Wondering how smart are cats? Do you want to know if your cat is one of the best cats in town? Are you wondering if your cat is the most intelligent feline out there? If you answered yes to any of the questions, then you’ve come to the right place.
In this article, we’ve discussed some of the characteristics that different breeds of cats possess that will help you decide what breed is smarter than all the rest.
HOW TO DETERMINE IF A CAT IS ACTUALLY SMART?
First of all, let us understand how is brain size related to intelligence? Well, remember that cats don’t have brains that are of the same size as dogs. What they do have is smaller “brains”, and a lot of space for those brains to work.
There are a lot of scientists who believe that felines have extremely high levels of feline intelligence.
The reason that cats, since they evolved from rodents have really developed very much in their domestication. Just think about how far back we can trace our relationship with cats.
Cats went through a great deal of evolution before becoming domesticated. So, the level of feline intellect must have been pretty high before they became “man’s best friend”.
So how are they doing with all this mental acuity? One of the most recent studies conducted on cats was done by a team of researchers led by Dr. Ian Grimmel of the University of Oxford.
Dr. Grimmel and his team carried out a study on nearly 500 domestic cats, and they discovered that these animals showed a surprising amount of ability when it came to pattern matching, which is where you use two or more similar items to solve a problem.
This is sort of like chess, and the best way to think of it is as trying to solve a puzzle.
Other areas of animal intelligence involve being able to pick up on others’ behavior. This is known as sociability.
Not all animals can reliably do this, but cats seem to be fairly good at it. Therefore, it seems that cats have higher than average intelligence.
WHAT ARE THE INDICATORS OF INTELLIGENCE IN CATS?
Now that we’ve established that cats have higher than average brain power, let’s talk about how you can figure out if your cat is really smart. One way to do it is to watch them interact with other cats.
If you own a very smart cat and watch it around some other cats, your cat will very likely make a lot of noise and jump around. You might even catch him rolling on his back.
He’s just being silly! There are other signs, though, that might indicate that your cat isn’t as smart as he claims to be.
One of the biggest indicators of intelligence in a cat is its long-term memory, which is sort of like human long-term memory.
If a cat has a long memory, it can remember things from long ago and probably far into the future. A short memory is more likely to forget what it’s been taught.
Cats that have a long-term memory are also smarter than cats that don’t have this type of memory.
IN SUMMARY
The last aspect that we’ll discuss is called Barnette Syndrome. Barnette Syndrome causes a short-term memory loss, and if you show your cat in the litter box, he may scratch and jump around.
This is an indicator of how smart he is. He has to be entertaining himself. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be bothering you so much! Cats that have Barnette Syndrome tend to be less intelligent than their non-Barnette littermates.
