https://www.youtube.com/shorts/FhwD1n9yrcI

I honestly believe I have encountered cats who have looked at me with disappointment when they perceived that I did not respect their intelligence.

This video reminds me of a few others. Imagine that we once thought of animals as dumb or lacking empathy:

1. For plain smarts, the cat touching its ear when it sees its reflection. If your young child had done that, you'd be bragging about it at work the next day.
2. There is a story of an old man, living alone, who fell and was unable to get up. He was stuck for a long time and finally in desperation, he asked his cat to bring him the cell phone. The cat was the only one who could help him and the cat did. (Not a video, but the producer Billy Rose had fallen as child and the family cat ran to the nearby store (this was 120 plus years ago and I guess people left infants alone in those days) to fetch his mother.
3. The cat seeing a goldfish in a pond stuck on a projecting rock -- the cat gently nudged the fish back into the water. (I saw a dog desperately trying to save fish on a dock by splashing water on them.)
4. Perhaps the most amazing cat intelligence video I have ever seen is the one where her kitten has messed up a bed. The mom cat spanks her kitten and remakes the bed. Incredible.
5. There is a cat named Billi who uses word buttons to communicate. You can argue whether cats and dogs are really using human language, but I saw the cat press "Billi Pet Mom" and sure enough Billi lifted her paw and petted her owner. It is not only showing that the cat could create a simple sentence but beyond that, it demonstrates that the cat thinks about things like occasionally trying to repay her owner.
6. The cat who discovered light diffraction and moved its paws back and forth behind a glass of water, observing the distortion.

The story I have repeated of Whitey a cat that lived in the 1960s who supposedly could use English in a very sophisticated manner. Although there is no recording or video of this, I do not consider it impossible. The smartest of cats might be as intelligent as, say, a 7 year old human as they assert crows are. We really do not understand how intelligence works, how animals with brains only a small percentage of the size of human brains nonetheless give them intelligence roughly within human range.

As I have suggested many times before, do not be surprised if artificial intelligence allows us to finally communicate with whales who have 8 kilo brains. I would kind of be surprised if we do NOT discover they are our superiors. And it won't even be close. Not merely a different kind of intelligence but a different order of intelligence, as much above us as we are above perhaps the other primates. (Of course, we may not be as above primates as we had thought...)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBhsBzN_BW4

Irrespective of the philosophical aspects, the beginning is remarkable.

https://abc7news.com/subway-rat-commuting-rodent-new-york-city/5336713/

The interesting question is whether they go into the subways seeking food or they actually use the train to get from one location to another and even return.

My understanding is that both dogs and cats have been known to use public transportation regularly enough to conclude that they really use it as transport and I have further heard it argued that rats are about as intelligent as either dogs or cats (perhaps better at some things than dogs and cats are) so it is not impossible that a rat lives in one location but goes elsewhere for food (almost like commuting for work, isn't it?).

I do not at all accept that the strange noises cats somehow make mean anything at all, or even that the cat is repeating something it heard.

On the other hand, it certainly shows that cats have the vocal apparatus to sound much more like a human than dogs are able to.

Why do cats even have this vocal apparatus?

I am convinced that both dogs and cats occasionally do employ words in the language of their owners. I am sure everyone has seen the husky plainly saying "no" repeatedly in a context that makes sense.

I have also seen the cat upset at going in the car to the vet and pretty clearly saying, resignedly, "We're going..." -- I think the cat meant what she was saying.

I read a story that is hard to believe but I do not completely discount it: Almost 60 years ago there was a cat named Whitey who spoke English, reporting to his owner that a visitor had struck him with a newspaper, etc. Eventually the cat stopped speaking, IIRC after an illness but given that cats are supposed to be as intelligent as a 3 year old human (that sounds high to me) and of course 3 year old humans can speak, it is not so surprising that some cats can speak. And maybe really exceptional cats are as intelligent as 4 or 5 year old humans and one would expect them indeed to be able to speak meaningfully just as a parrot apparently does.

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My beloved cat had a botched spading when she was a kitten and has a ovarian fragment left in her body. The new vet said going back to remove it was an unnecessary risk and my cat now goes into heat for 6-7 days every few months.

My apartment is ridiculously small and my cat has explored every aspect of it (trust me). When she goes into heat; she makes yowling mating calls constantly in her desire for a male cat.

I know she is an animal and the chemicals in her brain are making her do it; but does she really think a male cat will show up? As far as she knows; this apartment is the entire universe and nothing exists beyond it. We don’t let her leave the apartment as we live in the city and would never want to lose her.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/0H5olmEKnO0

I think we really have had no idea what animals are capable of and the reason we are only recently finding this out is this:

100 years ago basically animals were food, vermin or working animals. It is only relatively recently that wild animals have figured out we are -- usually -- not dangerous to them and will often help. It is not just mammals and birds. Even turtles have sought human help.

