Depends heavily on the dog. Our current one (a service dog) can even discriminate between pointing at an object to identify the specific object (e.g. something in your hand to be the subject of the next command) vs pointing at a location to go to vs bringing back an object by name. I’ve had a couple of dogs quickly get the concept with very little training effort, and others that were just hopeless.
As for cats, prior research found that domesticated felines also pay attention to us and can understand human pointing gestures. Kaminski, however, mentioned that "the researchers had to select them out of many hundreds of cats, " suggesting that only certain house kitties are on par with dogs when it comes to understanding people.
It’s interesting, because my two cats do seem to recognize when I point at something. This works best when I’m trying to engage them in an animate object - "look, a squirrel! or “look, a moth!” - but I can also can sometimes get them to key in on a toy as well. Strange that both will do it, though the trait seems rareish in cats. Guess that makes up for both of my completely unrelated cats being utterly uninterested in catnip.
True. There is a weird phenomenon with dogs that I think most people sort of know intuitively but don’t fully understand the rarity or implications of it. All dogs from toy Poodles to Great Danes and even wolves are technically the same species. However, their no other member of the animal kingdom that can produce such a huge range of traits both mental and physical at the species level. If dogs only existed 10 million years ago, you would think scientists were crazy if they claimed that all of these obviously different fossils were the same species yet it is true for dogs and has been for thousands of years.
There is something unique about their genome that makes almost everything about them modifiable and it doesn’t even take very many generations to accomplish it. You can watch extreme evolution happen as a single breeder just by selecting the traits you want and breeding for it. You can’t do that in nearly the same way in any other animal.
You can make small horses if you try hard enough but they still look roughly like big horses and you can make cats with a certain color fur or no fur but the differences are minor compared to what you can modify just by selectively breeds dogs for a few generations. The body type differences that they have be bred to become are extreme on their own but the same holds true for behavioral traits as well. There are no other animals like that.
It is a miracle of nature that their genome can rapidly assimilate so many different expressed differences and still produce a viable living animal. Their ability to morph into very different versions of the same species is what led them to become so successful at bonding with humans and exploiting that relationship for mutual benefit.
Authorities: Missing Texas man was eaten by his own dogs
*By JAKE BLEIBERG, ASSOCIATED PRESS DALLAS — Jul 10, 2019, 6:42 PM ET
*
A Texas man who had been missing for months was eaten, bones and all, by his pack of dogs, sheriff’s deputies said.
Medical examiners said Tuesday that DNA testing determined that pieces of bone recovered from the dogs’ feces were those of 57-year-old Freddie Mack, according to the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office.
Deputy Aaron Pitts said the 18 mixed-breed dogs apparently devoured all of Mack’s body, his clothing and his hair, leaving nothing larger than 2- to 5-inch bone fragments.
“Never have we ever, or anyone we’ve spoken to, heard of an entire human being consumed,” Pitts told The Associated Press. “The bones were completely broken up and eaten.”
Mack had serious health problems, and it’s unclear whether the dogs killed their owner or consumed his body after he died from a medical condition…
[snip]
Well, okay.
Still, if they don’t like your facial expression, they may just eat your face.