I think dogs are more intelligent BECAUSE they are social animals. Social animals need to do everything a solitary animal does + ability to know what his peers are thinking or about to do in order to coordinate.
Dogs can fake emotion (ever been bitten by a dog that waggles his tail?), know what appeals to humans(sending cutest or most wounded pup to beg for food), understand how subway works, etc. Cats have greater independence, but overall aren't as clever.
Crows and killer whales, now those fuckers are intelligent.
The only thing exceptional about human mind is the ability to be EXTREME in every aspects of our mind. Most creatures can do same as we, but we do it to a higher degree.
Speaking of social animals, spotted hyenas are very clever and groups of hyenas are not only very big, but have very complex rules for social interaction.
On the human mind, I do have a problem with assertions such as yours - saying that we can be "extreme" doesn't say much about how we are built or why other animals can't do it. We definitely don't have the biggest brains.
Sometime in the evolutionary process, we developed the ability to speak. Chimpanzees have symbolic capacities which are rarely used in the wild. Something happened to us, some social change and we've been practicing this ability since tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago.
And speech is tremendously important because that's how we learn - we pass and receive knowledge to and from others by means of natural language. Society also leaped forward along with agriculture because that's when written language happened, also allowing us to pass knowledge to future generations. We also leaped forward when common people started learning to read. And because of the ease of access to information nowadays, I also believe we're amidst another revolution.
Now if you look at animals, they do have language. Most intelligent animals rely on body language and even sounds to communicate. But one thing that we do effortlessly is to invent new words, new metaphors to describe whatever we want and our language has gotten so big that we can describe anything.
So there's a strong correlation there and the question on my mind is - are we smart because of the ability to communicate, or are we able to communicate because we are smart?
Well I haven't say or hypothesized why is that so.
Chimpanzees and crows can make tools, we make tools that make tools that make tools.
Animals have language(s), we have several highly symbolic languages. Ours is just more sophisticated.
I'm pretty sure there are examples of animals empathizing, humans can empathize with a large part of biosphere.
There is nothing that fundamentally divides us. Or you can say that humans are nothing special. It's just we have more most mental tasks at greater lengths and do it more consistently. That's all.
Dogs can fake emotion (ever been bitten by a dog that waggles his tail?), know what appeals to humans(sending cutest or most wounded pup to beg for food), understand how subway works, etc. Cats have greater independence, but overall aren't as clever.
Crows and killer whales, now those fuckers are intelligent.
The only thing exceptional about human mind is the ability to be EXTREME in every aspects of our mind. Most creatures can do same as we, but we do it to a higher degree.