Pigs are among the most cognitively sophisticated farm animals. Understanding their intelligence has profound implications for how we think about their welfare in commercial systems.
The cognitive complexity of pigs makes their standard commercial living conditions harder to justify ethically. Animals capable of planning, deception, emotional empathy, and sustained attention to problems are animals with rich inner lives. These inner lives can contain positive experiences — curiosity, satisfaction, social pleasure — or negative ones: frustration, fear, chronic boredom. The barren, overcrowded, socially unstable environments of many intensive pig systems are fundamentally incompatible with the welfare needs of animals of this cognitive sophistication. Welfare science is increasingly making this argument not just on the basis of pain but on the basis of cognitive and emotional complexity.