Paul Thomas: Cranky cat lovers have less to laugh about

Dogs are smarter than cats, contrary to popular wisdom, because they are social animals. Photo / Thinkstock

The world is struggling to get its collective head around the implications of new research, which suggests that dogs are smarter than cats because they are social animals.

This overturns the conventional wisdom that cats are more intelligent precisely because they're aloof, solitary creatures, while the fact that dogs have personalities and regard their owners with adoration, rather than indifference, is proof of their intellectual limitations.

After charting the evolutionary history of the brain across different mammals over 60 million years, scientists at the University of Oxford discovered a link between an animal's sociability and the size of its brain.

Gregarious animals such as monkeys, dolphins and dogs now have significantly bigger brains relative to their size than anti-social beasts such as cats and the notoriously obtuse rhinoceros.

This will come as a rude shock to cat lovers, who hold it as a self-evident truth that their pets are brainiacs whereas dogs, with their lolling tongues and pathetic need for attention and baby talk, are tiresome dimwits.

In fact, it seems that dogs' eagerness to please and appetite for affection reflect their intelligence.

Cats, however, are emotionally stunted because they don't know any better - as a result of depriving themselves of stimulating social interaction, they've stayed at the same mental age for 60 million years.

Cat lovers won't take this lying down. Their protest will be shrill and scornful; no blow will be too low.

If dogs are so bloody clever, they will ask, how come they eat their own vomit and other dogs' faeces? (The answer, of course, is that there's no accounting for taste.)

There will be an avalanche of anecdotal evidence purporting to show that cats are so immensely brainy that we'd be their pets rather than vice versa if only they could be bothered looking after us.

This sort of thing: "I'll have you know that I retired at 35 and now live in an absurdly large waterfront property at Noosa, thanks to my Turkish Angora, Simeon, who's made a fortune playing internet poker."

But science says otherwise, so dog lovers can finally stop being defensive and get on the front foot.

Let me start the ball rolling by pointing out that our black labrador, Smudge, once ate the best part of a Collins English Dictionary - the hardback edition - when she had a whole shelf of crime paperbacks at her disposal.

This discovery has profound implications for our own species, since the assumptions underpinning the now discredited theory of feline intelligence are often applied to humans.

There's a tendency to ascribe intelligence or serious mindedness to standoffish individuals, and vice versa. The introvert who deals in cryptic conversation-stoppers and glazes over when others engage in small talk is often assumed to be terribly clever, despite the lack of hard corroborative evidence.

Conversely the extroverts, the happy prattlers, the little rays of sunshine, are dismissed as airheads.

The adage that it's better to remain silent and be thought a fool than speak up and remove all doubt is usually attributed to Abraham Lincoln or Mark Twain. In fact, it's a folk saying which probably originated in the Book of Proverbs.

Interestingly, the original version doesn't concern itself with those who speak up. It's a sardonic comment on the habit of assuming that the person who hovers silently on the edge of the discussion with a world-weary expression knows something we don't: "Even a fool when he holdeth his peace is counted wise; and he that shutteth his lips is esteemed a man of understanding."

Maybe they don't say anything because they've got nothing to say.

Literature has its cat people - surly loners who keep society at arm's length. Here, again, the mere act of withdrawal is invested with significance: writers who lack social graces or should simply get out more are labelled "reclusive", a word often found in close proximity to "genius".

The most notable example is J. D. Salinger, who fled New York for small-town New Hampshire after the success of The Catcher in the Rye (1951). Over the next 60 years he went to great lengths to protect his privacy but published very little new work, so naturally his reputation soared.

It now seems that far from spending his long self isolation thinking deep thoughts or crippled by writer's block, Salinger zoomed from one crank religion - Scientology - or fad - urine therapy - to another like a bumblebee on speed.

Then there's Thomas Pynchon, who dropped out of sight in the 1960s and has been the subject of wild speculation ever since. At least he has a sense of humour about it, providing the voice for the animated version of himself that made a cameo appearance in The Simpsons wearing a paper bag over his head.