>As a child I thought cats and dogs might be differently sexed animals of the same species.
Sounds irrelevant to the parent's point. Which isn't that you knew what a cat was (with regards to taxonomy or whatever), but that you could tell one from a dog or a fire hydrant.
Ah you make a good point regarding my response.
Actually, recalling my argument in more detail I take back my agreement. The parent's point is that a child will be about to recognize big cats as cats, but dogs as not cats. My point was that as a child, this was not true. In addition, NNs can reliably be trained to recognize housecats vs. not-housecat in 1000 images.
I don't understand what you mean with this, as that was certainly not me as a child. As a child I thought cats and dogs might be differently sexed animals of the same species. I also thought that the big cats could be related to each other, though how any of them was related to the housecat was beyond me, given the size difference.