When I began writing the chapter in my book about how new scientific discoveries are blurring the line between pet and person, I knew it was going to be tough to find anyone studying the feline mind. As the owner of two cats, I’m aware that they probably don’t make the best research subjects. But even I was surprised by how few researchers study them. A canine revolution has been taking place in labs around the world for the past 15 years, but cats have been largely left in the dark.

After a few weeks of hunting, and more than a dozen e-mails, I finally found a researcher who studies cat cognition: Christian Agrillo of the University of Padova in Italy. When I got him on the phone, he confirmed my suspicions about why there aren’t more scientists like him out there. “I can assure you that it’s easier to work with fish than cats,” he laughed. “It’s incredible.”

Agrillo studies something called numerical competence. That’s essentially the ability to distinguish a small quantity from a larger one. To figure out how and when the skill evolved, he’s studied it in a number of animals, including monkeys, birds, and inch-long mosquitofish. And yes, he’s also looked at cats.

The test Agrillo uses is fairly simple. He places three black dots over a desirable object (like a plate of food or a door that fish can swim out to be with other fish), and two dots over an undesirable object (like an empty plate or a door that leads to an empty part of a fish tank). Agrillo and colleagues then look to see if, over multiple trials, the animals can distinguish between the two quantities. He’s published ten papers on fish, but only one on cats. Here’s why:

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Napoleon is a doggy genius. The 3-year-old, 7-pound Yorkshire Terrier can do something even our closest relative, the chimpanzee, can’t. He can read our thoughts. And he isn’t alone. All dogs, it turns out, are human mind readers.

I met Napoleon during a recent visit to the Duke Canine Cognition Center in Durham, North Carolina. I was doing some research for a chapter in my book on how new scientific discoveries are blurring the line between pet and human, and the head of the center, biological anthropologist Brian Hare agreed to let me come down and observe some of his work. Hare is at the forefront of a canine revolution that began about 15 years ago; in a series of high-profile studies, researchers around the world have shown that dogs are capable of far more than we ever imagined.

Dogs weren’t always popular research subjects, however, at least when it came to probing the secrets of the mind. Though Charles Darwin was a dog lover—and a big believer in the powers of the canine intellect—dogs were canis non grata in the cognition laboratory for much of the 20th century. They aren’t a wild animal, and they’ve lived with us for thousands of years, so most scientists considered them artificial and even tainted. Researchers interested in the animal mind studied chimpanzees and rodents instead.

But things changed when Hare, Adam Miklosi, and other prominent scientists began to notice something remarkable about dogs. I had come to the Duke Canine Cognition Center to see what first piqued their interest. And that’s where I ran into Napoleon.

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