Dr. Candace Croney, Purdue University
“Pigs are extremely clean, that they housebreak themselves
and that at the end of a play session they put their own toys away in a big tub.”
“Here’s the dirt on pigs: They are perhaps the smartest, cleanest domestic animals known – more so than cats and dogs, according to some experts. But pigs don’t have sweat glands, so they roll around in the mud to stay cool. A sign of their cleverness came from experiments in the 1990s. Pigs were trained to move a cursor on a video screen with their snouts and used the cursor to distinguish between scribbles they knew and those they were seeing for the first time. They learned the task as quickly as chimpanzees.” (1)
Yes, many researchers now believe that in many ways a pig is smarter than a German shepherd dog and learns some tasks faster than a chimpanzee yet in the factory farms the sow is forced to spend most of her life in a gestation crate where she is unable to move even (1) inch.
DEA agents use pigs to sniff out drugs because they have such a strong sense of smell. It was reported that one pig saved a (3) year old’s life. They are very protective of their owners when treated with compassion.
Are Pigs Really Smart?
According to Candace Croney is an Associate Professor of Animal Sciences at Purdue University and once taught pigs to play video games. (More on that later.) She says she understands the urge to compare animals to humans when it comes to smarts, but that the “boring science definition” of intelligence is this:
“Cognition is about all the processes that animals have available to them, that allow them to get information, store information, recall it and use it so that they can adapt to the environment that they find themselves in or not.”
Croney says that when she first embarked on pig research in 1998, she did not know much about pigs, but what she heard was not flattering. As part of the first lab in the United States to explore pig cognition, she participated in a study that set pigs to a task that previously only Rhesus monkeys and chimpanzees had been asked to perform. The pigs were provided with specially made joysticks that they could control with their mouths or snouts and then tasked with the job of moving a cursor around on the screen to make contact with different target walls that would shrink and move away. Croney did not think the pigs would be able to do it. But they could.
“What we found was that they actually — big surprise to people who work with pigs, right? Not at all! — is that they’re really very fast learners,” says Croney. “They learn novel things quite quickly and quite well.”
She soon set her pigs to other tasks. They were asked to perform duties in which they had to respond to visual cues. They were given odor quizzes, correctly picking out, say, spearmint, from an array of other smells that included mint and peppermint
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Footnotes:
(1) (Science on NBC NEWS.com: The 10 Smartest Animals)