I had a pig for a pet as a kid - Habeas Corpus was his name. A great outdoor pet for a kid - fun to play with, expressive and funny, nearly indestructible!
The value proposition for pork is really good. Pigs are huge, yield a lot of meat, meat considered safe and desirable by Westerners, etc.
For instance, China has a strategic pork reserve: http://www.economist.com/news/christmas-specials/21636507-ch...
Allegedly this practice goes on in America, without the consumer's knowledge.
source?
http://gothamist.com/2010/07/30/dog_tooth_in_chinese_food_pr...
BTW there is this fringe guy claiming that humans are pig-chimpanzee hybrids at http://www.macroevolution.net/index.html
Kind of insane, and likely all wrong, but actually interesting to read.
most types are not, but if you ever have the chance try to get to know KuneKune pigs. They are rather small, hairy, friendly domesticated pigs originally from New Zealand. See [1] for some pictures. Anyway they are very cuddly, for example when I call ours (whistling works but they usually see/hear/smell me before I need to call them) they'll come running over. If you then start petting their back they lay themselves on their side because they want you to rub their belly. If you sit down they'll try to come sit on your lap.
His pen was a wire fence ring around a tree (so he couldn't push it around the yard). I sat down next to the wire and ignored him.
He came closer to me, just to be companionable, still browsing in the grass head down. Silently I picked up the wire fence, moved it over him, set it down so now he was inside the ring.
After a minute he glanced up, looked around in a panicky way, and began to scream! You tricked me! Oh he was mad, charged around yelling.
So anyway, pigs are smart.
Show me a pig that can herd sheep with the help of humans whistling and shouting words.
> I guess dogs must not taste very good, or we should be eating them instead.
A couple of Swiss cantons would disagree: http://www.thelocal.ch/20121227/dogs-still-eaten-in-switzerl...
here's a documentary: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112431/
that said, my guess as to why dogs are mainly pets and pigs are usually food is: dogs have a higher carnivorous bias - they need more costly meat than pigs, making them more expensive to breed as food on a mass production scale.
also, dogs were extremely valuable pets since the beginning of human civilisation, so i guess it's culturally ingrained not to view them as a food source.
Although figures seem to vary, there is evidence that dog domestication began at least 30,000 years ago. Dogs co-evolved with humans to the point that we can communicate with them to a really impressive extent - humans can understand dog emotions and vice versa. It has also been shown that dogs can understand human pointing, a feat that even chimps are unable to accomplish, and I don't see any evidence of pigs doing the same either.
Dogs have been used for hunting, pest control, guidance (as in guide dogs), and companionship (individuals with PTSD or emotional problems) amongst many other uses. I have never heard of pigs being capable of any of these tasks. Their only other major use appears to be for truffle hunting.
I do not eat pork and I respect that pigs are highly intelligent creatures, but to claim that they are "way smarter" than dogs is absurd. To insinuate that we should eat dogs because they are supposedly less intelligent than pigs is even more ridiculous, and shame on anyone who thinks that. Without dogs, many human populations would not have survived, the Thule and Inuit being prime examples.
All of my claims are backed by this video, which does a lot more to explain how amazing dogs truly are: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/nature/dogs-decoded.html
A paper recently made the rounds regarding pigs: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8sx4s79c
For example: "Additionally, pigs can use pointing by humans (under certain circumstances) to lead them to a food reward (Nawrothet al., 2013b)."
But from a cursory glance, it seems that pigs are not "way smarter" than dogs, however they may be "about as smart" as dogs, which is surprising in and of itself.
One key point about the paper is that we still have an incredibly long way to go in the research of animal intelligence, especially with regards to animals apart from chimps and cetaceans. Even though dogs are so tightly ingrained in human lives, there is still so much that we have yet to understand about their intelligence, even more so with pigs and other animals.
In any case, I think it's silly to prioritize one life over another solely based on intelligence. I consider dogs to be family so eating one would essentially be cannibalism in my book, but I also really value animal lives in general and I would never eat a pig either.