I have only found two other posts about this subject one by @Oculusfluffy and neither really answered my question.
Namely how intelligent are fluffies exactly.
They are usually depicted as dumber then a bag of bricks, but are also capable to survive and thrive in the wild.
So they can’t be that dumb.
And probably be able to play simple video games.
Any video game a child up to 6 can play a fluffy can probably play.
But I still wonder how intelligent a fluffy is.
If one would explain the concept of money, bills, and work to them would they even have the slightest grasp or is it beyond them ?
( spoosh did a 2 panel comic about that, with a fluffy eating a tomato and then being put to work it was obviously quite unhappy but would the fluffy understand why or just consider the farmer a meanie ? )
How far can fluffies count, can they even count ?
That sort of thing.
@Booperino 's Snakefood seems fairly smart for a fluffy. And @FallenAngel007 has a Smarty that’s actually smart with the best interest for his herd at heart.
So does it all just depend on the fluffy him or herself ?
I’m also stil trying to figure out my own Kitsune Fluffy character, and his intelligence level.
reasons
It’s also 6.30 in the morning here, I cant sleep and I’ve been sick, clearly my mind is going wrong.
Short answer: It depends on headcanon. Thats the best answer I can give.
Any further and I will have to explain the differences in approach between different artists and writers. There’s no unified consistency, and its been one of the problems of the genre, as well as its arguable strength.
Addendum:
Before I type out my longer response, I’ll say this - just write. You can figure out the intelligence level over time. Sure, there’s discussion, but I also think that what really matters is the story. The intelligence level can be tailored according to the story - its like how I had to tailor the canon on fluffy lifecycles to fit Avocado’s story.
The short version in my headcanon is ‘It varies’. Everyone’s got their own style of fluffy so you can basically set it up to be however you want. I try and write a sort of ‘neutral’ style of fluffy in general and you could take a look at these stories for how I do the backstory and in-universe stuff:
Other examples of the range of fluffy behaviors can be found in any other writings I’ve churned out so far. On one end you have characters like Lightning from my Sam and Will stories on the upper end of intelligence.
And then you have characters like Lilac, from the same series.
I think it’s one of those things where they’re better in some areas than others. They can speak and comprehend language at a child’s level, but their survival skills probably fall more in the dog or cat range. They’re usually pretty poor at abstract problem solving. I think I’ve generally seen them as being able to count to around four, one for each hoof. (If fluffies came up with their own number system, would it be base four?)
It’s very likely a fluffy society would use base four or base five, if they counted the horn of a unicorn for some reason. However I doubt that the average fluffy given the general intelligence level displayed in most headcanons would develop anything resembling a proper positional number system. Most likely they’d have zero through four, then ‘many’ for up to some nebulous level, and then ‘lots’ after that.
Yeah pure headcanon depending on the artist/writer. I’ve always considered them extremely stupid, but from an abuse/sadbox standpoint it’s much more entertaining when they’re slightly intelligent but with consistently (and horribly) flawed logic. Like they have complete thought processes, just with extreme naivete or wildly unrealistic expectations.
Depends also on how sentient you view them as. You can either depict them as programmed biotoys with a limited range of cognition or as more sentient, individualistic creatures that can learn and adapt to a (usually very limited) degree.
Either way they’re almost universally considered fucking dumb…it’s just up to the creator to choose how dumb.
To echo: it’s not a set thing. There’s no explicit Canon to go by. They are as smart or as dumb as the writer needs.
To be honest, I think it’s harder to write them as functionally dumb.
One key note is for a lot of head canons they’re incomplete products made to both today dependent on humans and to sell more merch. This is why they can seem so entitled and needy. But the key is they’re incomplete. Couple that with them being a mess of DNA, add in both natural and artificial selection? You end up with a very wide range of possibilities.
For instance, I’ve noticed that successful ferals are a bit smarter than the typical pet fluff. Natural selection coupled with high birth rates should lead to rapid iterations)improvements to them, possibly eroding their “programming” if that’s in your head canon. Successful ferals will also teach their young how to survive.
House fluffs have no existential penalties for being dumb. So nature and nurture for them doesn’t give much push on average. They also are more likely to get fixed so a good, smart one might never pass on those genes or teach a new generation. Again, depending on head-canon.
And frankly, humans don’t have much reason to help develop them to their fullest potential.
I think it’s one of those things where they’re better in some areas than other
This x100! Even in humans, “intelligence” isn’t really a thing as such. At the very least, it’s not a single, fixed trait, but rather a whole constellation of different aptitudes.
(Which is part of the reason why IQ tests are mostly BS)
I think of fluffies as being “smart” in the way that a dog or a pig can be “smart”, plus the speech and social skills of a small child
And with a generous amount of variation between different individuals and different breeds.
