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I have a very realistic looking houseplant. The fact that I haven't watered it since I moved in a year ago suggests that it's probably plastic. (Or that I've stumbled onto a hardy new species of Scottish cactus.)
Back home? A Labrador and a Golden. The former has two brain cells, both currently on lunch break. The latter is too smart for his own good. I adore them both, and I look forward to being settled enough to justify getting a dog here. I grew up with more dogs than I can count, which is unsurprising given that we also had more parrots than I could count, or that my grandfather once owned a tiger. (Yes, a tiger. A different time, a different country, very different ideas about what constitutes a reasonable household animal.) I think my kids should enjoy that same privilege, even if I've concluded that a single animal is perfectly adequate. This is probably the consequence of a serial injection of pragmatic genes into the family. The men in my ancestry tend toward pleasant eccentricity, the women toward laudable sanity. I'm not sure where I land.
My personal benchmark for canine intelligence is the ability to open doors. The Golden could do it from the moment he was tall enough to reach the handle on his hind legs. My Lab can't, and just stares at them mournfully until someone takes pity. An earlier German Shepherd managed it too, though less consistently than his mother. She was a rescue (so is the Golden), and she came into our house with a profound distrust of menfolk. It took over a year for her to accept that I wasn't going to hurt her, and then assent to scritches behind the ears. She'd graduated to begrudgingly accepting belly rubs a year or so before she passed. Her son, and every dog since, seems to gravitate toward me. Maybe it's because I'm unusually considerate of their needs, while my younger brother has been known to wield a chancla when they misbehave. My father is the living archetype of the "we are absolutely not getting more dogs" to "I cannot live without them" pipeline. My mother is usually the one who talks us into the original transgression.
Honestly, I'm glad that most of my dogs passed away suddenly, and painlessly. I support euthanasia in principle, but taking an animal I love to the vet with full knowledge that they aren't coming back with me would break parts of me I'd prefer to keep intact. Dogs live unfortunately short lives. Parrots live far too long.
Some say we don't deserve dogs. I find that farcical. They're one of humanity's greatest achievements: without anything resembling a modern understanding of genetics, we managed to turn a ravenous pack predator into a creature that will, more often than not, lay down its life for you. We made dogs. We deserve them. (If anything, the dogs got the better end of the bargain, though I doubt they'd phrase it that way.)
Cats? I don't mind them. I'm slightly fond of them. Some can be cute, and they seem to like me in particular because I don't go out of my way to fuss over them. I've irritated quite a few of my female cat-loving friends by being the lap of choice. While renting elsewhere, I once had a stake in a kitten who would always climb up into my bedsheets and snooze on my feet. I'd wake up every morning, and before I could panic-dress and run off to catch the bus, I had to make sure she was safely disentangled. I could have stepped on her without noticing, which is probably also why she enjoyed sleeping inside my shoes. I felt awful the one time I forgot to let her out of the bedroom, coming back from work to see her practically leap ten times her body length over my shoulder to escape. Oh well, at least she kept coming back. I wonder how she's doing these days. She was on the smaller side, and lived a semi-outdoor lifestyle in an area where cats go missing with distressing frequency. I hope she's fine, and that she has kittens who've found smaller shoes to fill.
Funny you mention door opening as an intelligence test. All of my family's dogs have been able to pull that off, thought they've all been of a very specific breed. I have fond memories of them doing their daily patrols to check and make sure everyone was present before wandering back out.
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I agree we deserve dogs, and your intelligence test is great. Our dog is great at opening doors and it's a pain, but we love him.
I'm the same with cats, they're ok but nowhere near as lovable as dogs. Kind of like, less variance though since they tend to be less annoying.
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