Owen Walsh
In a culture that primarily sees pigs as a source of food, it's easy to miss the fact that these creatures are highly intelligent, social, and empathetic. And they experience pain and suffering—just like us.
Do you have a companion animal in your life, like a cat or a dog? There’s a lot to love about these animals. Their intelligence, for starters. How excited they get when you come home. How impressive it is that they understand you when you speak. How much fun they have playing with others. The companionship and loyalty they provide. The emotional connection you feel when you look in their eyes.
Pigs share all of these wonderful qualities with typical family pets. So why is one treated with love and respect, and the other treated simply as a source of food? Why is it acceptable to put millions of pigs through the cruel, inhumane conditions of factory farming that we would be horrified to see a dog endure?
The science is in. The mind of the pig has been underestimated for far too long, and it’s time that we reevaluate our relationship to this amazing animal.
Are pigs intelligent?
That’s easy, yes! Decades of research and scientific observation has clearly shown that pigs are intelligent, complex creatures.
Pigs have the capacity to experience some of the same emotions as humans, like happiness, excitement, fear, and anxiety. They’re able to remember important pieces of information for long periods of time. They have broad social abilities too, like distinguishing individuals out of a group; communicating with each other through touch, smell, sound, and sight; and learning to pick up on the verbal and nonverbal cues of humans.
Researchers have even found that pigs are able to use tools and play video games!
What makes pigs intelligent?
Cognition
Animals exhibit cognition if they have the ability to learn from their past experiences, think through problems, and make informed decisions about their future. Looking at some of pigs’ basic behaviors reveals the breadth of their cognition.
One of the basic cognitive building blocks is the ability to tell objects apart. The way that we know, for example, that a red square is different from a blue circle. Behavioral scientists tested this ability by presenting pigs with familiar and novel objects to see how they’d react to both. Researchers presented a pig with a cereal box repeatedly. Once the pig got used to seeing this cereal box, they presented him with the cereal box and a wooden spoon—an object new to the pig. The pig showed a clear preference for the new object, eager to learn more about it, while ignoring the cereal box with which he was already familiar.
Other studies have found that pigs’ cognition stretches beyond the simple ability to discriminate between objects. One experiment placed pigs inside of two different sets of crates; one crate for four hours and another crate for just 30 minutes. When given the choice between the two, most pigs opted to reenter the 30-minute crate over the four-hour one. From this, researchers drew two important conclusions: Pigs are able to perceive the passage of time, and they’re able to make decisions based on what they’ve learned through past experiences.
Communication
Pigs are very communicative—both with their fellow pen mates, and with humans. You may have heard about pigs’ impressive sense of smell, like the fact that they can detect a scent as deep as 25 feet underground. Well, their sensitive snouts also allow them to communicate with each other through information-packed pheromones.
With humans, whose noses aren’t quite as keen, pigs still find effective ways to communicate through body language. Pigs express their feelings and desires through tail wags, nudges, playfulness, stubbornness—even smiling! And when this doesn’t work, pigs can become very vocal, using a range of grunts, oinks, and squeals to get their point across. Researchers are aware of about 20 distinct noises that pigs use to communicate a range of emotions.
Memory
Remember the cereal box and wooden spoon experiment? Well, not only did it show that pigs know how to distinguish one object from another, it also revealed that pigs have quite robust long-term memories. Once a pig was familiar with the cereal box, five or more days could pass and the pig would still remember the box and prefer to play with new objects he was shown.
Perhaps even more fascinating, pigs are able to prioritize their memories based on importance. When given access to two different sources of food, one with more food and one with less, pigs quickly learned and could consistently recall which source had the more abundant supply and seek out that source again in the future.
Problem-solving skills
Researchers in Budapest recently put pigs’ problem-solving skills to the test by giving them both solvable and unsolvable puzzles. First, they placed food beneath an upside-down plastic container. Pigs learned very quickly that they had to flip the container over in order to get to the tasty reward. They completed this task faster than dogs doing the same experiment.
Next, the researchers fixed the container in place so that it couldn’t be flipped over. It turns out, when faced with an unsolvable problem, pigs remain very determined to figure it out on their own. This determination is unique to their species—other animals like dogs typically look to humans for help when they can’t solve a problem. Not only are pigs problem solvers, they’re independent thinkers too.
Tool use
The list of animals who have been seen using tools includes some of the smartest beings on the planet, like dolphins, chimpanzees, octopuses, and elephants. And now, pigs have been added to that list!
