Pigs recorded using tools
nationalgeographic.com
nationalgeographic.com
Pigs are particularly challenging to control because of their intelligence and lack of predators. Because of their size, intelligence, and aggressiveness they have no natural predators in Texas. They are quick to learn of hunting traps and will either avoid or disarm them. A herd of pigs reduced in population by 70% can rebound within 2-3 years without continued management.
They tear up the land and are a serious threat to the natural ecology and food supply. Their damage to commercial agriculture is estimated at $50 million per year, but their damage to property and the environment is estimated at close to half a billion each year. Because of their high intelligence they are adapting their range from rural areas to suburbs and urban areas. Unlike coyotes, which have also adapted from rural to urban areas with great success, they are often not afraid of people are known to hurt people in attacks.
https://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/animals/stories/pigs-and-h...
estimated texan pig population 2-2.5 million vs estimated texan human population 28-39 million. let's estimate 5% of texan humans don't eat pork.
texan pigs are still outnumbered 10 to 1 by a predator that will kill and eat them. if i were a texan pig, i'd be pretty anxious about that.
The national government here just announced a few days ago they'll allocate resources on streamlining Trichinella round-worm testing procedures and encouraging use of wild boar meat in restaurants, school food, fast food (McBoar, anyone?) etc. Many farmers have been complaining about ruined fields.
It’s not really the same. In Sweden, wild boars are effectively an indigenous species, present since the stone age. In the Americas, wild boars are an invasive species and a veritable menace to the local flora and fauna.
And why shouldn't that meat be used to feed people?
In short, there is probably not that much to worry about wild boars in their natural environment. To Americans, though, who are used to thinking about wild boars as a unadultered horrifying menace (which they are where they live), describing Sweden as “the same” is misleading at best.
In which case, as I explained, there is probably a comparatively easy solution involving reinforcing the naturally preexisting factors which usually limit the population growth. In any case, there is no reasonable way in which the situation of wild boars in America and Sweden could be described as “the same”. They are fundamentally wildly different.
It is the same in Italy, not everywhere but in several regions.
Here they make a sort of "quota" of how many can (and should ) be hunted and killed in a given area to keep population under control.
Still there are years when the "quota" is not calculated (no idea how it is actually calculated) correctly and we have simply too many of them roaming around, to the dismay of farmers and more generally those living in the countryside as they (the boars) can really ruin a field or garden in no time.
As a side note, the actual meat, once checked negative for parasites, is among the "best" ones, in the sense that it is free from antibiotics and other drugs possibly used with raised pigs and the food the boars eat is 100% natural.
https://www.facebook.com/brandenburgaktuell.rbb/videos/38179...
I wondered why, and he told me that after he had kids he decided pigs are about as intelligent as a 3 year old, and he simply couldn't bring himself to kill them anymore.
That pretty much precludes any animal from ever being able to "follow instructions", "speak", "understand logical problems", etcetera. Even if they would have the general intelligence to do the things we want them to do, it's very difficult to encode that information in a way that they would understand.
You could make the argument that being an omnivore is the most "moral" standing (excluding climate effects), as it does not value life based on its similarity to us. It holds life to have intrinsic value.
This is in part because an article about pig facial recognition frontpaged on HN before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19277846
"We like to say that humans are the tool-using animal, but we've found that lots of animals use tools. What I think is the actual advantage of humans is that we are the mimicking animal. We see what works for other animals and find ways to do the same thing without having to evolve those traits"
I thought that was a really interesting way of thinking about it.
That’s interesting I feel like there is but I’m not so certain. How about the Sapiens take on gossip?
For instance gossip requires speech or some other method of communication so only very few species get a chance to it (maybe dolphins? but not likely).
There are traits that are definitely unique, like building rockets, but they are usually complex things.
It's a rare species, what they saw might be genetically coded behaviour, previously unseen because not much behavorial data is available.
Do you have a source?
However, it is critical to understand that with hybrids there may be little if any genetic evidence remaining or it may be simply too scrambled to understand. Hybrids from a genetic point of view are complicated and do not necessarily leave a well defined record in their genetics.
Pig hearts are used to study the anatomy of human hearts because they are very similar in structure, size and function to human hearts.
https://education.seattlepi.com/pig-hearts-used-study-anatom...
I'm sorry, what?
I still like to think that hybridization played a greater role in evolution than we now suppose.
The proponent (Eugene M McCarthy) has some amazing examples of cross-species fertilization but also some pretty crack-potty stuff. His website is http://www.macroevolution.net/
It is so human to act like we are not also animals.
Pigs when they are slaughtered die a horrible death [0]. Right before you have your pork chops, or even during, could you watch a video of a pig being killed and slaughtered (with sound on) and would you still have the same enjoyment - knowing where it came from?
You might not care about animals, so what about the people working in slaughterhouses. Could you work in an environment where you had to kill & slaughter animals all day, hearing their screams, smelling the blood etc. What do you think this environment does to ones psyche? Slaughterhouse workers experience PTSD.
Now you might not care about these workers. How about our biosphere? Several studies have shown the immense strain and damage large scale animal agriculture has on our biosphere [1]
Hey look, we all (or most) love our BBQs or pork chops or whatever. But when approaching this with a critical / logical mind - do we really think that all the damage our craving for culinary pleasures warrants the damage it creates on a human, environmental and animal level?
Ethan Brown provides some alternatives that are worth exploring: https://www.ideacity.ca/video/ethan-brown-beyond-meat/
[0] This if for the UK, but I imagine it's the same for anywhere else https://www.viva.org.uk/what-we-do/slaughter/slaughter-farme...
[1] http://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2018-06-01-new-estimates-environmen... - The researcher himself of this study gave up meat & dairy completely after he completed this study/.
PS. If you raise or hunt your own then ignore the stuff above (which is mostly about factory farmed carrion)