Pet intelligence wank
The Guardian: Cats outsmarted in psychologist's test.

You can imagine how well this goes with the readers. Besides the predictable flood of pet owner butthurt and anecdotes of clever / stupid cats / dogs / mice / owls, there are plenty of genuinely funny comments as well as a side wank on the validity of test methods and statistics, obligatory calls to talk about world hunger instead or discuss the intelligence of various nationalities, and, naturally, Hitler and his pets make a bonus appearance. I think one could play classical wank bingo in here, but some of the stories make it all worthwhile.

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telegramsam
2009-06-22 09:21 pm UTC (link)

Nyeh. I'd be curious to see the actual data. How many cats did they use in this study? Where did they get them from? It may not even be a representative sample. There are an astounding number of really worthless "scientific" studies conducted and even published, especially in the field of psychology, that do not produce reliable or revelant results. Medical science is another field that churns out a lot of highly suspect material.

In any case, I agree - I'd wager it says a lot more about cats' spatial cognition skills than their ability to understand the concept of cause-and-effect. It even says in the single-string test the fared well, which suggests they figured out that pulling a string got them a treat. If they pulled at the empty strings in the two-string tests that just suggests they can't visually suss out which string connects on the other side of the barrier, which is a spatial issue, not a cause-and-effect issue.

tl;dr - it's a dumb study and not worth getting one's pants in a bunch over. I love cats, but this kind of thing is a waste of time.

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