This fox not only sought human help but drew conclusions: If we helped her kit, we must be friends. It behaves just like a dog or cat. Outside chance I suppose that the mother had been a pet, but I have never met anyone who had a fox as one -- fennec foxes are even unusual and that sure was not one.

I think I read that female horses in human-organized races actually will defer to males by letting them win.

This is somewhat plausible to me -- in nature, although males will also fight with each other, perhaps they also assert dominance by showing they are the fastest.

I have met more than one person in the horse racing business. One was a horse vet and he was quite sure that horses don't have the brains to understand that they are in a race but a trainer seemed to believe that horses do in fact get the situation and will try to win even without the jockey's urging.

If not all racehorses understand, perhaps the most successful ones do. I recall that champions are supposed to be more intelligent than other horses -- one actually picked up a rake in its stable and imitated the human who cleaned out its stall and another was observed tossing a stick in the air and catching it in its mouth.

In general, whenever someone asserts that animals are mindless, I am skeptical -- as I have mentioned before, all recent studies I have read have tended to show animals are more intelligent than previously believed. And since horses have pretty much one major "skill", which is running, why shouldn't they grasp the concept of racing?

seems like they might.

we have underestimated the minds of animals, I think.

Not sure when I read this but I think before internet, the book is from 30 years ago:

One story that I think I read in the book The Parrot’s Lament (a great book about animal intelligence) is a male orca scanned its pregnant mate and then acted angry/sad and it turned out that the orca baby was later stillborn. So we see an animal understanding the concept of pregnancy and incidentally is able to perform a test/diagnostic that was only developed by humans in the past half century or so. (Sonogram.)

It may have been about same male orca in same or different book where the orca understood a human needed a platform to stand on when they were moving the female into or from the tank and so he stayed still and allowed the man to stand on him -- weighing 5 tons, holding a 200 lb human steady is not a problem.

It is only within the past 20 years or so that it was discovered that Spirograph-like geometric patterns in the sand were created by male puffers for mating purposes -- trying to attract a female who will lay eggs in structure if she likes it.

Similar to the bower bird in this. I have read that bowers are intelligent in other ways -- their nest-building behavior could hardly be accounted for if they were not intelligent for such birds seem to get inspired by looking at bowers built by other males and will steal components or entire nests (a backhanded compliment especially if they kill you for it which happens).

I have read that puffer owners consider their fish unusually intelligent and I saw a remarkable video in which a pair of puffers were seen with one tangled in a net fragment.

While a diver worked to free its friend/mate/sibling/offspring, the puffer waited nearby (close enough for the diver to touch it) calmly and when the tangled fish had been freed, both puffers swam off together. Tell me that does not suggest high intelligence!

I have seen a video (not sure how many times this behavior has been observed or recorded) that shows an adult female croc helping hatchling turtles to the ocean.

It has been suggested that the croc is confusing baby turtles with its own young.

I would argue that certainly a croc can tell the difference between baby turtles and baby crocs.

I suggest that this behavior is either simply altruism, just as a human would try to help small creatures or perhaps more likely is that the extremely long-lived croc understands that the turtles grow up and lay more eggs -- this is then a sort of long-term farming activity, if indeed crocs sometimes eat turtles and/or their eggs.

Crocs may be the most-intelligent reptiles and they can live a century or more so they are likely to have good memories which serve them for example in their long-distance navigation to obtain foods (animals) that are available in different locations and times.

I was reading about how archer fish shoot water to hunt insects and that this is learned behavior. So that means at one point a fish developed an Idea using logic, other fish observed how that benefited them, started replicating it, and learned to account for light refraction. To me this seems like a pretty overlooked sign of intelligence

I would guess that very few animals would be even reasonable candidates to try, but with dolphin, orca or perhaps beluga (beluga might be very good candidates), simply see if the animal given a sequence of primes can provide the next one.

I seriously doubt that even a very intelligent animal would immediately be able to succeed at this -- numbers are important to humans due to I guess commerce and the calendar -- perhaps whales who migrate care about the calendar also, but probably not to the extent humans do. Commerce among whales non-existent but monkeys and apes seem to understand money pretty well.

It is an easy experiment to try.

The whales with the largest brains are I guess very hard to experiment with. But fundamental to their existence is image processing -- very mathematical and perhaps the sperm whale has been hoping a human will present it with a sequence of prime numbers. Maybe they don't think we understand them.