Are cats smarter than dogs?
This kind of question always depend on what you consider "intelligent".
Dogs are wired to understand us. They are superior at social interaction—it’s in their genes from wolf ancestors on, and they’ve co-existed and co-evolved with humans for many millennia. Dogs are much better at reading human social cues than any other non-human animal, including chimps, even though the latter are certainly more intelligent generally. They are also much better at it than wolves, who unlike dogs have no instinctive understanding of human expressions, gaze direction, and so on. And of course dogs are much easier to train for various tasks, since they’ve been bred for it. You can’t ask your cat to go upstairs and get a toy. However, "trainability" is in a different dimension from pure intelligence.
To keep law and order, dogs tend to have a strong drive to please their superiors and are quite ready to accept command. A dog will attack an intruder as quickly as possible because he know that his pack will back him up no matter what. Since there are alot of individuals in the pack, dog are quite good at recognising, interpreting and understanding vocal, facial and body language communications.
Cats are solitary animals that are predators to small rodents, birds, lizards, insects e.t.c as well as prey to others such as Raptors, Foxes, Dogs e.t.c. This is an extremely complex life and require a lot of intelligence. Don’t get it wrong, when cats in the wild live together, it must be a situation of abundant food supply and even then, they are merely tolerating one another. Cats do not have the social and communication skills dogs have and kittens are usually raised by single mums. Therefore to survive, kittens have to be good at solving problems as early as possible.
If you take the basic definition of intelligence, the ability to acquire knowledge and skills, cat’s do it better. They are made for it. Smaller, more flexible, more agile, quieter, more patient. As a wild animal, cats do a better job. They are designed to normally figure out the solutions to their problems on their own and are quite good at it. Cats are master of observation and careful implementation (dogs are good too, but cats are better).
When you’re comparing different animals, you’re comparing types of intelligence, and that’s really not productive. It’s akin to comparing, “Which is a better fruit, apple or orange?” Both are nutritious in their field, so it becomes a question of which characteristics you feel are more desirable for certain situations. The smartest dog may be smarter than the smartest cat, but the dumbest dog is dumber than the dumbest cat. Each animal is endowed with a species-specific anatomical design, and different, though overlapping behavior and abilities.
Ultimately it depends on whether you’re talking about social intelligence or problem solving. We personally tend to think cats are better at solving problems, and dogs are better at following orders.
So, it will be unfair to say dogs are smarter than cats or vice versa. Because they are perfect and smart in their own way! :)