Pig Intelligence
Not by the Hair on my Chinny, Chin, Chin!
By Meret Shaker
They love to cuddle, play fetch, laze around, and get massages; and yes, I am talking about pigs! Many of us are not aware of their sweet, affectionate nature and let's face it, we've all used the phrase “when pigs fly” once or twice before when something sounded completely far-fetched to us; I know I definitely have.
You may have also come across the novel “Animal Farm” before and while the idea of having walking, talking pigs who conquered an entire farm from a team of armed humans may be a little ridiculous to most of us, you may be surprised to learn what recent studies have discovered about the superior intelligence of these often misunderstood creatures.
Did you know that the cleverness of a pig can outtake that of a lion, a tiger, and even a dog? When it comes to leaning new tricks or routines, studies have shown that pigs are one of the quickest animals to learn new behaviours, ranging from standing and spinning, to jumping hoops, opening cages, and even tying shoelaces!
Once a pig learns a trick, they'll do it repeatedly without a mistake due to their amazing long term memory. They are also known for their excellent sense of direction, and finding their way home from very far distances. If you are prone to getting lost or have a terrible sense of direction, then you should consider getting yourself a little piggy.When a reflecting mirror was placed in the pen of a pig, they curiously investigated it from all angles, and in just a matter of five hours, researchers noticed from the way the pigs inspected themselves that they were capable of interpreting that the image in the mirror was not a window with another pig looking back, but a reflection of their own surroundings. Soon, they paid no particular attention to it... that is of course, until it involved food.
When those smart guys in white lab coats hid a bowl of food in a maze-like arrangement of mirrors, the pigs turned away from the virtual reflection of the food and sought to find the real food using the mirrors, instead of resolving to simply dig around them.
A good sense of direction, combined with scheming and cunning behavior, are excellent traits that can be useful when it comes to finding food. As it turns out, our four-legged friends can be greedy and quite deceiving due to the random distribution of food in their natural environment. Through observation, it was noted that pigs can learn right away to follow each other if one pig shows signs of knowing where good stashes of food are stored; but who likes sharing, when you can have everything to yourself? The first pig would cunningly mislead his fellow pigs to a less appetizing stash or even throw them off on a wrong route, so that he could gladly enjoy the better one in peace. Very smart little piglet!
You think you can beat a pig in a video game? Well, the dogs definitely couldn't, and even the chimpanzees had some serious competition! A study lead by Professor Stanley Curtis of Penn State University was able to teach two pigs to play video games! Their task was to manipulate a joystick with their snouts in order to choose the right icon with the cursor, and in achieving that, they would earn a treat. The video game would progressively get tougher and tougher, but those two brilliant pigs astonished the team of researchers every time with their video game playing skills. Hoop jumping, deceitful, and video game playing pigs? Amazing! If you ask me, the idea of a pig generating wings and flying does not seem too unlikely to me now.
Well, we've learned about their cleverness, their playfulness, and their mischievousness; but what about their welfare? What about the way they are treated on our farms? The truth is, in gestation farms, those same video game playing, brilliant animals are cruelly mistreated everyday. Can you imagine living in your bathtub for more than a day? Well, for 90% of sows in Manitoba, this is their whole life.
Sows, the female pigs used for breeding, are continuously impregnated and confined in a tiny two feet wide, seven feet long metal-barred stall for almost all of their adult life. In this little cage, it's even impossible for them to turn around. Day after day, all they can do is nervously chew on the bars of their cage in mindless repetition as they carry out all of their life functions in this little hard-concrete confinement.
Why you may ask? Simple: economics. Stalls are a way of cramming as many sows into a small place without having to “waste” money on building cost or food; an animal that barely moves, barely needs any food as well.
In their nature, pigs are such sociable animals with exceptional intelligence, and when they are imprisoned in tiny stalls with hard concrete floors, they are denied their most basic behavioral and physical needs. The WHS encourages straw based systems, where pigs can interact with each other in a natural environment and where sows can build a nest for their young.
The question for me is not whether it's okay to eat such smart animals or not, rather; whether it's okay to confine such a brilliant animal that deserve so much more.
(This story was originally published in The WHS Fall 2010 Newsletter.)
