So what did the overall comparative review conclude? Our canine friends are not nearly as clever as chimpanzees or dolphins. They rank in a similar way to cats, goats and pigs. And depressingly, in some ways, they aren't as smart as birds like pigeons and magpies.
Pigs are considered by animal experts to be more trainable than dogs or cats and are very smart animals. Pigs just barely edged out dogs for our list of the 10 smartest animals. While dogs have intelligence comparable to a toddler, pigs operate at a much higher IQ level.
CHIMPANZEES. RECKONED to be the most-intelligent animals on the planet, chimps can manipulate the environment and their surroundings to help themselves and their community. They can work out how to use things as tools to get things done faster, and they have outsmarted people many a time.
Dolphins are often cited as the second smartest animals on Earth due to their relatively high brain-to-body size ratio, the capacity to show emotion, and impressive mimicry of the dumb apes who research them.
Based on the number of neurons found, they speculated that dogs have roughly the same intelligence as raccoons and lions, while domestic cats have comparable intelligence to bears. For comparison, humans have by far the highest number of neurons in our cerebral cortexes—as many as 16 billion per person.
Pigs are gentle creatures with surprising intelligence. Studies have found they're smarter than dogs and even 3-year-old children! In the wild, pigs form small groups that typically include a few sows and their piglets.
Scientists have studied both species and their brains to find the answer to this very question. And, scientifically speaking, dogs are likely smarter than cats. The research study looked at the brains of animals in the order Carnivora, a group of mammals containing bears, seals, raccoons as well as cats and dogs.
The average dog's IQ is about 100. Based on the results done to test a dog's IQ, it turned out that dogs, even the average ones, have the IQ same as a 2-years old human.
Zak studied 10 cats and 10 dogs to see how much affection they had for their humans, and it turns out dogs love their owners almost five times more than cats do, according to the Huffington Post.
Dogs will often lick you when you pet them to show affection, and because they want you to continue. They also lick you to absorb your scent and to groom you. Licking can also be an appeasement behaviour and a means of communicating that they are not completely comfortable.
Horses and Dogs are both intelligent animals, but they have different cognitive strengths. Horses excel in areas like navigational intelligence while dogs do better with social intelligence. Neither animal is smarter than the other, that's just what makes them unique!
Bottlenose Dolphins
For years, dolphins have been heralded as the smartest animals on Earth, second only to humans—though some would even contest that ranking. Aside from humans, dolphins have the greatest brain-to-body ratio among animal species, including primates.
They learn faster than dogs or primates and their intelligence is compared to that of a three year old child. Cows have excellent problem solving skills that involve logic. Once they master how to solve a problem, they celebrate jumping, wagging their tails and running happily.
1. Border Collie: A workaholic, this breed is the world's premier sheep herder, prized for its intelligence, extraordinary instinct, and working ability.
Rats are as smart as dogs
According to PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), rats are: “Natural students who excel at learning and understanding concepts. Rats are considerably smaller than dogs, but they are at least as capable of thinking about things and figuring them out as dogs are.
Dogs do not usually try and take on lions, and solo, a dog may not be able to kill a full-grown lion. A pack of dogs is another story. However, there is a breed that is often called a 'lion killer'. The breed is the Rhodesian Ridgeback.
The human brain is about three times as big as the brain of our closest living relative, the chimpanzee. Moreover, a part of the brain called the cerebral cortex – which plays a key role in memory, attention, awareness and thought – contains twice as many cells in humans as the same region in chimpanzees.
To answer that question, yes kangaroos are very smart animals. When researched, they've shown intelligent behavior in many different scenarios. In a more recent study, researchers found that kangaroos displayed high levels of cognitive function through communicating with humans for food.
In fact, on some tests of logic, wolves come out on top. In some experiments conducted in 2009, dogs followed human cues to perform certain tasks—despite evidence that they could see that suggested a different strategy would be smarter. In contrast, wolves made the more logical choice based on their observations.
But goats are just as clever as dogs, and as the new research shows, they form relationships, problem-solve, and communicate with humans in much that same way as dogs.
Border Collie
The valedictorians of the dog world, these herders took the top spot in Stanley Coren's intelligence rankings, meaning most can learn a new command in under five repetitions and follow it at least 95% of the time.
That said, most researchers believe dogs can remember important people and significant events in their lives for years, perhaps until death. So, yes, your dog remembers your scent, your face (especially your eyes), and your voice and associates them with happiness, love or snuggling, or maybe just with food.
Like humans, dogs are especially impressionable as their brains develop, so puppies up to 6 months old are in their key socialization period. Like their human counterparts, dogs develop favorite people over time based on positive experiences and positive associations with that person.