The Unexpected Genius of Pigs

The origin of the species

By and large, a pig is a docile and benign beast. There are times when it’s best to steer clear, as we’ll discover, but with some understanding they’re generally easy to read. Instinctively, I think, before reaching out to scratch a flank or rub behind an ear, we’ll talk to them. There is something about pigs that always prompts us to do this. They respond to human voices, just as we respond to them. We speak very different languages, but the tone of both a grunt and our greeting seems to effortlessly cross the divide.

The wild boar, on the other hand, is a very different creature. Visiting the outskirts of Bucharest on a work trip recently, I decided to use some free time to go for a run. I have always been a runner (apart from the period when Butch and Roxi devoured my time). I find it helps to clear my head if I’ve been writing all day, and basically serves both my mental and physical health. That day, unfamiliar with the city, I planned a route on Google Maps. I had assumed I could plot a circuit that might take in a park with a lake and suchlike. I just hadn’t realised that this quarter of the Romanian capital contained a vast swathe of dense forest. From above, this dark and ragged expanse looked completely out of keeping with the grid of avenues surrounding it, one of which I would have to follow to pick up the trail path. Aware that stray dogs roamed the streets, I asked at the hotel reception if it would be wise.

‘No problem,’ the receptionist told me. ‘The dogs are harmless if you leave them alone, but in the forest you must watch out for the boar.’ Her English, and my non-existent Romanian, didn’t allow for finding out more. I just thanked her, smiled, and headed outside, where exhaust-stained snow had been shovelled to each side of the avenue.

Despite being dressed in technical shorts and a luminous Lycra top, with the receptionist’s warning in mind I felt like an age-old character from Grimms’ Fairy Tales. All the way to the forest, no more than a mile at most, I dwelled on what I might face. I passed lone street dogs that paid me no attention, and a Rottweiler behind a fence that chased alongside me for a while. It was noisy, but I wasn’t alarmed. We see dogs of every temperament. They live among us, unlike the animal I had been warned about, and as I approached the trailhead I felt as if I was leaving my world and entering one that belonged to them.

I have never seen a wild boar for real. I know they’re beginning to populate pockets of the UK once more, but I still think of them as a livestock version of the Loch Ness Monster. Having become hunted into extinction in the seventeenth century, their quiet reappearance in forested regions from Scotland to the south coast of England is largely believed to have begun in the 1980s as a result of escapes from captivity. Today, it’s estimated that 4,000 wild boar could be at large in the British countryside. It may not sound like many, but an adult male can weigh in at 150kg of muscle and tusk, and is unlikely to turn tail if startled, in the manner of a rabbit or deer. In rural parts of Europe, however, especially to the East, the wild boar is commonplace, and this was uppermost in my mind on leaving the avenue behind and heading deep into the trail.

With my running shoes crunching through the snow and the low sun hanging behind the trees, I found myself becoming all eyes and ears. The only thing I knew about wild boar was that as territorial creatures they could be aggressive when disturbed, and here I was breezing through their kingdom without a pass. I admit to feeling some apprehension, seeing movement in the thickets when there was none, and I picked up my pace along with my heart rate on registering the sound of something scramble away. When I heard a distant but guttural snort my nerve deserted me completely. In my mind, I faced imminent attack by a beast that suddenly embodied my greatest fears. As casually as I could, I turned and ran back the way I had come.

‘You were lucky,’ the receptionist told me when I reported the experience on my return. I am pretty sure she was simply telling me what I needed to hear. There was every chance that I had just been startled by my own shadow, but as a hotel guest I hadn’t paid to be ridiculed. Nevertheless, I returned to my room with a renewed sense that we are hardwired to be wary of wild boar. Like the bear, it’s a creature that we consider to exist across a divide – one that represents danger, should we venture far from home.

The crossing

With no nice hotels to hide out in, or room service to cater for their needs, our ancestors were right to be wary of the bear and the boar when they ventured into the woods and forests. After all, these creatures had a significant advantage in their domain: they would be aware of your presence before you saw them, which would be sure to unsettle anyone but the hunter. So they were best left alone.

