This video, clearly showing the superiority of cats over d*gs, got 6.5 million hits since it was posted nine days ago. I’ve gotten it from several readers, so this might be old news for ailurophiles. There’s certainly something about it that appeals to the public!
“It’s just a cat, dude—come on.” Really? Just a cat?
And, one for Official Website Physicist™ Sean Carroll:
“Advancements,” of course, should be “advances.” Why is this longer and more pretentious word replacing the simpler one?
The video show that dogs know that c*ts can’t be trusted.
The Oatmeal knows this best. 🙂
Cats can be trusted … to do exactly what they want to do.
Good point.
All that that video shows is that d*gs are peace-loving creatures that want to avoid conflict.
My dog behaves like the dogs in the videos sometimes with my parents’ dog because he bites her and she gets in trouble for fighting him. However, she usually beats the crap out of their dog. With small animals, my dog tends to bark in their faces really loud. It’s unpleasant for the bark receiver.
1. Cats= Evil
2. Because: academia/corporate tendencies to invent new words rather than clarify with existimg words.
IMO. 🙂
Agreed. If I never have to see “proactive” and “co-conspirator” again, it’ll still be too soon.
Ramp up, this point in time, the thing is is (WHY two ises??)
Because it’s a cartoon and cartoonist wuz probably making fun of speaker, too….
Good d*gs! They know their place, fearing the wrath of Master Cat.
Dare I say it on this blog. “Poor Pooches!”
I’ll second that. 🙂
“Poor Pooches!”, yeh. “blog”, NOOOO! 😉
This video demonstrates the superior intelligence of dogs (who know that if they try to get around the cat they will suffer a swipe), and the innate pugnaciousness of cats (a bunch of bullies).
Right. In fact, it shows that the dogs are smarter than the people, who keeping urging them to walk by the vicious felines.
D*gs are wusses.
Our 70 pound dog acts like this around the cats frequently, and to the best of my knowledge, they haven’t done anything to him.
Most of the time, they just want to throw themselves on him and purr. A frequent occurrence is the dog laying down, cat throwing himself on the dog, dog growling, getting up and going somewhere else;rinse and repeat.
With all of the kittehs over the years who have possessed me ( just another one of humans’ majority of right handed – dominant individuals ) and in observing other felines who keep humans and rule / reign dominion over d*gs, there is an observation of mine about cats: an overwhelming majority of kitty cats are / appear to me to be … … left – pawed. They lead, they strike, they reach out with, grasp, extend — first … … before using the other one — the left paw.
I am wondering, Dr Coyne: Is there an evolutionary benefit / involvement / component to this observation ?
Blue
Good ol’ sinister! So much more cunning than dexter!
Good point. 😉
I shall not hold my breath until the day when I read something about a Police Cat or a Search and Rescue Cat !
Or a sheep-herding cat. Although we did see a sheep-herding rabbit here, a while back.
You wouldn’t want a police cat. A special forces military team might want an attack cat, but you absolutely don’t want the police to have one.
Pound for pound, cats are second only to humans in their deadliness — and that’s only when the human is armed. Any cat weighing sixty pounds or more would absolutely and quickly shred any police dog on the street. Jaguars kill their prey by puncturing skulls with their fangs, causing death by brain hemorrhaging. Would you really want such an apex predator bringing down fleeing suspects? It’d be more humane to just shoot the “perps” in the back with a machine gun.
Dogs, on the other hand, are well suited to police work precisely because they’re less effective predators than unarmed humans. Sure, a dog can mess you up bad, and you won’t stand a chance if you’re outnumbered. But humans have leverage, reach, strength, and intelligence that dogs don’t, and anybody fit who has the intent to do grievous harm to a dog (though I’m hard pressed to imagine real-world situations where one would) will surely succeed. The thing is, in police situations, people are either disproportionately afraid of the dog or they’re too concerned with escaping the police to be able to focus attention on hurting the dog. Either way, that’s all the dog needs to bring the suspect to a stop for long enough for the humans to catch up and take over, without risking anything worse than minor lacerations and bruises to the suspect.
