These dudes are on their way to math club
Since there was no story yesterday, I’ll do two today, but just so I don’t create a backlog in your reading list, I’ll mash ‘em into this single post, and even make them about the same overall topic. Presto! Yes, I’m magic like that. Oh, and the theme is pigs are smart. Shazam!
In our first story, we get to find out about mirrors and how pigs can see right through them. Except that they can’t, or more importantly, they don’t. Rather than look for the food they see in the mirror behind the mirror, pigs are able to figure out the magic of reflections and track down the appropriate angle to get the hidden food. This is something that a lot of animals can’t do, or maybe more accurately, nobody’s thought to test them all yet. Still, it’s a test of higher awareness, and pigs nailed it.
In the other story, AKA story part deux, there’s a video that starts automatically, so mute your sound accordingly if you’re at work, or maybe turn it up so people notice, because this is pretty cool. There are farms out there with some kind of RFID-based system for their pigs wherein each pig gets a collar with a tag, and that tag determines how much food the pig gets, and here’s the key – the food gets dished out once per day. The pigs have figured out the collar equals food, so those wishing seconds have chosen not to inform the pigs who have learned how to remove the collars altogether, which means some clever pigs are getting more than one meal a day, and other pigs are going hungry, and some farmer paid a bunch of money to prove that he or she is feeding the pigs properly and it’s totally not working and someone needs to get fired. Four legs good and all that.
I realize that most pig stories involving intelligence involve food, but it’s worth noting how the inverse is so often true when it comes to humans. For every story about a pig being able to go to great lengths to grab a snack, there’s a story going around about, say, someone calling 911 because the local fast food joint is out of french fries. There’s a (possibly growing) percentage of the population who thinks it’s their right to eat bacon but at the same time, if there was some temporary situation (say, a one week power outage) they wouldn’t be able to demonstrate a tenth of the ingenuity shown by pigs to find food. Chew on that instead of a pork chop, would you?
{ 1 trackback }