Where Do Cats Rank in Animal Intelligence? Why the Ranking Cannot Be Made
Key takeaways
- There is no official ranking of animal intelligence, because both the feasible tasks and the ecology differ by species.
- Dogs are estimated to have roughly twice the cortical neurons of cats, but that is not a ranking of intelligence.
- In tasks where a person points to hidden food, no significant difference between dogs and cats has been reported.
- The standard view treats animal cognition as a question of what a species is adapted to, not how smart it is.
Search for animal intelligence rankings and you will find plenty of lists. Chimpanzees, dolphins, elephants, crows, and dogs near the top; cats sometimes present, sometimes absent. What these lists share is the absence of a cited source.
No unified ranking exists
The field that studies animal cognition has no cross-species composite intelligence score. The reason is simple: different species can be given different tasks. You cannot hand a dolphin a pointing task, and a tool-manufacture task makes no ecological sense for a cat.
Force a common task and you advantage whichever species is ecologically closest to it. A ranking then reflects the properties of the chosen task rather than the ability being claimed.
Numbers that can be compared: brains and neurons
Two indicators travel across species reasonably well: the encephalization quotient (brain mass relative to body mass) and cortical neuron count. Jardim-Messeder and colleagues (2017) compared carnivorans and estimated about 530 million cortical neurons in dogs and about 250 million in cats.
What makes the study interesting is that it also reports the high neuron density of raccoons and the low neuron count of brown bears. A larger brain does not guarantee more neurons, and more neurons do not straightforwardly mean greater intelligence. These numbers are material for comparison, not the ranking itself.
Task performance often shows small differences
When dogs and cats are compared on the same task, differences frequently fail to appear. Miklósi and colleagues (2005) compared the two species on finding food in a container a person pointed to, and reported no significant difference in performance.
The same study observed that when the task became unsolvable, cats looked up at people for help less often than dogs. That is a difference in strategy, not ability (which is smarter, cats or dogs?).
Why cats tend to be placed low
The review by Vitale Shreve and Udell (2015) points out how much less research exists on cat cognition than on dogs. Less research means fewer demonstrable results. On top of that, cats have low motivation to participate in laboratory settings and drop out often.
A cat's position in any ranking, then, likely reflects the methodological difficulty of measuring cats more than it reflects what cats can do.
Ask what a species is adapted to
Modern comparative cognition asks how each species' cognition fits its ecology rather than arranging species in a line. Cats are solitary ambush hunters, skilled at localizing sound, predicting movement, and switching between stillness and explosive action. Dogs, which cooperate in groups, need a differently shaped set of abilities.
The same lens applies to human intelligence. Behind a single composite IQ sit several distinct abilities (types of cognitive ability).
See your own strengths by domain
The free NekoIQ IQ test measures spatial reasoning, pattern recognition, logical inference, and classification in 20 questions and about 10 minutes, reporting a profile by domain rather than a rank alone. Results are estimates for self-understanding and are not a substitute for an official intelligence test.
Frequently asked questions
- Where do cats rank in animal intelligence?
No scientifically established ranking exists, so no rank can be given. Different species can be tested on different tasks, which makes a shared scale impossible to build.
- Are animals with more neurons smarter?
Not straightforwardly. Neuron count indicates the processing resources available, but the abilities that emerge depend on how the brain is organized and what the species is adapted to.
- Are some animals smarter than cats?
On specific tasks, corvids and chimpanzees excel at tool use and dolphins and elephants at mirror self-recognition. These are differences in task-specific strengths, not an overall ordering.
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Editorial note & disclaimer
This article was written and edited by the NekoIQ Editorial Team using peer-reviewed research in animal cognition, behavior, and veterinary science. We distinguish the study's measured result from interpretation and report limitations such as sample size, task fit, and motivation where relevant.
The tests on this site provide estimates for entertainment and self-understanding purposes only. They are not medical or clinical assessments, nor official psychological (intelligence) tests.