Pigs are the happiest species?

Surveys by scientists from the University of Pennsylvania (USA) showed that when properly farmed, pigs appear to be quite happy and positive, not only stubborn as many people often think.

Like their ancestors, the pig number 9 has only one task: eating, sleeping and giving birth. However. How much will "9's" weigh nearly 200kg to a simple video game? The results were quite unexpected.

Kristina Howard and herd of pigs on a farm in Pennsylvania.

The experiment is not really a complete game or an intelligence test, but a method of assessing the mental health of cattle. On the screen is a red square dot. Once the mouth is used, it is trained, it will be rewarded with a piece of food.

"It's not very nice, but compared to the whole, it's very smart," commented Kristina M.Horback, an animal behavior specialist from the University of Pennsylvania.

Under the influence of animal rights organizations and fast food brand customers, the livestock industry now no longer has to own each animal in a kennel, but is often locked up. Over 40 years of reform, about 20% of farms choose to graze naturally so that they can travel and interact.

Pig in experiment.

Later, the team expanded the experiment, adding a no-win white box, and also displaying offensive effects, along with a random pink box on the screen. After observing the pig herd, Horback found that pink dots are "optimistic" about life, because they hope a reward will appear. The ones that ignored the pink boxes showed signs of anxiety, fear and boredom, corresponding to the two groups that were free-grazed and locked up.

However, the goal of the study is not to find out which method is most effective in raising livestock, but to prove that pigs not only have logical intelligence but also high social interaction, equivalent to dolphin

Pigs and dolphins have developed brains to adapt to the environment.

Specifically in the free-grazing group, pigs line up to wait instead of fighting to win food when farmers pour bran on the floor. Sometimes they still scramble for each other to get their favorite place to sleep, but there is one child with the role of a leader to solve problems in strong body language to oppose the weaker. This is completely absent in pigsty.

Pigs and dolphins have developed brains to adapt to the environment. They recognize homosexuals, do maths, even trick other children to dot the red to get food. The expression of positive is also measured based on the reaction to people. However, basically, this group of pigs appears to be quite positive about psychology and seems to be "more leisurely" .

In fact, it is impossible to ask how happy they are, but at least there is a measure of the number of piglets born to assess the overall health of cattle, and the survey shows that these Pigsty pigs have the lowest productivity and quality of reproduction.