Are Pigs Happier in a Pigsty? Just Ask Some People
Do you know what makes pigs happy? Me neither. But we humans love to anthropomorphize, don’t we? And that’s exactly what a thousand Germans did when looking at fake photos of a pig in two notably different pens.
The humans viewed four images of the same pig. In one, the pig was poised in a pen with a nice and tidy slatted floor, the type used nowadays to let the poo run out. Practical, right? The other abode was messier than a teenager’s bedroom, strewn with straw and who knows what. In each setting, the Photoshopped pig was made to appear happy or unhappy based on differing body language and facial expressions.
Here’s how folks felt:
“The welfare of both the ʽhappyʼ and the ʽunhappyʼ pig was assessed to be higher in the straw setting compared to the slatted floor setting in our study, and even the ʽunhappy pigʼ on straw was perceived more positively than the ʽhappy pigʼ on slatted floor,” the researchers reported in journal PLoS ONE.
“The straw stall is rated as clearly more natural and more animal-friendly,” said study team member Achim Spiller, a professor of agricultural economics and rural development at the University of Göttingen in Germany. “Even the sad or cheerful expression of the pig standing in the enclosure does not change this.”
There’s a point to the study, to “understand how the public evaluates animal husbandry systems,” the researchers wrote. “The impact of the background setting can also be influential when people view pictures of farm animals in the media, as presently, media exposure is the primary source of communication about livestock farming for the general public.”
No attempt was made to determine if a pig would actually be happier in the neat pen or the total pigsty, but Spiller’s colleague, Gesa Busch of the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy, offered this thought:
“A natural behavior of pigs is grooming, and to perform exploration behavior, behaviors that are very hard (or boring) to perform in a slatted floor pen — at least if no structuring elements are included,” Busch said in an email. “Therefore, straw pens have some advantages regarding performing this natural behavior for pigs.”
Are you happy as a pig or sad as swine? Please take my Happiness Survey, to help me understand who is happy, who is not, and why. It’s totally anonymous.
