If you're keen for that last piece of bacon you might want to think twice. It turns out our swine friends could be much more intelligent - both rationally speaking and emotionally speaking - than previously thought.
One example of a brilliantly bright boar is Moritz, a pig who lives in Germany with his owner, Nicolle von Eberkopf. In this video posted below, von Eberkopf shows Moritz solving a wooden block puzzle in under a minute, a feat some young humans can struggle with.
While it's clear Moritz has had a bit of training, according to The Dodo, it still makes his feat no less impressive as for many years people viewed pigs as dumber, dirtier animals. Now scientific evidence is coming out to the contrary.
In an experiment conducted by Wageningen University in Holland, researchers showed that pigs share both the stress and happiness of their pen mates, The Daily Mail reports. This finding illustrates traits of human-like empathy and compassion, which are all hallmarks of a previously unstudied emotional intelligence present in pigs.
Beyond emotional intelligence findings of logical and rational intelligence have also been noted when observing pigs. In the 1990s studies conducted at the University of Pennsylvania showed pigs could be trained to move a video game cursor in order to select images they'd seen before versus ones they hadn't. The accuracy was remarkable and only previously seen in chimpanzees, The Independent reports.
Lori Marino, a neuroscientist and the executive director of the Kimmela Center for Animal Advocacy, stated in a press release, according to The Dodo, following her studies with pigs being published in the International Journal of Comparative Psychology: "We have shown that pigs share a number of cognitive capacities with other highly intelligent species such as dogs, chimpanzees, elephants, dolphins, and even humans. There is good scientific evidence to suggest we need to rethink our overall relationship to them."
