Alright, time to work on a longer response.
cracks knuckles and stretches fingers
~
The problem with determining fluffy intelligence is that is boils down to bias.
Obviously, abusers and people who have a negative disposition to fluffies (this includes a number of sadboxers I find) will of course depict fluffies as mentally stunted, dumber than a bag of bricks, incapable of certain functions while citing things such as “fluffy pony drowns” or rely on things like “they’re incomplete”, “they’re not really alive” and so on and so forth. These are biases, and they’re not that different from a hugbox approach to fluffy intelligence that would be a lot more charitable to them, albeit to a fault. I know I am guilty of this, but thats because I do like fluffies, and find the concept of them to be genuinely interesting. If I have to take an even more extreme example, @Pinkyfluffy’s fluffies have always been unique due to the fact that some of his fluffies have spoken perfect Italian.
So the question we should REALLY ask is why fluffies are the way they are in the first place, and why has their depiction almost entirely relied on things like fluffspeak and playing with kids toys. And one thing I stress that people should do is read about how fluffies started:
Fluffies started out as a joke within the MLP community on 4chan, a meme, with the idea being a more baby-ish version of an MLP character. I often compared it as the relationship between Muppet Babies to normal Muppets, and Baby Looney Toons to normal Looney Toons. Cartoons depicting baby versions of characters has been a thing, which may be why the idea caught on. Consider Marcusmaxius’s take on Applefluff, which was based directly off the depiction of baby Applejack from MLP:FiM. When fluffies were still considered part of the MLP fandom and fan canons, it was easier to just depict fluffies as essentially mentally stunted, with things like the PETA raid being used to explain why they were “incomplete” - the idea was that there was supposed to be a finished version.
All this changed when fluffies stop being part of the MLP fandom due to the Scruffening. I’ve written an entire piece regarding this that’s also on this site, so I’m not going to repeat all my points here. Suffice to say is that I do NOT consider an “intelligent fluffy” to be similar to an MLP character in any regard. I boil this down to the difference in aesthetics, and the difference in the primary settings. The reason why I am raising this is because some people seem to think making a fluffy intelligent would be the equivalent of making a “mary sue OC” or “making an MLP character”, when they fail to realize that many designs of fluffies do NOT look like MLP characters, especially of the G4 (and now G5) iterations.
Why does this matter? To me it matters because I like to explore fluffy intelligence. One could say I am biased, yes, but I am also appreciative of hugboxers who had depicted fluffies developing general curiosity. Waggytail has done this many times, as had Squeakyfriend. I remember seeing one person chat on the Discord, and him being a noted abuser would always go into a direction of “I don;t fluffies are capable of doing that”. Its a problem I’ve had with that bias since some people seem to prefer have fluffies be downright dumb and incapable so that they can enjoy their gore and torture porn of the subject matter.
I think something as simple as writing would help with number counting. I think 4 is too simplistic, and I can imagine them at least managing up to ten.
One thing I’ve seen people disagree on is whether fluffies can “read” or “write”. Part of the reason why I like @Foxhoarder’s fluffy code is because it shows how fluffies can develop in a city setting, by creating simple pictograms that would be able to signal to other fluffies what is safe, whats dangerous and so on. Taking it a step further, I can imagine fluffies using a simple pictogram to work out a numerical system. Consider tally marks. I’ve used Tally marks in my earliest story. Tally marks are simple and anybody can do that.
And yet, at least one person I know of will say “a fluffy can’t do or think of that”. And there where it becomes a problem of bias.
See, this is where I disagree. I don’t consider them “fucking dumb” as much as I’d consider them mentally deficient. And even then, I feel that its a scale. It’d be the equivalent of, say, saying a caveman is mentally deficient, when we owe our ancestors to finding their way through nature to survive. Likewise, I’ve often compared fluffies to the mentally handicapped and actual animals, and neither are really dumb. I also have considered approaching the idea from the nature of fluffspeak itself, which is a constructed and thus a very limited language. One of the themes mentioend in Orwell’s 1984 is the use of Newspeak, and how this limited language exists to significantly dumb down and restrict it’s populace. I could imagine Fluffspeak being developed with this goal in mind - fluffies could actually be intelligent, but be heavily stunted by a language created to make them “sound cute”.
But point is, and ultimately, it all boils down to bias. Yes, it boils down to the headcanons of the respective writer and/or artist, but again it boils down to the bias of each respective creative. And I just happen to have an empathetic/sympathetic bias for fluffies where I do not see them as “fucking dumb”.