Research into pig social cognition and emotional life over the past two decades has revealed a level of sophistication that has profound implications for how we evaluate and manage their welfare in farming systems.
The accumulated science on pig social cognition paints a picture of an animal whose subjective experience of farming is far richer and more morally significant than conventional agricultural discourse acknowledges. A pig that can play video games, form long-term social memories, and show empathy for companions is experiencing its farm environment — the social instability of mixing, the frustration of enrichment deprivation, the boredom of barren housing — in ways that engage cognitive and emotional systems of genuine complexity. This does not make pig farming inherently wrong but does raise the welfare standards we should apply to it substantially above current norms. The gap between what we know about pig inner lives and how we treat them in commercial farming is one of the largest in animal welfare.