Pig Video Arcades Critique Life in the Pen (1997)

7 days ago

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Pigs Hamlet and Omelette demonstrated the ability to play video games using a joystick controlled with their snouts.
Research by Stanley Curtis suggests pigs may be as intelligent as chimpanzees and other nonhuman primates in certain cognitive tasks.
The video game experiments aim to understand pigs' thought processes and potentially develop a symbolic language for communication.
Curtis modified a joystick to make it pig-friendly and used rewards to train the pigs in cursor manipulation and icon alignment.
Pigs learned the tasks as quickly as primates but showed shorter attention spans, typically playing for about 15 minutes before tiring.
Future research will explore if pigs can use symbolic language by choosing between icons representing objects, similar to primate studies.
Curtis believes pigs are among the most intelligent farm animals and finds their quick learning abilities remarkable.

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