And yet the wild boar viewed the world beyond their own through different eyes. Unlike the bear, the boar ventured out from their kingdom and into ours. By extension, they duly broke the spell between man and beast. I like to think they did so with some trepidation, crossing the line under the cover of night to claim the scraps that had been discarded on the outskirts. In a sense, they had found a way into human life that presented no threat. If anything, by clearing the ground of waste that would otherwise attract vermin, these pioneering forebears of the common pig offered something back, and thereby laid the blueprint for a relationship that would thrive.

‘The boar really is quite a wild animal,’ Professor Mendl points out when considering how we took things to another level on discovering a taste for the meat. ‘Some would have been bolder than others, and willing to interact with people, and so the selection and breeding process would have been gradual.’

At one with the pig

Studying fossils, it’s possible to look back through time and see the pig evolve as humans moved from foraging to farming. For the swineherds through the ages, however, the emergence of the docile beast from its wild ancestor would have been imperceptible. Every generation continued the work of the last, slowly shaping form and nature through one century and on to the next. The tail coiled as the skull broadened and the nose flattened into a snout. The dark bristles softened and yielded to a pink and hairless skin, while the ferocity and fury that defined a wild boar under fire burned out to reveal the gentle soul we recognise today.

In many ways, the pig allowed itself to become domesticated in order to earn a place in our world. In changing itself for ever, and submitting to our needs, it brought us closer together.

Throughout the ages, our relationship has become ever more tightly intertwined. The pig assumes the final position in the Chinese zodiac, having shown up last when Jade the Emperor called a gathering of animals. In this story, the pig is celebrated for its honesty and determination, having admitted it fell asleep along the way, and yet it’s believed this might also be where it picked up a reputation for being lazy.

Other areas of folklore see the pig ascribed with different qualities. In Ancient Egypt, the pig was associated with Set, god of storms and disorder, and by Native Americans as a herald of rain; while the Celts considered it to be an icon of fertility and abundance. Pigs have impacted on religion, most notably in being unfit for consumption under laws of both Islam and Judaism. Buddhism portrays a deity called Marici as a beautiful woman in the lotus position astride seven sows, and the New Testament tells the story of the exorcism of the Gerasene demoniac, in which Jesus cured a man possessed by casting the evil spirits into a herd of swine.

Across the world, from one culture to another, pigs have come to represent extremes of the human spirit, from sloth, gluttony and dirtiness to irrepressibility and sheer lust for life. There is no middle ground. Love or loathe the common pig, it has made its presence known.

Today, it is believed that the world pig population exceeds one billion. The vast majority are raised for meat on an industrial scale, with breeds such as the Large White and Land Race, Duroc and Piétrain optimised for fast growth and large litters. While pig farming became big business after the Second World War, rare breeds have seen a renaissance in recent decades. Whether driven by welfare issues or the texture and taste of the meat from pre-industrialised breeds, there’s something reassuring about the sight of an old-time pig turning the soil under the sun.

Visit any smallholding or select farm and you’ll find the Gloucester Old Spot, the Berkshire and the Tamworth, the Oxford Sandy and Black, and the Saddleback. While these breeds are physically distinct from one another, with some showing behavioural traits such as the Tamworth’s remarkable escape skills, you’ll discover that each pig also possesses a force of character and spirit that immediately defines one from another.

Approach a pen or a field of pigs and you can be guaranteed a greeting. Bold or shy, they’ll always register your presence – especially if you bring something to eat – and never cease talking to you. From The Three Little Pigs to George Orwell’s revolutionary swine, Winnie-the-Pooh’s timid friend, Piglet, to Miss Piggy, Wilbur and Babe, we have anthropomorphised pigs in the stories we tell one another to better understand ourselves.

