Some pig!

Tool use has never been reported in pigs. Until now. Scientists observing Visayan warty pigs in Paris in 2019 observed the animals using bark to dig for food and to help them construct nests. This led the scientist and her team to publish the first ever report of tool use in pigs.

While extraordinary, what is really surprising is that this behaviour had never been reported before. Pigs are widely recognised to be highly intelligent and have many of the traits associated with tool use. Now we are witnessing them demonstrating behaviours long thought to be the preserve of humans and other great apes.

Since we domesticated pigs 9,000 years ago, they have become an important part of our diets, clothing, and even our medicine. Humans consume more than a billion pigs each year, but few people spend more than a brief passing moment with them in modern life.

Sensitive

Today, they are largely locked away and out of view, in barren industrialised or rudimental agricultural worlds. Yet, those who do share time with them often remark upon their considerable intelligence, their cognitive abilities -which are said to exceed those of dogs - and emotions which are described as not unlike our own.  

In the UK, ten million pigs are slaughtered for food each year. Many of these pigs spend their lives on factory farms, deprived of the ability to express natural behaviours, where cutting off piglets’ tails without anaesthesia or pain relief to prevent stress-induced tail biting is common practice.

Growing unease with the ethics of supporting this industry is one of the factors driving more people to consume less meat.

Yet there’s another population of pigs less spoken of who are suffering and dying behind closed doors, the thousands used each year in research and testing in British laboratories, most commonly subjected to tests that attempt to demonstrate the safety, quality or effectiveness of medicines and other products.

Guidelines set out that in the UK new drugs are tested in two species of animals, one of which cannot be a rodent. This is therefore often pigs, dogs or monkeys. These sensitive animals may be force-fed or injected with a substance, sometimes daily for weeks or even months, before being killed and dissected.

Emotions

That pigs are sentient is now formally recognised by the UK Government in the recently enacted Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act, which acknowledges that all vertebrate animals experience feelings including joy and pain.

But cutting-edge behavioural science goes further than this, demonstrating that pigs possess the capacity for complex cognitive feats, including time perception and perspective-taking, as well as social discrimination abilities.

Another study provided compelling new evidence that they respond emotionally to music. The recent development of a method for determining pigs’ emotions from their grunts and squeals could offer even more insights into the minds of these intriguing animals.

Meanwhile, around 80,000 pigs still suffer in experiments in the EU each year. Minimum legal housing standards are even lower in Europe than the UK – where a fully grown pig is afforded an area of floor space smaller than a double bed.

Medicines

Cruelty Free International’s recent expose of a contract testing facility in Spain found pigs housed in tiers in a dark room on a hard, slatted floor with no resting areas, bedding or enrichment.

While attention-grabbing experiments like Elon Musk implanting Neuralink chips into pigs’ brains or pig-to-human xenotransplantation make headlines, the reality of much animal testing is decades old and tests that are not validated to modern standards.

The Biotechnology Innovation Organisation (BIO) - the world’s largest trade association representing biotechnology companies, academic institutions, state biotechnology centres and related organisations across the United States and in more than 30 other nations, reports that 92 percent of drugs fail in human trials even though they passed pre-clinical tests, including animal tests.

This inefficiency contributes to the drug development crisis – characterised by high failure rates, long lead times and soaring research and development costs – which results in fewer safe, effective and affordable medicines for those who need them.

Laboratories

Animal-free safety testing is evolving rapidly and is already outperforming animal testing where implemented. For example, a combination of computer cell and chemistry based methods is more predictive of human allergic skin reactions than the most widely-used mouse test.

An ingenious device the size of a USB stick, known as a “liver-chip”, can detect a drug’s potential to cause liver injury – one of the most common safety reasons for withdrawing a drug from clinical trials – with more accuracy than tests on animals.

As modern behavioural science reveals more to us about the complex inner lives of pigs, let’s not only keep these intelligent animals off our plates, but out of our laboratories too. Animal testing isn’t a straightforward consumer issue in the way that food is – for as long as tests on animals are a regulatory requirement, boycotting medicines is both dangerous and futile.

But we can all make an effort to speak up for those whose grunts and squeals are so often conveniently ignored, by contacting our MPs, signing a petition or even just starting conversations with friends and family. Meanwhile, Cruelty Free International will continue its work to keep pigs – and all other animals – out of laboratories, worldwide.

This Author

Dr Sam Saunders is the UK science programme manager and Kerry Postlewhite is director of public affairs at Cruelty Free International.