A New Reason Not to Eat Pigs: They Rule at Video Games

Pigs can absolutely crush it on Super Mario Brothers. So…don’t eat them, OK?

An ad for educational and advocacy group Farm Sanctuary, set to launch this week, tells the rest of us what many folks in the farming world have known all along: Pigs are smart. In fact, the mammals are so sharp that they learn to play video games as fast as chimpanzees and quicker than 3 year olds (children, not goats).

The commercial, a 36-second stop-motion animation video, shows what happens when chimp meets pig over joysticks in an idyllic, storybook-looking living room. Pig wins. Chimp throws a tantrum. There’s research to back up the ad’s claim in the form of a Penn State study that found pigs to be “cognitively sophisticated,” said Farm Sanctuary’s senior policy director, Bruce Friedrich. Read more...