The four pigs came to win. If they played well, they received delicious dog food (they used to receive M & Ms, but humans decided they were too sugary). Again and again, when asked by researchers to complete a video game task – guiding a cursor with a joystick, a kind of rudimentary Pong– they did it with impressive skill.
Researchers started putaking care of pigs in computerized tasks in the late 1990s, and although the results have received occasional press coverage over the years, no peer-reviewed research on the experiments was published until today, ordinary paper in the magazine Frontiers in Psychology. The scientists found that despite the animals’ right and visual restrictions, pigs were able to understand and reach goals in the simple computer games.
“What they have managed to do is to perform well above the chance of reaching these targets,” said Candace Croney, director of the Animal Welfare Science Center at Purdue University and lead author of the article, by telephone. “It is so far above chance that it is very clear that they had some conceptual understanding of what they were being asked to do.”
The published research is the long-awaited fruit of some 20 years of work that began when Croney was at Purdue University, working with the prolific pig researcher Stanley Curtis. The project followed the efforts of two Yorkshire pigs, Hamlet and Omelet, and two micro pigs from Panepinto, Ebony and Ivory, as they tried to move a cursor to an illuminated area on the computer screen.
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“They beg to play video games,” Curtis said the AP in 1997. “They beg to be the first to get out of their pens, then go up the ramp to play.”
It was an uphill battle for the pigs. The joysticks were equipped for primate testing, so hoofed pigs had to use their snouts and mouths to get the job done. All four pigs had long-range vision, so the screens had to be placed at an ideal distance for the pigs to see the targets. There were additional limitations for Yorkshire pigs. Raised to grow fast, the heavier pigs could not stand for long.
“While there may have been some physical limitations to how well the pigs could see the screen or manipulate the joystick, they clearly understood the connection between their own behavior, the joystick, and what was happening on the screen,” Lori Marino, a neuroscientist. affiliated with the current newspaper, said in an email. Marino, who directs the Whale Sanctuary Project, has long studied the cognition, intelligence and self-awareness of mammals, including pigs. “It is really proof of their cognitive flexibility and ingenuity that they were able to find ways to manipulate the joystick, despite the fact that the test setup was often difficult for them to get physically involved.”
“What makes these discoveries even more important is that the pigs in this study demonstrated self-agency,” added Marino, “which is the ability to recognize that actions themselves make a difference”.
The pigs learned a series of commands to make their lives easier, just like those of the researchers. They learned instructions similar to what you would teach a dog – sit, come, wait away from its pens when they needed cleaning – as well as pick up their toys when the work of playing video games was over.
“At one point, they were getting really good at picking up their toys and not so good at cleaning themselves,” said Croney. “I was practically becoming a pig nursery, walking around and separating them. So we started to teach them how to put things back in place. “
When the survey was completed, Yorkshire pigs were adopted by the owners of a bed and breakfast, where they lived their lives on the farm. Ebony and Ivory ended up retiring to a children’s zoo. Croney said that even years after the experiments, she went to visit Hamlet, who heard her voice and “came galloping” across the pasture to say hello.
Pigs may not have the skillful fingers of a primate or the dismal appearance of a puppy, but cognitively they are competing steadily. Winston Churchill once said: “Dogs look at you, cats look at you with contempt. Give me a pig! He looks you in the eye and treats you as an equal. ”It’s past time to give the pigs the respect they deserve.