Top Ten Fascinating Facts About Pigs

Swine flu dominated the national news in 2009, when a pandemic that started in Mexico spread to the U.S. and resulted in more than 274,300 hospitalizations and 12,400 deaths. (The global death toll may have been as high as 575,400.) While this particular disease hasn’t been making headlines as often as it once did, it’s still a threat. In 2018, swine flu sickened around 120 people from at least 25 states who attended a national letter carriers’ convention in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

That same year, an outbreak of African swine fever began spreading throughout China. An official with the U.K.’s National Pig Association said that it was only a matter of time before it spread to other countries—and right she was. Since swine fever was first reported in China in August 2018, it’s been found in at least six other Asian countries and millions of pigs have been “culled.” It’s also been found in Hungary, Romania, Russia, and several other European nations.

While humans can’t get swine flu or swine fever by eating pigs, these diseases exist primarily because pigs are raised for food. And eating pig flesh certainly contributes to heart disease and other life-threatening conditions. That’s not the only reason why humans should stop raising and eating pigs, though—they’re sentient beings who feel pain just as much as dogs, cats, and other animals do.

Here are some fascinating facts about pigs that should persuade everyone to switch from pork sausage to vegan sausage:

1. Pigs form close bonds and love to snuggle with one another and with other animals. They dream, much as humans do. In their natural surroundings, they spend hours playing, sunbathing, and exploring. People who run animal sanctuaries for farmed animals often report that pigs, like humans, enjoy listening to music, playing with soccer balls, and getting massages.
2. In his book The Whole Hog: Exploring the Extraordinary Potential of Pigs, biologist Lyall Watson writes, “I know of no other animals [who] are more consistently curious, more willing to explore new experiences, more ready to meet the world with open-mouthed enthusiasm. Pigs, I have discovered, are incurable optimists and get a big kick out of just being.”
3. Pigs communicate constantly with one another. More than 20 vocalizations have been identified that they use in different situations, from wooing mates to saying, “I’m hungry!”
4. According to neuroscientist Lori Marino, Ph.D., the co-author of Thinking Pigs: Cognition, Emotion, and Personality, “We have shown that pigs share a number of cognitive capacities with other highly intelligent species such as dogs, chimpanzees, elephants, dolphins, and even humans. There is good scientific evidence to suggest we need to rethink our overall relationship to them.”
5. Newborn piglets learn to run to their mothers’ voices and to recognize their own names. Mother pigs sing to their young while nursing.
6. Professor Donald Broom,an emeritus professor of animal welfare at Cambridge University, says, “[Pigs] have the cognitive ability to be quite sophisticated. Even more so than dogs and certainly [more so than human] 3-year-olds.”
7. Pigs are clean animals. When given sufficient space, they’re careful not to soil the area where they sleep or eat. Pigs don’t “sweat like pigs”—they actually have few sweat glands and are unable to cool themselves sufficiently by sweating. They like to bathe in water or mud to keep cool. Mud also serves as “sunscreen” to protect them from sunburn.
8. Suzanne Held, who studies the cognitive abilities of farmed animals at the University of Bristol’s Centre of Behavioral Biology, says that pigs are “really good at remembering where food is located, because in their natural environment food is patchily distributed and it pays to revisit profitable food patches.”
9. The late Professor Stanley Curtis of Penn State University found that pigs can play joystick-controlled video games and are “capable of abstract representation.” He observed, “[T]here is much more going on in terms of thinking and observing by these pigs than we would ever have guessed.”
10. A pig farmer in the U.K. asked for “pig out” and “eat like a pig” to be removed from the Oxford English Dictionary, as the expressions are not only “derogatory” but also based on the inaccurate assumption that pigs are greedier than other animals.

These are just a few of the many reasons to leave pigs off your plate. Order a free vegan starter kit to get started.

Written by Heather Moore