Research into pig cognitive abilities has revealed surprising complexity that has direct implications for how pigs should be housed, managed, and enriched in commercial and companion animal settings.
Pig intelligence research has consistently exceeded expectations, revealing cognitive sophistication that places pigs among the most complex farm animals. This has profound welfare implications: if pigs can learn, remember, plan, and express emotional states through cognitive biases, then environments that deny them mental challenges cause a form of suffering — cognitive impoverishment — that physical measurements alone cannot capture. Enrichment programmes informed by this research focus on variable challenges, social learning opportunities, and novelty rather than static objects. The optimism-pessimism bias test has emerged as a particularly valuable welfare assessment tool, allowing researchers to measure whether a pig's current environment is generating positive or negative affective states.