Scientists have successfully taught pigs to play video games

No, pigs haven't learned to fly — but they have learned to play video games. A quartet of pigs — Panepinto micro pigs Ebony and Ivory, and Yorkshire pigs Hamlet and Omelette — learned how to play a video game by using their snouts to move an arcade-style joystick that would steer a cursor into various walls on a computer screen, as described in a research paper published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology. "The pigs were allowed to work at their own pace always and could end sessions at will," Dr. Candace Croney, lead author of the paper and professor of comparative pathobiology and animal science at Purdue University's Center for Animal Welfare Science, told Salon by email. Dr. Sarah T. Boysen of the Comparative Cognition Project, a co-author of the paper, echoed Croney's observations, writing to Salon that "while we can't know what the pigs were thinking, I think they did, in fact, enjoy working on the video task. "What's different here from any other sort of learning previously demonstrated, where a pig simply performs a learned behavior and gets a reward, is that the pigs had to grasp the very difficult concept that the thing they were manipulating was having its effect on a 2-dimensional computer-generated image that they could not touch, smell or interact with directly," Croney told Salon.