In 2015, an ecologist named Meredith Root-Bernstein was observing Visayan warty pigs as they built their nests to prepare for incoming piglets. Root-Bernstein noticed that one clever pig had picked up a piece of bark in her mouth and started using it to dig and move soil for the nest.
Root-Bernstein and a team of fellow scientists continued to observe this group, and sure enough, multiple warty pigs consistently took advantage of nearby bark in order to build their nests. The matriarch of the group, Priscilla, seemed to be the most adept at wielding her primitive shovel. The ecologists hypothesized that Priscilla learned the technique first and passed this knowledge onto her mate and her offspring.
Are pigs emotionally intelligent?
Pigs are empathetic
You know that feeling of walking into a room of your friends, and you can just tell something is off, even if you don’t know why? Pigs do the same thing!
In 2015, researchers put pigs into groups of six. Out of this group, two of the pigs had been trained to associate the music of Bach with the positive outcome of receiving a tasty treat. Two other pigs had been trained to associate military marching music with the negative outcome of being placed into an isolated pen. The remaining two pigs were not trained to react to any type of music.
When the six pigs were placed altogether, the researcher found that the untrained, or “naive,” pigs mirrored the emotional states of the trained pigs depending on the music being played. When the trained pigs got happy and excited at the sound of Bach, the untrained pigs showcased the same emotions through playfulness and tail-wagging. And when the trained pigs responded to the negative military music with stress, the untrained pigs also became stressed—standing alert, ears back, with increased cortisol levels.
Even though the naive pigs did not know what either music meant, they picked up on the effect it had on their trained pen mates, and matched their energies. And isn’t that the very definition of empathy?
Pigs are social
Behavioral scientists have described pigs as “highly social” animals. In natural conditions, mother pigs stick together in small groups and share their maternal duties equally across all of their piglets. As the piglets mature, they naturally form a social hierarchy and keep track of who is who.
Pigs are very playful too. Happy piglets can almost always be found scampering and leaping about, wrestling, nipping at each other, and pushing each other around just for fun.
Getting the chance to play and socialize with friends is absolutely essential for the development of a baby pig. A pig raised in isolation from other pigs—especially if they are trapped in a cage—is likely to develop behavioral abnormalities compared to a pig who’s allowed to grow up surrounded by friends and with plenty of space to move around.
Pigs can suffer
Yes, pigs can suffer, and in the factory farming system, they most certainly do. They feel pain, sadness, anxiety, isolation, and grief as a result of being treated like a commodity, and not like the emotionally complex, social, intelligent creatures they are.
Are pigs as intelligent as dogs?
Even though they hardly get the recognition that “man’s best friend” gets for their smarts, scientists say that pigs are just as intelligent as dogs. In some ways, they’re even smarter.
In 2015, neuroscientist Dr. Lori Marino and professor at Emory University Christina M. Colvin took a deep dive into the mind of pigs. Their review, published in the International Journal of Comparative Psychology, concluded that pigs possess “complex ethological traits” on par with dogs and even primates like chimpanzees.
Marino and Colvin noted several behavioral traits shared by swine and canine alike—and places where pigs perform better. For example, not only can you teach a pig to “go fetch the frisbee” on command, you can also teach them to “go fetch the ball” and they’ll know how to differentiate which object you’re asking them to get.
Some recent experiments looked at how well untrained piglets responded to human cues compared to untrained puppies. They found that the puppies were more naturally responsive to humans’ nonverbal cues—like pointing to a reward—than the piglets were. They didn’t see this as a sign that the pigs were less intelligent, though. Instead, the scientists theorized that this is due to centuries of dogs being bred to live alongside humans, while pigs have unfortunately been raised mostly as a food source, rather than the emotionally sensitive companions they have the potential to be.
How intelligent are pigs compared to humans?
It can be difficult to compare our own intelligence to that of other species, since the way we measure human intelligence differs greatly from how we measure animal intelligence. However, most researchers agree that a pig’s cognitive abilities—emotional depth, memory, spatial learning, self awareness, object discrimination, et cetera—are comparable to that of a young child as old as three.
Leaving pigs off your plate
Animal psychologists and other researchers have been saying it for years now: It’s time that we rethink the way we treat pigs. Supporting the factory farming industry means supporting a system that puts these gentle, emotional, and intelligent animals through unimaginable abuse and agony.
But there are alternatives. Eating an ethical, plant-based diet is a great first step to ensure that you don’t contribute to the suffering of pigs.
Get your free plant-based eating starter kit and be the change for animals today.
