression is that cats are far less obsessed than dogs with human beings. This is no doubt due to the fact that dogs were domesticated by man 30,000 years ago - 20,000 years before cats - and, unlike cats, were selected to help us. Cats, on the other hand, domesticated themselves. So, sure, they're intelligent, but they don't have the passion to be nice to us.