If you’re a dog person you probably won’t like this article, but you should read it anyway for the sake of your friends who have to suffer through the endless Instagram posts of your pup.

A new study has shown that while dogs aren’t the dumbest animals out there, they also aren’t uniquely smart.

The study’s co-author, Britta Osthaus, is a senior lecturer in psychology at Christ Church University in the UK. She’s part of the team that published the paper in the journal Learning and Behaviour, and had the following to say to TIME about man’s best friend:

“They’re smart, but they’re not stand-out smart.”

The research was inspired by lead author Stephen Lea’s prior role as editor of the journal Animal Cognition, Osthaus says. Lea, now an emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Exeter in the UK, saw plenty of papers about the special abilities of dogs, but noticed that other animals were rarely tested using the same types of cognitive tasks.

Working with Osthaus, Lea decided to set the record straight by analyzing [sic] more than 300 existing studies on animal cognition in an effort to compare dogs to other equivalent species.

Dogs fit into three main classifications: They’re carnivorans, they’re social hunters, and they’ve been domesticated by humans. Osthaus and Lea compared dogs to other animals in those same categories – like pigeons, wolves and cats – across a number of cognitive categories:

From the ability to draw information from sensory stimuli to problem-solving to social intelligence—the researchers found that other animals could match or exceed dogs’ abilities.

I’m pretty sure cats exceed dogs in cognitive capabilities, but that goes without saying. Even so, dogs do have their moments:

“They’re the only species at the middle of these three categories, so they are rather special,” Osthaus says. Because of their overlapping classifications, canines are uniquely well-suited to certain tasks, such as serving as guides for the blind or assistants to police officers.

But in each of these three categories, “you will find other animals or other species that will do as well as dogs, or maybe even better.” And many animals could be considered special when examined through the lens of their specific qualities, she adds.

The popular opinion that dogs are super smart persists for a number of reasons. They are easy to study, and many humans have really close relationships with them.

And because humans have an especially close relationship with dogs, there probably is an element of confirmation bias in the scientific literature. “We like our dogs to be very clever, and we like them to be appreciated,” Osthaus says.

But treating dogs like a superlatively intelligent species may actually be doing them a disservice, she says. “We need to take into account that dogs are dogs. We need to be fair toward dogs, to know what their limits are, so we don’t expect too much.”

The research also said that some animals, like goats and pigs, aren’t receiving the recognition they deserve.

To round off, please enjoy this compilation of Cats vs Dogs:

[source:time]