The Great Pet Debate!

Ok, Sean White posted a story about a particularly capable dog on his blog and used the story as the basis for his claim that "dogs are better than cats". I posted a rebuttal on his page, but thought I would post it here for the thousands of people who read this blog to debate. This is obviously a classic debate and quite an emotional one, especially for people who think that dogs and cats should not be consumed. A stance that I don't particularly agree with, as a marinated dog kebab can be quite a treat. But, that's niether here nor there. The debate at hand is which animal is better, not if pets in general are dumb. I think most people, whether consciously or subconsciously, already know the answer to that. Regardless, here is my rebuttal to Sean's post.

Ok, your argument has a gaping hole. We are dealing with a spectrum here. In my experience, cats fill a much narrower scope on the spectrum. What is the spectrum? It looks something like this:
Stupid ———-*———-*———-*———-Cool
The stars (*) have broken up the spectrum into quartiles. Cats generally occupy a position in one of the two middle quartiles. Some would argue cats can only occupy the quartile closest to “stupid”, but evidence shows this is an argument that is not backed up with statistical proof. The majority of cats are somewhere inbetween stupid and cool. Some err on the stupid side, some err on the cool side. It is very rare however to find a super cool cat or a super stupid cat. Dogs however fall all over the spectrum. Because of this there are many dogs that are way cooler than the average cat. However, there are MANY dogs that are way more stupid and annoying than the average cat.

While I can instantly pull to mind dozens of memories of dogs jumping on my, licking me, barking at me, growling at me, pooping around me etc. etc. I can only recall a few select unpleasant moments with cats. On top of that, cats have the ongoing advantage of being much easier to care for. The only argument I can see you winning is that the coolest dog is much more able minded and able to help than the coolest cat, so much so that their increased abilities make it worth the big responsibility of owning a pet that is much more intensive to care for and clean up after. But that percentage is certainly smaller than the uppermost quartile and probably in the range of less than a percent.