Pigs are far from human, however. With outsized ears and disc-shaped snouts there is something unearthly about them, and yet eye to eye, that connection with us is there. What goes through their minds is something we can only wonder at. Be it driven by emotion, instinct or a blend of both, the bond we share has strengthened over time and continues to grow. Just look at advances in modern medicine. Not only has the pig genome been sequenced, opening up their inner world, we have established that our anatomical and physiological make-up – including our cardiovascular systems – are remarkably similar. While we already call upon pig tissue in some life-saving surgical procedures, there will surely come a time in the near future when the pig becomes a viable donor for organ transplants.

In a sense, our hearts already beat as one.

3

The Mind of a Pig

Strands

The animal kingdom will always be a mystery to us. We can explore it in many illuminating ways, from a biological or behavioural perspective, but we will never share that singular strand that binds a species together. As humans, we understand each other in a way that the dog and the cow can only observe from their own world. In the same way, when we peer into the realm of the pig, we do so from a step away.

So, in asking ourselves what makes an animal like a pig tick, let’s not be afraid to call upon our imaginations to bridge the gap. George Orwell did just that in Animal Farm by proposing that, ‘being the cleverest’, the organisation of the livestock into a force to be reckoned with should fall naturally to the swine. In the same way, we’ll never truly know whether a pig feels love or grief, calculates, deliberates or daydreams, of course, but if we take a leap of faith and accept that it’s as sentient a creature as we are then we have the vocabulary to explore that missing strand.

Survival of the smartest

Butch, my not-so-minipig, lived in the shadow of his so-called sister. Growing up together, they had certainly bonded like siblings. They shared the same sleeping quarters, flopped side by side with their snouts poking out, rose at the same time as the cockerels and then picked and foraged their way through each day.

Size informs the porcine equivalent of a pecking order, and this dictated that Roxi was the dominant pig. At feeding time, she could shove Butch to one side with such force that it could knock him off his trotters. I found this alarming at first, and worried about a breakfast-related injury. I took to filling their big rubber feeding bowl and then trying to engineer things so that Butch could get there first. This involved standing between Roxi and the bowl. Then I found that Roxi would just try to barge me out of the way, so that strategy didn’t last long.

Despite her insistence on breakfasting before Butch, she never finished the pig nuts I had measured into the bowl. This might have been down to the fact that Roxi couldn’t manage double helpings, or perhaps she purposely left enough for him. Either way, Butch always got his breakfast. It’s just he only ever did so on her terms. Until, that is, Butch began to use his brains.

To a certain extent, he was only following Roxi’s example. She had figured out that by making a lot of noise from the moment she woke, I would come running like her personal servant. When I say noise, I mean a blood-curdling squeal that must come close to what would accompany the opening of the gates of hell. As she did so at the crack of dawn, it always forced me to career from the house in a half-tied dressing gown in a bid to shut her up before every resident along the lane turned against us.

Over time, it made me so anxious that I took to setting my alarm just ahead of her call to arms. That way, I would at least have time to slip on my wellington boots rather than bound there barefoot. And it worked, for a while. If I crept down to the pigpen, and lifted the latch without making a squeak, I could leave out breakfast and be back in bed before Roxi had a chance to rise and draw breath.

Several weeks into my new strategy, sleep deprived but with the peace of the neighbourhood intact, I found myself under observation as I quietly filled the bowl. I paused and glanced across to the pigs’ sleeping quarters. In the breaking light, a pair of beady eyes peered back at me.

‘Shhh,’ I whispered at Butch, and finished the task at hand.

I retreated to the garden and closed the gate behind me. As I did so, the little black pig slipped out into the open so quietly that all I heard was the crackle of straw. With the sun just a promise behind the woods, he stretched and then crossed to the bowl. I fully expected Roxi to follow. Instead, as he began to pick and graze, she slumbered on with barely a twitch of her ears. It wasn’t until I was back in bed, in fact, with my alarm reset for an extra half an hour, that I heard the familiar rumble and squeal. Only this time it stopped just as soon as it had started. In the silence that followed, curiosity got the better of me. I crossed to the window overlooking the garden, peeled back a curtain and peeped outside. There, in the first bars of sunshine, just as Roxi finished guzzling greedily on what looked like a fair share of pig nuts, I watched the cunning little boar make his way back to bed for a post-breakfast snooze.

