No, pigs did not learn to fly – but they did learn to play video games. In fact, they can even have fun while playing.
A quartet of pigs – Panepinto micro pigs Ebony and Ivory, and Yorkshire pigs Hamlet and Omelette – learned to play a video game using their snouts to move an arcade-style joystick that would direct a cursor across multiple walls on a computer screen, as described in a research article published in Frontiers in Psychology. In the process, they provided scientists with new insight into the depth of pigs’ intelligence and revealed that pigs, like humans, may be able to have fun playing video games and bond with other living creatures while indulging in the sheer joy of games.
“Pigs could always work at their own pace and could end sessions at will,” said Dr. Candace Croney, lead author of the article and professor of comparative pathobiology and animal science at the Animal Welfare Science Center at Purdue University , to the Salon by email. “When we were cleaning and giving them time to interact freely with the toys and trainers that were present, it was common for them to go up the ramp and try to start a computer session even if it was not scheduled.” They continued to play even when the food distributor broke down; that dealer had been used to provide them with tasty rewards as an incentive to gamble.
“On some occasions, they probably continued to play even though the food distributor crashed, because they expected the goodies to start falling again,” explained Croney. “On other occasions, they seemed to enjoy the experience and continued only with verbal praise and affection, which, based on their behavior, they clearly liked, as they often requested. So it may have been a combination of something they liked doing the task itself, but also the positive social interactions they got at work, although they routinely received it outside of computer sessions.
Dr. Sarah T. Boysen of the Comparative Cognition Project, co-author of the article, echoed Croney’s remarks, writing to Salon that “although we may not know what the pigs were thinking, I think they, in fact, enjoyed working on the video task. They are, unsurprisingly, highly motivated by food, so that probably also played a role. “
Croney explained to Salon that scientists already knew that pigs were very smart, so the notable discovery here is not that our four-legged pig friends are a bunch of brains. Is that they were able to exhibit a highly specialized type of intelligence and learning ability that “nothing in the natural behavior or evolutionary history of the pig” would have previously indicated that they were capable of doing.
“What is different here from any other type of learning previously demonstrated, where a pig simply performs learned behavior and receives a reward, is that the pigs had to understand the very difficult concept that the thing they were manipulating (the joystick ) was having its effect on a two-dimensional computer-generated image (the cursor) that they couldn’t touch, smell or interact with directly, “Croney told Salon. “This kind of conceptual learning is a big mental leap for any animal, as it would never happen in the real world.”
The study tells us a lot about how sophisticated and intelligent pigs are. And the pigs themselves had a happy ending: they were not addicted to video games like humans, and had a good life after they no longer participated in the study.
“At the end of their time in our study, all pigs (except one that developed a serious health problem that forced us to make the difficult decision to have a veterinarian euthanize to avoid suffering) were relocated to farm sanctuaries,” wrote Croney a Salão. “Micro pigs lived their lives interacting with other animals and people in children’s zoos. Several people asked and, in retrospect, I would have thought of adding this information to the scientific article.”