A couple of months ago I wrote a follow-up to my chicken blog which featured the amazing Jane Howorth MBE and her charity, the British Hen Welfare Trust. With that in mind, I thought I'd revisit my blog on the Curly Tails Pig Sanctuary (the wonderful re-homing charity set up by another amazing woman, Jane Scott) and learn something more about pigs. Are they really as stupid and as dirty as people say or is there more to these creatures than meets the eye? 

So let's de-bunk the first myth, pigs are anything but stupid, in fact they can outsmart dogs and chimpanzees, even three year children in cognitive ability tests. At just three weeks of age, a piglet can learn and respond to it's name as well as understand roll-over and sit commands.They learn tricks faster than a dog, can complete a jig-saw puzzle and can even prioritise important tasks.

Their memories are great too, they remember people and can distinguish between objects. Studies have shown that they can remember where food is set aside in up to 8 different locations and know where the small and the big treats are stashed away. Obviously they head for the big treats, they're not fools.

They even pass the "Mirror Test", a test very few animal species can do. Cambridge University's Professor Donald Broom set up a study which demonstrated that pigs could use a mirror as a tool to locate food otherwise not visible. So unlike most animals, these beauties know that mirrors are reflectors not  windows.

And as for cleanliness, when they live in their natural surroundings, pigs are incredibly clean animals and keep their feeding and toilet areas apart, something that's rarely possible on factory farms. 

True they love rolling around in mud but this's due to them having very few sweat glands and a high body fat ratio. The mud not only lets them cool down naturally in order to maintain an ideal core temperature but also acts like a sunscreen to protect that pale skin. 

• These incredibly sociable creates love to communicate with each other and have at least 20 different grunts, oinks and squeals for different situations such as expressing hunger or wooing a mate. Mother pigs when nursing their piglets even "sing" to them. And they like to make themselves heard, at 115 decibels their squeal is higher than a the sound of a Concorde!
• Their ideal sleeping position is snout to snout.
• In the 1990's researchers  at Pennsylvania State University demonstrated that pigs had a genuine aptitude for video games. A study headed by Dr. Stanley Curtis showed that pigs enjoyed playing joystick controlled video games. In fact they were more competent at playing these games than either dogs or chimpanzees.
• Being the excellent forages that they are, pigs find food easily in the wild and using pigs to hunt out truffles dates back to the Roman Empire. Female pigs are by far the best because there's a compound within the truffle that's really similar to the sex pheromone in boar's saliva to which these lovely ladies go crazy for. Pigs may have an innate ability to sniff out these fungi however their propensity to to gobble them up once found has seen dogs becoming a more popular hunter recently.
• Ever wondered where "Piggy Banks" came from? They can be traced right back to the 15th century when people used pots to store their money in. Given that metal was hard to come by let alone expensive, items such as pots and plates were produced from a cheap clay called 'pygg'. Due to both words sounding the same, English potters would create "pygg" pots in the shape of a pig, this novelty pot became so popular that over a few centuries people forgot the pygg clay reference and just came to call them piggy banks.
• Eighty two miles south east of Nassau, in the Exuma cluster of islands lies Big Major Cay aka "Pig Island". Entirely uninhabited by humans, this Bahamian beauty spot is home to "swimming pigs", a feral colony of pigs which have fast become a top tourist attraction. No one really knows how they got there but local legends abound. From shipwrecks to pirates dropping them off and never making it back for their meal so to say. A more likely theory refers to Wayde Nixon, who claimed to have brought the pigs over with his business partner, Don Rolle. They hoped to start a pig farm in the late 1990's. Nixon said he wanted to create a sustainable food supply for the Bahamas incase of the predicted Y2K  computer meltdown, as that never happened, they pigs remained there and colonised the island instead.

• In the past 50 years, the appetite for ham, bacon, sausages and pork has trebled, today nearly 1.5 billion pigs a year are slaughtered for their meat.
• They have 44 teeth as opposed to our 32. These teeth are routinely clipped at piglet stage to stop any injuries to other piglets when competing to suckle their mother's milk. Tail docking also occurs to stop pigs biting each others tails off, this behaviour is directly caused by the intense levels of frustration pigs suffer when kept in confined spaces. During both these procedures and castration routinely performed, they receive no pain relief.
• In intensive farming, pigs live in such narrow metal cages that they can't turn around let alone lie down.
• Pigs are biologically similar to humans meaning that they're more often than not used in human medical research. And in some countries, they're even used as live crash-test dummies for the automotive industry. I've seen the videos, brutal viewing.
• Due to cramped and often filthy conditions on factory farms, pigs can develop painful skin conditions such as mange which are not cost effective to treat.

So if you are not ready for the Quorn alternative to bacon, then please choose a high welfare label such as RSPCA Assured, Free Range or Organic. The pigs there would have been raised on UK farms adhering to strict high standards in animal welfare. They can roam outside, sows have access to birthing huts and straw bedding, piglets have much more weaning time with their mothers, you name it. The difference it makes to their lives is beyond enormous! 

Naturist Lyall Watson wrote a beautiful quote in his book "The Whole Hog" - "I know of no other animals that are 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". 

If you fancy seeing (and maybe supporting) some truly happy, curious pigs, I urge you to visit her rescue centre, Curly Tails Pig Sanctuary, details below.