Science & technology | Brawling pigs

Pigs reconcile after fighting. That confirms their intelligence

Bystanders offer consolation to losers

Free range Domestic pig (Sus scrofa domesticus) piglets play fighting, UK, August 2010

“I like pigs,” Winston Churchill supposedly once said. “Dogs look up at us, cats look down on us, but pigs treat us as equals.” Whether Churchill’s contemporary George Orwell also liked pigs is less clear. But he, too, surely saw something in them that was lacking in other domestic beasts, for it was they who ended up running the show in his allegorical novel, “Animal Farm”. Pigs, then, are intelligent social creatures.

This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline “More equal than others”

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