Sorry, Garfield: Science says dogs are smarter than cats

Image: Cute Dog
A cat and a dog at a Blessing of the Animals ceremony at Washington National Cathedral in October 2006.Win McNamee / Getty Images file

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By Alex Johnson



A pug dog at the annual Crufts dog show in Birmingham, England, in March 2011.Oli Scarff / Getty Images





The research explains why, but first, here's another picture of an adorable dog to help it go down easier:

A dog seen dressed as Moana during the Haute Dog Howl'oween Parade on in Long Beach, California, on Oct. 29.Chelsea Guglielmino / Getty Images file

The research accounted for physical brain size, assessing the number of cortical neurons against the size of the brain they can cram into. And it turns out that dogs have more sheer brainpower even than carnivorans with much larger actual brains — including African lions and brown bears.

Why? The paper puts it this way: "Large carnivorans appear to be particularly vulnerable to metabolic constraints that impose a trade-off between body size and number of cortical neurons."

In other words: Once a species grows beyond a certain size, the energy needed to hunt meat roughly equals the energy the species is able to consume. And because the brain uses more energy than any other organ, there's not enough leftover energy for it to continue developing, evolutionarily speaking.

(The sweet spot appears to have been found by raccoons, which have about the same number of cortical neurons as a dog, but in a brain only the size of a cat's, according to the research.)