As a one-off, I considered the moment worth sharing with my wife and kids. Over the course of the next few mornings, when I found Butch waiting for me beside his snoring partner, and then repeating the same trick, I marked him down as being as shrewd as he was small.

It took a while for Roxi to rumble him, and prime herself to wake up just as soon as Butch slipped from their bed. Naturally, she charged out and reclaimed her position as the pig entitled to first pickings. Butch seemed resigned to the situation, and took himself off for a wee. As he negotiated his way back to the sound of crunching and munching from his sister, I tossed him a handful of conciliatory nuts to keep him occupied while he waited.

The pig in the labyrinth

Professor Mike Mendl responds to my story like a seasoned parent.

‘Initially, your pig might well have been screaming to express hunger,’ he says. ‘But if you’re rewarding that behaviour they will learn from it.’

‘I didn’t feel I had much choice,’ I tell him.

‘If it was a child you would ignore it.’

I know he’s quite right, of course. Maybe Roxi would’ve desisted had I not given in and served breakfast under my own terms. But then I am quite sure many households within a 500-metre radius would’ve countered by serving me with a noise abatement notice. Regardless of my handling, I am interested in the fact that each pig sought to manipulate the situation to their advantage. Did that make them smart, sneaky or both? As the Professor is one of the country’s foremost experts in pig cognition, he seems pleased to move on from my questionable swine-herding skills and on to his specialist subject.

‘The question of whether some animals can be deceptive began with a study of chimps,’ he says. ‘The original study featured a chimp called Bella. The researchers placed food in a certain place in a field for her. She would take the food and then return to her group. Eventually, the adult male sussed her out, followed her and took the food for himself. Next time, Bella then showed an apparent deception by leading him away from the food before rushing back to get it.’

It’s a story that’s as cute as it is enlightening, but Professor Mendl is keen to point out that this doesn’t mean chimps could mask a winning poker hand. ‘It’s sophisticated,’ he says, ‘but we’re not certain that what they’re doing is intentional deception. It’s just because they’re primates and they look a bit like us that people are ready to draw that conclusion. With pigs,’ he suggests, ‘we are more sceptical.’

In his research, and careful not to fall into the trap of wanting to believe that pigs process thoughts and feelings just as we do, the Professor and two colleagues set up a maze with a food source hidden in a one location. Releasing a pig into the maze, they observed it forage around and figure out how to find the food. On the second visit, the pig demonstrated a sharp sense of spatial awareness as much as a memory by heading straight for the source.

For the next stage of the task, a bigger, more dominant companion followed the informed pig into the maze.

‘Over trials, the bigger pig twigged that the other one knew where to go,’ says the Professor. ‘Eventually, when the informed pig went to the food, the bigger pig followed and displaced it.’

I nod, mindful of the way that Roxi displaced Butch from the breakfast bowl, effectively an all-out assault.

‘After that happened a couple of times,’ the Professor continues, ‘the one with the knowledge would not go to the food bucket straight away. Now, one possibility is that the informed pig thought, “Ah, the dominant pig keeps getting to the food and so I’m going to do something different.” On the other hand,’ he says, ‘the informed pig may have just been avoiding the dominant pig because negative things kept happening. Then, once the dominant pig was out of the way, it hurried back for the food. Either way, it’s still a knowledge thing. They’re picking up what to do by association. Once they understand what predicts whether they get – or fail to get – the reward they can be very quick to modify their behaviour.’

I consider my experience in the light of Professor Mendl’s findings. Did Butch and Roxi deceive and exploit each other to get a first crack at the breakfast bowl? In my view, each one had processed the situation they were faced with and worked out how to put themselves first.

