What is intelligence? Is it knowledge or the ability to use knowledge? Is it the ability to focus? Or is it simply the ability to survive in a given environment? The lesson of dogs and cats is illuminating.
Dogs have "doggy odor". That is, the typical dog stinks. This isn't because dogs are nasty animals but because dogs have turned what could have been an evolutionary liability into an asset, by becoming pack animals.
The hunting strategy of dogs is to send part of the pack upwind of the prey and the other part of the pack downwind of the prey. When the odor of the upwind pack is picked up by the prey, the prey flees from the odor into the jaws of the downwind pack. This strategy requires coördination. Coördination requires communication.
To domestic dogs, humans are members of the pack, whom they respond to, because part of their survival menu is communication.
Because cats are lone hunters, odor is a disability rather than a hunting tool, as it is with dogs. After eating, cats remove the odor of their prey by licking themselves, what we call grooming, cat saliva's being a natural deodorant. Thus a cat, even when sated, is always ready for the next hunting opportunity, a valuable survival strategy when successful hunts occur sporadically. Because cats are lone hunters, there is no reason to communicate with each other. Except when mating and mothering, cats rarely interact.
Domestic cats have no social relationship with humans other than convenience. Communication is not a part of a cat's survival menu. Having no need to communicate, cats simply have not evolved to know what communication is. Because dogs seem to respond to us, while cats seem capable only of staring at us blankly, we tend to think of dogs as more "intelligent" than cats. Yet cats have mastered their environments better than dogs, as individuals. A dog in the wild without his pack, the "lone wolf," is severely handicapped. Not so the cat.
Which, then, is the more intelligent animal, and what does this say about our understanding of intelligence?
