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Carl isn’t alone. After years when scientists largely ignored social intelligence in cats, labs studying feline social cognition have popped up around the globe, and a small but growing number of studies is showing that cats match dogs in many tests of social smarts. The work could transform the widespread image of cats as aloof or untamed. It also may eventually offer insight into how domestication transformed wild animals into our best friends, and even hint at how the human mind itself changed over the course of evolution.That is, if the cats themselves deign to participate.Cats left behindCarl’s canine predecessor was a black Labrador retriever named Oreo. In the spring of 1996, Brian Hare, then an undergrad at Emory University in Atlanta, was studying how toddlers pass the pointing test. “I turned to my adviser,” says Hare, now an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, “and said, ‘I think my dog can do that.’”In 1998, Hare and Ádám Miklósi, a cognitive ethologist at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, independently published studies showing dogs could understand human pointing. Until then, social cognition researchers had paid little attention to dogs, thinking their minds had been “corrupted” by thousands of years of domestication.

Cat Workout Because Murder is Wrong Shirt

Hare’s and Miklósi’s finding sparked a canine cognition revolution, helping confirm that domesticated animals such as dogs were worthy of study. More than a dozen labs around the world have since churned out hundreds of papers on the canine mind. Researchers have learned that dogs can recognize emotion in people’s faces, understand components of human speech, and may even have a sense of fairness and ethics. Those abilities probably helped turn canines into loyal, trusted companions and enabled them to perform socially complex tasks, as varied as guiding the blind and serving with military units.As dogs nuzzled their way up the cognitive tree, however, cats were left clawing at the roots. By 2004, researchers had published more than two dozen papers on canine social cognition—and none on felines. And yet, aside from dogs, no other animal is as prevalent or cherished in the human home. “The scientific output doesn’t match the popularity of cats,” Miklósi says. “We know more about how wolves think.”