Pigs are among the most cognitively sophisticated farm animals. Understanding their intelligence has important implications for the ethical treatment of billions of individuals in commercial production.
The cognitive and emotional sophistication of pigs has profound ethical implications for the conditions in which we raise billions of them annually. Animals capable of learning, forming relationships, experiencing optimism and pessimism, and potentially recognising themselves in mirrors cannot be treated as interchangeable production units without significant moral cost. The barren, crowded, restrictive conditions of standard intensive pig farming deny these cognitively complex animals the environmental richness and social stability that their mental capacities require for genuine welfare. Bringing the science of pig cognition into public understanding is an important step toward the cultural and regulatory changes needed to align pig farming practices with what we now know about who pigs actually are.