Researchers at Vanderbilt University have determined that dogs are smarter than cats. Turns out dogs have bigger brains, and more importantly, dogs have roughly 530 million neurons in that brain, while cats have about 250 million. The experts say that neurons in an animal’s cerebral cortex are a hallmark of intelligence. I knew this. We all knew this. The people at Vanderbilt are seemingly working on getting degrees in obvious.

Cats aren’t smart, in fact, they don’t really think at all, they’re all emotion and attitude. How much evidence do you need? It all starts with the sound they make, meow. The sound starts with ME, the self-centered, dramatic all about me, and ends in OW, as is in, oh god, I might be hurt. The very sound illustrates the narcissistic tendencies of the undeveloped brain.

If you throw a ball to a cat, she’ll hit it away with her paw figuring you were trying to hit her – dumb. A dog will go get the ball, bring it back and try to get a treat out of it – smart. When you walk into a room, a dog will greet you and wag its tail, pretending that they care about the person who pays the bills and gives it food – smart. When a cat walks into a room the best it can do is rub against your leg as if it was trying to dislodge something disgusting from its fur, leaving cat hair and who knows what else on your tailored slacks – dumb.

Cats are friends with witches. This shows the cat’s inability to think things through, lacking the basic smarts to pick good friends and make good choices. Witches only hang around with cats because they want to grind them up and use them in magic potions, but every year around Halloween, without fail, you see witches and cats together. Not very smart. Dogs hang out with policemen and soldiers and spend their downtime doing charity work like helping blind people. They just have the good sense and kind hearts that cats lack.

Dogs learn tricks and generally make themselves useful. Granted, everything they do is because they want a treat in return, but shit, we’ve all sold out to the man. Cats just want to lick their fur all day and scratch at furniture because they’re depressed because they can’t catch birds or figure out how to walk on a leash. They’re simple-minded and, alas, they know it.

Dogs eat tasteless kibble, but they do enough positive public relations that they almost always get to supplement their diet with a piece of pizza or Oreos or mac & cheese or a steak bone. Cats eat stinky chopped up fish from tin containers and any foul-smelling thing they can liberate from neighborhood trash cans. Their breath always smells like fish and the houses they live in end up wreaking like a sewer and that’s why nobody wants to be around cats or their owners. Their cuisine of choice clearly shows a lack of basic intelligence.

So there’s nothing new here. Anyone paying attention can see the huge pile of empirical evidence that tells us that cats aren’t too smart and even if you’ve never thought about it scientifically, everything you need to know about the brain power of cats has been spelled out for us in cartoons. I mean just look at the way, day after day, the cat has been tricked and outsmarted and hoodwinked and duped and deceived and outwitted by the humble little field mouse! These little mice who still can’t figure out that the free cheese is a trap are still way smarter than cats.

Remember Pixie & Dixie? These mouse twins from the South, one wearing a bowtie, the other a vest, bamboozled Mr. Jinks the cat from sunup til sundown. Remember Jinks would say, “I hates those meeces to pieces!” Dumb and illiterate. Did you see the things Jerry used to do to Tom? Could Tom have been any dumber? Even innocent little Jerry couldn’t believe the stuff Tom would fall for. Jerry sliced Tom in half, decapitated him, shut his head in a window, stuffed Tom’s tail in a waffle iron, kicked him into a refrigerator, electrocuted him, used a tree to drive him into the ground, stuck matches between his toes and lit them …

So you see, cats just aren’t smart enough to learn. Did we really need research to tell us that?

Cat people will typically be quick to point out that cats and cat owners are misunderstood, but I’d say that, based on the powers of human observation, we understand them perfectly.