Do cats have a learning disability that dogs don't have? One researcher won't put it in so many words, but her research into the friendly felines has demonstrated that "cats do not understand cause and effect connections between objects".  Her experiment was not high-tech at all- she basically baited a string with tasty treats (fish and a biscuit), and placed them out of reach  to see "if the cats could work out that pulling on the string would pull the treat closer."

She used three strings: "a single baited string, two parallel strings where only one was baited, and two crossed strings where only one was baited."

Don't let your cats read the next part because it might traumatize their delicate psyches. Cats, who are infamous for their string-pulling abilities, performed worse than the dogs on the test. The single-string was no problem for the beloved felines, but not a single cat could figure out the nuances of the parallel strings.

If you're a cat lover and have cats for pets, you're probably more than a little ticked off with the results of this "experiment". Don't blame me, blame Britta Osthaus, who is the Psychology lecturer who performed the experiments. To mitigate the damage, she said, "I am not trying to say cats are stupid, just they are different." I don't know about you, but I'm not so sure that I necessarily agree with that. The article failed to mention whether the researcher herself was a cat or dog owner. Perhaps she was a little biased in her study?