the canniness of cats

Hooker, with lizard

Just came across a very cool (though poorly edited) article on a British cat site which challenges received notions of feline intelligence:

In another experiment cats were trained to press a bar a number of times to open a food tray; having gained access, they could eat as much as they wanted at that sitting. At first it took 40 presses to gain access to the food. As the number of bar presses required for the food tray to open was increased (up to 2560), the cats responded by eating fewer meals each day, but eating more at each sitting. . . Researchers then varied the number of bar presses from one meal to the next, the cats calculated the average "price per meal". They amount they ate at a given meal was related to the average number of times they had pressed the bar in the course of a whole day or over a period of several days, not to the number of times they had pressed it for that particular meal.

As the author chronicles, cats fair poorly at intelligence tests influenced by behaviourist psychology. Rats and dogs will race through a maze faster and faster each time (as will many humans); cats are content to explore its blind alleys, or just sit and wash themselves. But experiments which consider feline intelligence in the context of their motivations paint a much different picture.

--for Muddy Hooker Griffin-Merchant
b. July 4, 2003
d. April 26, 2012

Hooker, Oklahoma, May, 2004. photo by Dion Griffin