I caught a young mother raccoon in a live trap a few years ago. The process of releasing her was interesting. She maintained eye contact with me the entire time i was handling the cage. She used her front paws to stay upright and positioned to maintain said eye contact with incredible hand-like dexterity. It was clear she was trying to predict how i was going to move the cage and was doing a good job.

In my limited experience oldet raccoons tend to be much more aggressive, making lots of noise and showing their teeth.

Raccoons and bears have pretty impressive puzzle solving skills, as anyone who has tried to keep them out of a garbage can will note. Although bear strength is a bit of a crutch, there's also the whole escalating food puzzle game between them and hikers.

Cats, I think people just mistake their uncooperative nature for some sort of mysterious wise aloofness.

It's not surprising that a crepuscular ambush predator is less intelligent than pack predators, it would be surprising if it were the other way around.

It's fascinating the replies I get claiming I must be a dog person. It's really... telling... when someone conflates intelligence and moral worth like that. I like cats. I'm not going to pretend they're as smart as dogs just because I like them.

Hah, I had a whole long comment about how I was most impressed by pack hunters, but I somehow backed myself into a bunch of comments around how they must be smart enough to model each other's behavior, which in some ways seems similar to metacognition... until I realized I was in totally over my head and about to make a bunch of arguments about intelligence and animal behavior that I had no chance of backing up.

So, raccoons in the garbage.

Uhuh. They have more neurons. This does say exactly nothing about "smart".

There's also the small matter that while dogs have more neurons than cats in general, they have significantly less neurons allocated to their cortex. The study you likely refer to talks about total brain matter.

It is, in short, a dog lovers argument.

I don't really have a dog in this fight, no pun intended, but you would be wrong. The only modern study that looked at neurons of carnivorous animals including cats/dogs found that dogs have nearly twice the number of neurons in the cerebral cortex, and the ratio of cortical neurons to overall neurons is also higher (~20% vs ~23%).

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnana.2017.0011...

I know very little about brains in general but I would guess that the number of synapses (connections between nuerons) has more to do with intelligence than the number of neurons themselves. Could be that this scales exponentially. I think it's much easier to count neurons tho, seems like we have good numbers for lots of species.

Worth considering that African elephants have 3x the nuerons we do, Killer Whales twice as many only counting the cerebellum.

Cool list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n...

It's interesting right! But it turns out elephants have about a third of the cortical neurons as humans, presumably they need more brain capacity to handle being enormous.

Orca, on the other hand, have more cortical neurons than we do, and much larger brains in general. Part of that is clearly that they have an incredible sense we don't, the ability to make three-dimensional maps out of sound, but orca are also remarkably complex beings and I don't have too much trouble believing that they're about as smart as us, just in a very different way that doesn't involve tools.

Ah. Turns out my numbers are based on packing density, while the study you cite is based on counting neurons. (I'm assuming here counting is the better choice :)

The main point remains either way - equating numbers of neurons with "smart" is a really odd definition of "smart". (I mean, most definitions of "smart" in animal studies are bonkers - the most common one is "is obedient")