No, pigs have not learned to fly – but 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 how to play a video game by using their snouts to move an arcade-style joystick that shows a pointer in different walls on a computer screen, as described in a research article published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology. In the process, they gave scientists a new insight into the depths of pig intelligence and revealed that pigs, like humans, can both have fun playing video games and connecting with other living creatures while delighting themselves in the sheer joy of play.
“The pigs were always allowed to 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 Purdue University’s Center for Animal Welfare Science, told Salon. email. “When we were cleaning and giving time to communicate freely with toys and coaches who were there, it was common for them to walk up the driveway and try to start a computer session, even if it was not scheduled. . ” They continued to play, even when the food distributor broke; that dispenser was used to give them nice rewards as an incentive to play.
“On some occasions, they probably kept playing, even though the food distributor got stuck because they were hoping treats would start falling again,” Croney explained. “At other times, it seemed like they enjoyed the experience and would continue to just go on with verbal praise and pets, which they clearly enjoyed based on their behavior, as they asked so often. So that was it.” a combination of something they enjoyed doing the task themselves, but also the positive social interactions they had while working, even though they often got it outside of their computer sessions. ‘
Dr Sarah T. Boysen of the Comparative Cognition Project, a co-author of the article, quoted Croney’s observations and wrote to Salon that ‘although we may not know what the pigs thought, I think they did. enjoy the video task. This is no surprise, and it’s highly food motivated, and it probably played a role as well. ‘
Croney explained to Salon that scientists already knew that pigs are pretty intelligent, and the remarkable finding here is not that our four-legged pig friends are a hairy bunch. It is that they were able to manifest a very specialized type of intelligence and learning ability that ‘nothing in the natural behavior or evolutionary history of the pig’ would have previously shown that they were capable of doing.
‘What is different here from any other doctrine shown earlier, where a pig merely performs a learned behavior and receives a reward, is that the pigs had to understand the very difficult concept that the thing they manipulated (the joystick ) an effect on a two-dimensional computer-generated image (the pointer) with which they can not directly touch, smell or communicate with each other, “Croney told Salon.” This kind of conceptual learning is a big leap for any animal, for it will 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 did not become addicted to video games like humans and had good lives after they were no longer involved in the study.
“At the end of their study during the study, all pigs (except one who developed a serious health problem were required to make the difficult decision to have a veterinarian kill him to avoid suffering), to farm reserves, “Croney writes to Salon. “The micro pigs have lived out their lives interacting with other animals and people in zoos for children. We have already had several people inquire, and in retrospect I wish we had thought to add this information to the scientific article.”