> How is this not common knowledge?

There is a lot of stupid common knowledge, from fan death to cold weather causing colds.

I grew up with cats and was entirely unaware that they had the capacity to learn names. Respond to words, sure, but it never seemed to matter what I was saying.

I have been allowed to consider myself a colleague (at best, ordinarily: an associate) by many cats - you do not get to be an owner of a cat: that's an affectation!

I have also loved and been loved by many dogs too. I am not a dog OR cat person - I am AND. When me and the wife met in 2003, she had two dogs and I had two cats. They all lived out their days together happily.

I can't speak for horses and cows - limited personal exposure. I think that the relationship between humans and cats and dogs are rather different. I'm not too sure that cats really learn words in quite the same way that dogs do.

Cats are far less "domesticated" than dogs. Apart from real killers, when was the last time that a dog delivered a disembowelled small mammal/bird/reptile to you and requested your approval?

If you have a few 100 (or 1000) years to spend, why not start off with a population of lions (which do live in prides and are hence pack animals) and breed them down to domestic cat size and somehow domesticate them.

Now compare them with dogs.

I've never communicated with a cat using words - bloody daft! OK I do speak at them out of habit but I use high pitched sounds when "communicating" and never look them in the eye. I've rarely met a cat I could not convince to come on over and be stroked.

The world is full of things that were once considered common knowledge, but are now considered silly or downright wrong. Science is exactly in the business of finding out which parts are actually true and which aren't, whether someone believed it before or not is rather irrelevant.

Yea, seriously. My cat is 15 and she is pretty intelligent. She knows about a dozen verbal commands and I’ve noticed over the years will perk up or come out of nowhere when certain words are used. She also will respond and (usually) come when you call out her name like a dog. It did take a very long time though, like 5-7 years and a lot of trust established to get to this point, but I think it’s been fairly obvious for a long time now that cats are very habituated to humans and human habits, maybe even as much as dogs.

One of the difficulties for science when studying cats is they are so aloof and take time to build trust, that observing these behaviors in a study setting is pretty hard. Even mine will totally understand what I’m saying (her ears will perk up and twitch) but she’ll ignore me sometimes.

My cat knows that one, along with "treat" and "snack". But in the way that it was (probably falsely) claimed that Eskimos have dozens of words for snow, my cat really does understand dozens of variations of the word "no".

There's "no", there's "No", there's "No!", there's "NO!", there's "NO!!!! NO!!! NO!!!", and many other variations each with slightly different connotations that my cat definitely picks up on.

Yep! If you have a food motivated cat, they can pretty easily pickup tricks - My cat knows sit, shake, speak, up, and 360. Not sure if higher lever words/concepts such as, it’s raining outside, are making it through.

That's because he is cat. You don't tell cat. You ask cat. He does what he wants. If it looks like he's doing what you want, then that's just a coincidental aligning of his wants with yours. Your pleasure of his doing what you want is your gleeful misunderstanding of the situation.

That'd be a bit of a non-sequitur as cat would not be of much use if it weren't for its ability to use its ear [1].

[1] see /dev/stdin or &1 - cat only listens in mono

Me neither, because I use uBlock Origin.

> 1581 partners

Amateur hour. Peter North has over 2,000 acting credits.

Kidding aside; I have seen more than 1600 partners listed before. I just close the tab.

Why is it obvious that they can learn words?

Science is often in the business of verifying things people think are obvious.

Cats are highly individualistic, and they all have their own motivations for doing things that go beyond simple treats. Dogs will go to great lengths for treats, but cats won't usually.