david_grimm

Great question. Honestly, I think it's a pretty even exchange. Pets get to be on permanent vacation and have their every whim and need catered to (at least the lucky ones), and we get companions that provide unconditional love. Pets may also provide us with health benefits like lower anxiety and blood pressure. I think we both make out like bandits!

I'm not a huge fan of breeding. I think we should appreciate dogs (and cats) for what they are, not for what we can turn them into. I'd also like to see more people adopting pets than buying them from breeders. More than 3 million unwanted cats and dogs are killed in U.S. shelters every year.

Ha! Well I'm a cat person, but I love dogs too. I think we get different things from each pet. Dogs are faithful companions who become like our children. Cats let us bring a bit of the wild into our homes--they allow us to caress the tiger, as someone once said--but they are also "love sponges", as Ernest Hemmingway called them. Why chose? Get both! :-)

Great question. There are millions of animals on earth, and dozens of domesticated animals. Yet we've largely singled out just two--cats and dogs--to be our family members. I think it may have something to do with the adaptability of cats and dogs, and the fact that they think a lot like we do. As a result, it's easier for us to form emotional bonds with them.

Great question! I wrote a piece for Slate on this very issue last year (http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2014/04/cat_intelligence_and_cognition_are_cats_smarter_than_dogs.html)

There are about a dozen labs around the world studying the canine mind, but almost no one is studying cats. For my book, I scoured the world to find someone--anyone--who studies the feline mind, and all I came up with was one scientist in Italy who usually studies fish, but who did one experiment (on counting ability) in cats. Fish, he told me, are easier to work with than cats.

And that's the crux of the problem: dogs don't mind being in a lab and doing tricks for experiments--heck, they love it. But cats don't want to be anywhere near a lab. So unfortunately, that's preventing us from knowing much about how their minds work. But hopefully advances in scientific techniques (like MRI imaging) may eventually help us shed light on the feline mind.