As for S&R…cats, like humans, are visual predators while dogs (and wolves) track by scent. The cat has no tools significantly different from those humans have to find those who can’t be seen. Dog vision isn’t anything to get excited about, but they’ve got good noses.
Cheers,
b&
WEll, hey, if you’re gonna bring big cats into this–how about a Police Wolf, eh? EH?
😉 (Yeah, I know still not as deadly as a cat, at least when alone.)
And what is a German Shepherd if not a particoloured wolf with a bit better house training? And a collar.
Police elephant! If you could have a nice grazing area that was HUGE for your elephant and you lived in a warm climate, you could armour up your elephant like Hannibal & no one would mess with you. I’d call him, “Stampy”. 🙂
Now there’s a scary thought. Police horses are impressive (and ideal) crowd control animals…I can’t imagine what kind of overkill would ensue from a squadron of police elephants. Sounds like something perfectly suited to a dystopian SF movie crowd scene….
b&
Yeah, the more I think of it, the more I want a battle elephant. They would be so fierce trumpeting as they stamped! I think Hannibal outfitted them with swords on their tusks or something like that.
The police horses are really nice too. They are very large and if they aren’t busy, the police will usually let you pat the horse.
Those tusks are already swords…talk about gilding the lily!
I’m very much in favor of police patrolling on horseback and by bicycle, as well as on foot. As far as I’m concerned, only the traffic cops and emergency responders should be in cars.
b&
I don’t know, I’d be slightly more afraid of the first police force to successfully train a Ratel.
Cats are relatively fragile. But still.
Housecats are fragile relative to adult humans…but an adult housecat weighs as much as a newborn human.
A cat your own weight is going to be at least a mountain lion if not a panther or a cougar, and those cats are not fragile. Nor is an housecat fragile in comparison with other ten-pound animals — quite the contrary.
b&
ALLEGED perps. A small but important point, often forgotten by police, journalists and rampaging mobs.
Oh, absolutely. But, as you point out, many police don’t give a damn, and many of the rest let adrenaline get the better of them.
b&
I’d say that most people don’t think very well, but that would be unnecessarily verbose. Most people don’t think, full stop.
Sad, but — hey, did you hear about what Geneva Marriott twittered while she was being arrested for prostitution during her last show on live TV? Like, OMG!
b&
Who?
This person was engaging in live prostitution on a TV show? Are you sure that you hadn’t accidentally tuned into the Pron Channel?
Speak English, boy! (to quote a TV advert from decades ago)
Madrid Radisson? Frankfurt Hyatt? Barcelona Motel Six? I know it was some city name followed by the name of some hotel chain. I don’t know if it was her real name (where she was born? conceived?) or a stage name (where she first got arrested for servicing customers?).
‘Twasn’t me; no TV, haven’t had one of those infernal contraptions for years. Somebody else was explaining why he didn’t care about what we were doing to those spics we’re torturing somewhere in Bumfuckistan.
Actually, that was a direct quote…not sure what it’s actually supposed to mean….
b&
I think that between disinterest, absence of a shared language, and more disinterest, there’s a breakdown of communication here.
So, what you’re trying to express is that, what we’ve got here is failure to communicate?
b&
At least she didn’t tweet it.
That probably required more thumb-brain coordination than Ms Hamburg Reeperbahn Rent-by-the-hour-Knocking-Shop can muster. Sort of like dinosaurs (*) with the sacral brain, only she’s lacking the upstairs ganglion.
To clear up a point – police dogs and protection dogs are not supposed to tear people up – that would be a vicious dog.
Indeed, the whole Schutzhund thing has gotten out of hand in some places and that’s why I didn’t Schutz train my dog even though I think she has the drive for it for tracking and for protection. Also, I wanted to annoy all the macho men with their German shepherds & rottweilers when my 5’2″ self and my giant yellow dog showed up. 🙂 However, I heard stories about rotties with shock collars on to force them to stand down because they got too into the attack. I didn’t want me or my dog around that.
However, the Police do train their dogs properly – my dad once had our black lab out on a walk and she found a policeman hiding (their dog was supposed to do it). Another time, a different dog stole the police dog’s dummy (an item used to retrieve) from the water. I have a long history of menace dogs 🙂
Yes, agreed — which, again, is why you want the police to have dogs and not cats.