In my headcanon intelligence is a byproduct of natural selection, the fluffys that were too dumb to live naturally died out while smarter fluffies continued in the gene pool.
But I also like to make it nature + nurture, so a fluffy inteligence can be increased if given time and dedication to teach them, like in the case of snakefood, who i wrote first as a happy fluffy who lived with fixer to a full assistant who can even speak more complex words thanks to his proximity to fixer.
Ferals i imagine having their own set of values and inteligences, probably the more sneaky and clever ones survived while not being necessarily more inteligent, which would make smartys actually smart and not just authority figures
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”.
Considers this: In the old days, fluffies are stupid because that’s the quickest way they killed themselves. Making your fluffies smart or stupid was not the topmost priority
“Fluffy Pony Drown/Dies” > “Fluffy Pony is Stupid”
Depends on the direction you want it to go. If they were all stupider than a rock they would die before being able to spread. This is a fallacy lots of abuse/sadbox/bleakbox fall into. If an animal is so dumb it literally drowns in a bowl of water, never learns from its/those around him’s mistakes, can’t run from predators because it’s slow as molasses and a flick on the nose is enough to break its legs, it may reproduce as quick as a rabbit, but it will still die in a day, meaning the babies die too and the species follows soon. Take pandas, but bring it to an extreme.
My personal take to avoid this is to make fluffies naive, rather than stupid. Just like a 4-12 years old kid. Some might actually be brilliant, but tell them Slenderman exists with enough conviction and they probably will fear any man wearing a suit. In general, they probably would struggle understanding how Wall Street works, but take your time to tell them about how humans exchange “munnies” for other stuff and they will learn like any kid who asks for money to his parents. Same for counting, singing and other basic nursery-elementary school things.
Tl;dr: if you go for more realistic fluffies, dropkick any notion of “fluffeh poneh drowns” or “fluffeh poneh stares at corner because it doesn’t have spatial awareness”. Make 'em not the sharpest tool in the shed, naive to a fault and perhaps too trusting in humans if they haven’t been abused.
I really love others’ answers! So here is mine :>
My headcanon:
Fluffies are naive, bit stupid just like all kids (ye, kids are fucking stupid lmfao)
Some are worse than others, unicorns being smarter at average, well-raised alicorns being actually very smart (their gene had to survive somehow in the world which hates them)
And then there’s a completely different group, being fluffies of gen 5 and their descendants. Hasbio shook itself from the almost-bankruptcy and realised they should do something about this shit running around. So they started making smarter, stronger, more durable fluffies for rich - very very rich - families and prestigious and rich breeders.
These fluffies are strong and durable like true tuffies, smart like alicorns, obedient like broken fluffies and full of pure love like our favourite fluffy pets.
Generally, these traits disappear in great-grandkids, but designer and demi-designer fluffies are truly the perfect toy/pet (still not considered animal tho)
whit out reading any thing you are all wrong fluffies are as smart as humans but there way of thinking is radically different from any animal while there actions are completely logical to a fluffy they make no sense in the real world so they seam stupide and naïve
As others have said, there’s not going to be a one-size-fits-all answer. Each creator sets their universes up differently to suit the needs of that creator, and thus aren’t guaranteed to and probably won’t overlap.
My fluffies are probably actually a good bit dumber than in most headcanons, on par with a very smart dog or a very dumb pig. Literacy, counting in the abstract (as opposed to one-more-foal-than-teat or bowl-half-full, which they can do) or even art are just not going to be in the cards for them. Or playing cards, for that matter.
I aim to make them about as smart as they average veterinarian patient, but with this super, super over-developed language center that sticks out like a sore thumb as an obvious “what has Man, in his hubris, wrought?” thing. Because that suits my setting and my themes.
So my recommendation is to come at it from the other side: figure out the story you want to tell, adjust the kitsune fluffy to fit, and then fit everything else in around that.
My headcanon is that fluffies can be deceptively intelligent and/or stupid due to how much of their comes preprogrammed in their genes. For example, every fluffy believes that pegasi can fly, so when reality doesn’t match this they have to develop their own mental gymnastics to accommodate the new experiences into their hardcoded worldview. Some will conclude that “running really fast is basically flight” and develop a realistic idea of the world, some will come up with excuses like “need to jump from a higher place to take off”, and others yet will flat-out deny the undeniable and grow up retarded due to their unresolved cognitive dissonances.
As pretty much everyone else has said, it depends on the headcanon.
Making fluffies smarter is actually an ongoing project in mine, and I’ve got some pretty clever fluffies. A certain pair of brothers tried just engineering a fluffy with supergenius intellect, but… it didn’t end well.
