Can pigs play video games? It’s probably a question few would expect to have been genuinely asked, never mind scientifically investigated. Even fewer might have guessed that the answer would prove to be as surprising ‘yes’.

But that’s exactly what a new study, the results of which were recently published in the Frontiers in Psychology journal, found to be the case when the ability of four pigs to play a simple video game was tested. The four porkers, Ebony, Ivory, Hamlet and Omelette revealed a depth to cognitive skills previously unobserved in pigs by mastering, to varying extents, a game similar to the classic Pong.

The piggy project was led by Dr Candace Croney of Indiana’s Purdue University. Dr Croney’s perception of the animals was transformed by the surprising results of the research. She revealed:

“When I started this study, I didn’t know much about pigs and what I did know was negative. I thought that, frankly, they were dumb and dirty animals.”

While arguably indicating a surprising lack of general knowledge for a highly educated scientist involved in researching the cognitive abilities of animals (pigs have generally shaken off the old myths around their lack of cleanliness and are well-known to be extremely intelligent creatures), Dr Croney is now well and truly a convert, explaining.

“What it’s testing is whether an animal can make a connection between the joystick and what it is doing — poised in space and time on a computer screen. Nothing in their natural world prepared them for this.”

But despite the exercise’s complete abstraction from anything they might encounter in their natural world, the pigs were able to interact with the game via a joystick, with Ivory proving the most adept gamer of the four. Some of the other pigs may not have had Ivory’s natural talent but even his less skilled colleagues unveiled remarkable cognitive depth:

“He was the pig you could count on to get any task done quickly, and done well,” said Croney. He had around an 80 per cent success rate. It was not all about results, though. “Omelette was slower, but worked hard and was really sensitive.”

To even the playing field with other animals similar tests have been performed on in the past, Croney and her colleagues running the research had to make allowances for the fact pigs have trotters.

Monkeys, for example, have a major advantage when it comes to controlling video games thanks to being blessed with opposable thumbs. The pigs had to move the joystick with their snouts, which meant they couldn’t both watch the screen and interact with the game at the same time. Side-to-side motions are particularly tricky for a snout, designed for the up and down movement of rooting.

That saw the success rate of the pigs drop if the Pong-esque’s game’s wall to bounce the ball off was positioned to the left or right of the screen. But they could just about get around that difficulty by tacking up and down in iterations.

Another interesting insight into the psychology of the pigs is that they responded more to encouragement that came in the form of human contact than treats. Dr Croney explains:

“One of the biggest motivators were belly scratches. If they were frustrated, we would give them a break and they would flop over and we would scratch them. Then they would go back to the task.”

Dr Croney, who has kept in touch with the pigs following their rehoming when the research project concluded (with the exception of Omelette who unfortunately died), believes the study’s results show the intellectual needs of pigs should be taken more seriously when regulations on their welfare are drawn up. And she now has a lasting bond with the animals whose cooperation led to the breakthrough discoveries on the extent of their intelligence:

“Hamlet lived out his years on a farm. When I went back to visit him, he not only recognised me, he barked, raced towards me, sat and then rolled over so I could scratch his belly.”