Scientists at Wageningen University in the Netherlands set out to investigate whether pigs can show empathy to one another, defined by renowned primatologist Frans de Waal as ‘the capacity to be affected by and share the emotional state of another, assess the reasons for the other’s state and identify with the other, adopting his or her perspective’. They housed pigs in 16 groups of six, training two of the animals in each of the groups, Scientific American reported. The pigs were trained either to anticipate happiness or distress, by playing them music and either rewarding them with a pleasant treat such as chocolate raisins and a roomy house filled with peat, or putting them in a stressful situation, such as keeping them in isolation in a small pen. Untrained, ‘naive’ pigs were placed in a pen with a pig conditioned to expect happiness, or one that expected discomfort. All the pigs were then played the same music – a piece by Bach - used in training. Some of the trained pigs showed that they anticipated what may happen to them, either by displaying happy behaviours - such as wagging their tails and barking - or signs of stress, such as keeping their ears back, urinating and defecating. Despite most of the trained pigs failing to react at all, they were still taken to another pen, leaving the naive pigs behind, and were either rewarded or punished, depending on their training. The naive pigs, which could not have known what lay in store for their penmates, reacted to the trained pigs’ behaviour anyway. For example, when a trained pig showed it was stressed, a naive pig acted in the same way, by becoming more alert and keeping its ears back. The behaviour was even more noticeable when the untrained animals noticed the behaviour of trained ‘happy’ pigs, with the animals becoming more playful and wagging their tails. To test that the animals were responding to each other’s behaviour and not simply the music, the scientists played the naive pigs the tune. They showed no signs of changing their behaviour, indicating they were showing empathy with the trained animals. The findings were published in the journal Animal Cognition. via Occupy the FDA
Posted on: Mon, 26 Jan 2015 23:04:35 +0000