Social Skills: Cats vs Dogs

Ran across an interesting article the other day on the differences between cats and dogs when it comes to social engagement with humans. Here's a little excerpt:

The limited research that has been done on human-cat interaction has shown that cats do not readily socially engage with humans, unlike dogs, primates, sometimes horses, and even dolphins and whales (to some extent) and other marine mammals.

For example, a 2005 study by Ádam Miklosi and colleagues showed that both pet dogs and cats were able to use human pointing gestures to find food. This is not really surprising. However, when the animals knew the location of the food but it was inaccessible to them - and the human owners were naive to the location of the food - only the dogs could effectively engage their owners to help them gain access to the food. The cats simply kept trying in vain to get it themselves.

Importantly, all of these animals were family pets, and had plenty of experience with their human owners. One could argue that these animals were able to use human social signals because they had simply learned them through experience. Other research, however, has provided evidence that even without significant human experience, [even] domesticated foxes will socially engage with humans to solve a problem.

Hm. That kind of leaves cats in the dust when it comes to "working the system" to get what they want. Now if we overlay onto this the popular analogy of gender differences, that men are like dogs and women like cats, where the heck does that leave us? ;)