And I’d get a kick out of seeing you put your dog through the paces…but I can completely see why you wouldn’t want to put said dog through that kind of emotional stress. And just for the pleasure of seeing the looks on the tough dogs’s owners’s faces? Not worth it.
b&
Yeah, but have ever tried to herd cats?
Good Gauche!
I think the thinking is that b/c it is more efficient (and adaptive) to concentrate language and communication areas in one brain hemisphere, the brain is also asymmetric in other ways like having dominance in using one limb (handedness). There are lots of reports that handedness is pretty widespread in the animal kingdom, so this may be a pretty general thing.
Oooo, very cool. Indeed.
Thank you.
Blue
Ha! The cats comes out as the dogged ones.
Because ailurophiles sounds more sciency than “catlovers”? =D
Actually I can think of two reasons:
– For many years I’ve never seen anyone use “advances” for advancements re technology and science. Nice suggestion though, and trends are made to be broken.
– For once, the plural meanings of “advances” may perhaps trip the joke up – or possibly deepen it. E.g. you can “advance” up to and onto a ball of string in many ways. (Ask a cat!)
No True Sesquipedalian™ would deploy the locution catlover if there were a lengthier alternative.
That’s half a quinquepedalian?
(Googling it should bring you to a Piers Anthony short story. It’s actually rather good.)
Not half, since sesqui means 1.5 and quinque means 5, but within an order of magnitude at least.
Sorry ; brain fade.
Lessee … oxides of three-valent metals are sesquioxides (e.g. Fe2O3). so I should have been thinking of phosphorus pentoxide P2O5 … for which, annoyingly, the chemists don’t take account of the divalence of oxygen in it’s name.
Oh [rude words], now they’re telling me that it’s really P4O10. So that’s not going to lead me to a Latin root.
And when I find a list of Latin fractions, it only includes fractions less than unity.
Bah!
Surely, the cat will be discussing advances in quantum felid theory…
/@
Sent from my iPhone. Please excuse all creative spellings.
>
I cat believe you said that!
I can believe he typed it. What I can’t believe is that he managed to get it past the iPhone’s autocorrect….
b&
😀
Poor doggies. They be terrified of the left hook and jab, on the flanks.
This is how my one of my dogs (Roma) used to act. She would get backed into corners by Sushi being a bully. Now she’s got some courage and is usually the one chasing the cats around.
Cats are pointy, it gives them an unfair advantage.
Hah, reminds me of the family cat that we had when I was very young. The next-door neighbour’s d*g was so terrified of the cat that it would only walk past our gate on the other side of the road.
Cranky ex-farm cats > cheerful mongrel d*gs!
““Advancements,” of course, should be “advances.” Why is this longer and more pretentious word replacing the simpler one?”
Another example:
“utilisation” instead of “use”.
Our dog is different. Whenever he sees one of our cats he runs directly and aggressively towards them at full speed. The cats have no choice but to leap up onto something out of his reach. I have to admit, though, that once out of reach, they look down on him with amusement.
I had a dog that thought it was playing to run full tilt at other animals, esp cats and brush over them. He made a cat friend doing this. The cat would rub all over him. Then one day he did the same thing to a skunk and the poor skunk tumbled on his back with his little feet in the air. My dog was too fast to get sprayed though.
Since this is still being kicked around, I HAD to doublecheck.
Webster defines ‘advancement’ as ‘the process of promoting a cause or plan’.
eg. “their lives were devoted to the advancement of science”
….. whereas ‘Advance’ is defined as
– forward movement
– progress in the development or improvement of something
– a rise in price, value, or amount
There seems to be a subtle difference in meaning here. Keyword ‘process’.
Not being terrible devoted to the delicate art of Grammar Nazism, I haven’t bothered to check this in the OED (so much more correct than those colonial productions), but here in the Old Country we’ve had the British Association for the Advancement of Science for nearly two centuries, until they changed names a couple of years ago.
This just goes to show that d*gs are just big pussies, so to speak!