According to the Professor’s findings, the key to understanding what makes a pig tick is to recognise its ability to learn. He tells me, for example, how a colleague found some evidence that pigs can grow to understand the concept of reflections. This involved releasing a pig into an arena with a mirror placed just beyond the far end of a barrier. From a certain angle, it enabled the pig to see a food source on the other side. Rather than crashing into the glass, the Professor tells me, the pig appeared to work out how to use the reflection to guide it back around the far end of the barrier in order to reach the food. Whether a pig can recognise its own reflection, which would suggest a degree of self-awareness, we simply don’t know, but we both suspect there is a great deal going on between the ears.

Professor Mendl and his colleagues continue to devise fascinating ways to investigate what degree pigs can be said to be smart or sly. To the best of my knowledge, and under deeply unscientific conditions, all I can say is that I knew two that had repeatedly taken advantage of me.

Wendy’s world

‘I do think pigs are very knowing, but there is a big variation between smart pigs and thick pigs. It’s the same with people, really.’

Wendy Scudamore is so passionate about pigs that it guides her outlook on life. Hidden away on a bucolic farm on the slopes of the Golden Valley in Gloucestershire, her cottage overlooks steep-sided hills and pockets of forest veiled in early-morning mist. Wales is just one field away to the West, with a view of the Black Mountains towards Brecon and a vast, ever-changing sky overhead. On a visit one morning in late spring, I am stopped at the gate by an advance guard of little piglets. They’re rooting around on the farm track for what’s left of a scattering of feed pellets. They’re so locked into their search that I can’t be sure if they’re aware of my presence. I suspect they probably are.

Five minutes later, having entered on their terms, I knock at the farmhouse door to be greeted by a dark-haired, elegant figure in muddy overalls patched at the seat with silver duct tape. Wendy has lived here since 1992, but it’s more than just a home. She introduces me to her son, just back from university and off to walk his dog, while out in the yard and across the fields and paddocks are the pigs that make this a remarkable little world. As she puts on the kettle for tea, checking I’m OK with fresh goat’s milk as that’s all she has, I am struck by how so many of her family pictures feature children through the years, cuddling piglets or being photo-bombed by lumbering fat sows. Wendy is, without a doubt, a pig person, and I am here to be enlightened by her.

‘I used to promote the intelligence of pigs by taking an agility course around agricultural shows,’ she tells me over a distinct but enjoyable cup of tea. ‘I had one lovely pig who used to do it to music. She would follow me round and I just sort of told her what to do. I wanted to show that they aren’t just lumps of meat you can stick in a pen, rear and eat. A pig is a sentient, emotional and very affectionate creature, and I hoped that it would encourage people to become more concerned about the pork that they buy.’

As the owner of an unruly Miniature Dachshund and a selectively deaf Greek rescue, I am heartened to learn Wendy believes that, like dogs, some pigs are more amenable to picking up tricks than others.

‘In 2010, I was invited to train three little ginger pigs to appear at the Cannes Film Festival,’ she tells me. ‘I did it with a clicker, which drove the soundman mad, but one pig in particular would do everything I asked. Brad was fantastic. He would sit and wait for me to tell him what to do, whereas the other two just wouldn’t listen. Nicole Pigman was the worst,’ she says, and I try to keep a poker face. ‘I just couldn’t get her attention. They were from the same litter, just different genders.’

‘Is it a boy-girl thing?’ I ask.

‘The third pig was a boar, and though he was quite smart, it was Brad who stood out as the star. I think it came to down to concentration span,’ she suggests, and then tells me Brad is still alive and well and enjoying his autumn years up in one of the paddocks. She talks about him like an old thespian friend in retirement. As her stories continue, it strikes me that Wendy has formed a lifelong bond with every one of her pigs that begins with her recognition that these are creatures of significant intelligence.

After Bertie

With my limited success in dog training, I know that treats are a key motivator. The clicker is only effective once the dog associates the sound with something that makes it drool, but do pigs operate on the same basis? When I ask Professor Mendl, I am surprised and not a little delighted by his considered view.