Argos the dog can look where I point if I spot the toy he's looking for before he does. If I spot the toy in the kitchen, I can go to the living room and tell him where it is and he'll retrieve it. He invents games and teaches his humans how to play them. He knows each of us by name. He's so good at understanding our speech that we frequently have to spell words in front of him if we don't want him to know what we're talking about, but he's beginning to learn how to spell.
He can't operate a door. If a door he needs to traverse is opened a width he can't fit his face through he will stand patiently by until one of us pushes it open for him. It doesn't matter how badly he wants to be on the other side of it. He will not operate the door himself. It's almost pathetic. Is he stupid? He is demonstrably not. Our theory is that when he was a puppy, some parts of the house were off limits to him but not to our cats who preceded him in the family, so we propped the doors open a cat's width with weights on either side of them and he learned (unintentionally on our part) that the door was not a technology that he was permitted to use even as more doors became open to him. He's not stupid; he's polite.
My cats on the other hand, generally unconfused by the workings of hinges on a cracked door, have a predilection for an open closet. If one is unattended for even a minute, there is a good chance a cat will be inside of it when the door is closed and latched. Whenever this happens, it goes generally unnoticed until the furthest reaches of sleep are disturbed suddenly by the awareness, vague at first, then increasingly certain of meowed calls of distress that force you to rise in search of the source. The regret that I feel on rescuing a cat from a situation I may well have made by carelessly closing a closet door without first getting a visual on both cats can be repeated as soon as the following night, but it will be revisited over and over again, no matter how heartwrenching the cries the last time the same cat was trapped. How could the universe have failed to give the cat a mechanism to avoid what was surely traumatic by, for instance, teaching it to steer clear of any open closet door that it comes across in the future.
The answer is not obvious but eventually it comes to me. The cat is not traumatized or trapped. The incident happens on purpose. The closet is entered because it beckons. The closing of the door is part of the pleasure. There's no need to panic-- scream loud enough and a human will come.
I tend to believe that the answer to the problem of how humans seem to have gotten the greater part of the available supply of intelligence on the planet is that humans have gotten the human brand of intelligence. Bees have the bee intelligence. Haddock have all the haddock intelligence. To say that human intelligence is superior to ostrich intelligence is to miss the point. A salamander with requisite salamander intelligence is as gifted salamanderily as an intelligent human is humanly. It takes bat intelligence that I do not have to locate moths by sonar. It takes human intelligence to conceive, invent, build and operate a door, but dog intelligence is equipped to experience a door doggily just as cat intelligence is all a cat needs to know how to summon a human to open the damn door for it.
The popularity of dogs has a lot to do with the communing that we do with them. Dogs engage and experience us with their intelligence and we return the effort with our own. Cats don't have to impress us with their ability to display human intelligence which takes a certain kind of empathy to appreciate. They will get attention on their schedule. They have other priorities.
