Pigs Have Proven To Be So Smart, They Can Play Video Games With Their Snouts

Pigs Have Proven To Be So Smart, They Can Play Video Games With Their Snouts

Mikelle Leow

Gone are the times of this little piggy going to market and this little piggy staying home. These days, they’re playing video games, and considering their physical limitations, they’re pretty good at them.

Four snouted players, Hamlet, Omelette, Ebony, and Ivory, were recently trained by researchers to control an arcade-style joystick with their snouts such that it maneuvered an on-screen cursor into walls. Surprisingly, they proved to be able to comprehend the link between the controller and the game.

Each time they won a game level, the pigs were rewarded with a food pellet. However, food wasn’t the only reason they were playing the game—they appeared to also enjoy it for the resulting social gratification, as when the food dispenser broke, the gamers continued clearing levels with the encouragement of the researchers.

In their paper, the researchers described how “remarkable” it was that the pigs could understand how the game and joystick worked. Not only did they have to learn snout and screen coordination, but they also had to do so in spite of being far-sighted creatures with no hands nor opposable thumbs.

Pigs Have Proven To Be So Smart, They Can Play Video Games With Their Snouts

Mikelle Leow

This may not really be very surprising, considering the many close similarities in pig physiology with that of humans. And there is this:

At https://phys.org/news/2013-07-chimp-pig-...umans.html:

Dr. Eugene McCarthy is a Ph.D. geneticist who has made a career out of studying hybridization in animals. He now curates a biological information website called Macroevolution.net where he has amassed an impressive body of evidence suggesting that human origins can be best explained by hybridization between pigs and chimpanzees.

This may not really be very surprising, considering the many close similarities in pig physiology with that of humans. And there is this:

At https://phys.org/news/2013-07-chimp-pig-...umans.html:

I've looked at the work of Eugene McCarthy in the past. What struck me was his level-headed approach. He is an acknowledged expert in animal hybrids. On the areas under discussion, he doesn't make any claims or imply any particular belief. Only a recommendation that this is worthy of further study. For reasons which may be primarily emotional or religious, there has been a reluctance by others to take the subject seriously. 

It is odd though that medical research into treatments for human diseases is often carried out using pigs - because of their great similarity in physiology to humans. One might ask why chimpanzees are not the preferred testing-ground, given how commonly it is asserted that they are our closest animal relatives.