You might think youre smart...but chances are these animals are WAY smarter. Pigheaded: How Smart are Swine? 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.” Beyond that, comparing pigs to dogs (or children) is like comparing, well, apples to oranges. Animals develop specializations according to their surroundings and trying to draw cross-species comparisons is not very meaningful. “An octopus is evolved to live in one environment, bats in another environment, pigs in another environment,” says Michael Mendel, a professor of animal behavior and welfare at the University of Bristol. “So trying to compare them directly is quite difficult.” But back to the video games. 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. Some studies have shown that scent is so important to a pig that if you cover up a part of a pigs’ cheek, they have trouble recognizing each other because that is where they emit a certain pheromone. Croney’s pigs were pampered and stimulated. They lived in large indoor runs and had lots of toys to play with to break up the monotony of the day. Croney says the pigs were extremely clean, that they housebroke themselves and that at the end of a play session they put their own toys away in a big tub. Of course, it’s not all videogames and housekeeping. Some researchers have delved into the pigs’ dark side. Researcher Mendel, for instance, asked the question: Can pigs exploit and deceive each other? His pigs were placed in an arena and confronted with a choice of buckets, only one of which contained food. Each pig was given two chances to locate the food. On the second run, the food remained in the same place, so the pigs could rely on memory to locate their meal. But there was a catch: On the second run, each pig was also accompanied by a bigger pig, a pig who did not have the benefit of knowing where the food was, but did have the benefit of bulk. “So for several days we repeated this,” says Mendel, “And we found that the pig who was naive, if you like, he was going in without knowing where the food was, seems to cotton on that the other pig gets the food earlier and seems to develop following type responses. So they get better and better at keeping up with the knowledgeable pig and because they’re bigger is able to displace them from the food source.” This, of course, was not a happy development for the smaller, knowledgeable pig. ** source:modernfarmer/2014/03/pigheaded-smart-swine/ video source: https://youtube/watch?v=TuXYXq8Lznw
Posted on: Wed, 24 Sep 2014 21:38:53 +0000
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