Posts Tagged Pets
Creatures (other than cats) with innate sense of direction and purpose
I am continually amazed by creatures great and small who know just where to go and what to do. For example, who would have thought that a dog could apply calculus to find the optimal angle at which to jump into a lake and fetch a tennis ball. See the proof here from a mathematics professor who worked it out after observing his Welsh Corgi “Elvis”.
Naturally ants do very well going about their business, as we’ve all observed when they get into our homes. I was alarmed to hear recently that these industrial insects apply an algorithm for building bridges over any gaps that hinder their travel. See how they do it in this 2/26/18 blog by Quanta Magazine. Things are getting a bit too ‘swarm’ for my comfort when entire institutes such as this one do nothing but model collective behavior. To what ends will this knowledge be applied? I foresee it being used by the military to program hordes of diabolical drones. But, perhaps, it will mainly be for more peaceful pursuits, such as managing traffic on par with ants, who according to this report, never get into a jam.
But just counteract the notion that creatures might be a lot smarter than we think, either individually, like Elvis, or collectively, such as ants, there’s this cat who showed a lack of capability in its calculations of distance.
Studies on the intelligence of cats versus dogs and their owners
Posted by mark in pop, Uncategorized on July 20, 2016
It is a demonstrable fact that dogs know calculus as reported here by The Mathematical Association of America. On the other hand, everyone knows that cats, while obviously intelligent, are too lazy to learn any tricks like all dogs do, at least until they become too old. Therefore, for these two reasons, dogs must be smarter than cats by my reckoning.
But now comes news that felines fathom physics, or at least they naturally grasp the principles of gravity. This conclusion comes from an ingenious experiment on thirty cats done by Japanese researchers. The creatures were found to be inordinately curious about magnetic balls that did not fall out of an overturned metal container. For more details, see this recap by phys.org.
Then to make matters worse for dog lovers like myself, a recent study by a Wisconsin researcher indicates that cat owners are smarter than dog owners. Read it here in Psychology Today and whimper. If it’s any consolation, the study shows that dog people are less neurotic.
“The greatest pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool of yourself with him, and not only will he not scold you, but he will make a fool of himself, too.”
― Samuel Butler
Are dogs right-pawed or left?
Last week I judged a number of entrants in a 7th grade science fair. The one I liked the best investigated a number of dogs to see which paw they favored. This depended on which hand the student held out. When he held out his left hand, all dogs offered up their right paw. But when he held out his right hand, half of the canines shook it with their left paw. I conclude from this that far more dogs are lefties than humans, who favor their right hand by a ratio of 9-to-1. Based on what I read here in the Washington Post and see published on the internet, my guess is that dogs are split 50/50 left versus right. The same may be true for cats, although they might be slightly more likely to right-pawed according a study noted in the Post article.
Just for fun, test your pet by putting a snack just barely within their reach. Which paw do they put out? Make a note. Do it again a number of times. If you see what seems to be a significant bias to left or right, let me know.