So Jonah Goldberg, as though he had nothing better to write about, decided to start the Dogs vs. Cats debate up again. Bill Bennett points out that while cats may be smarter, they're not, "on our side, like dogs are on our side."
From Temple Grandin's Animals In Translation (pp. 304-305):
If Dr. Wayne is right, wolves and people were togetherat the point when homo sapiens had just barely evolved from homo erectus...This means that when wolves and people first started keeping company there were on a lot more equal footing than dogs and people are today. Basically, two different species with complementary skills teamed up together, something that had never happened before and has really never happened since....
Fossil records show that whenever a species becomes domesticated its brain gets smaller. The horse's brain shrak by 16%; the pig's brain shrank by as much as 34%; and the dog's brain shrank 10-30%...Now archaeologists have discovered that 10,000 years ago, just at the point when humans began to give their dogs formal burials, the human brain brgan to shrink, too. It shrank by 10%, just like the dog's brain. And what's interesting is what part of the human brain shrank....in humans it was the midbrain, which handles emotions and sensory data, and the olfactory bulbs, which handle smell, that got smaller, while the corpus collosum and the forebrain stayed pretty much the same...humans took over the planning and organizing tasks,and dogs took over the sensory tasks.
