Studies in social cognition: From primates to pigs

The stressful effects that environments have on farm and laboratory animal welfare are likely to depend on how much animals understand of the behaviou r and intentions of their conspecifics as well as on their understanding of their physical environment. However, studies on animal social cognition ha ve primarily focused on primates. Here, we report on our work on social cog nition in domestic pigs. It focuses on the ability of domestic pigs to asse ss and use to their advantage the behaviour of conspecifics, and uses appro aches pioneered in studies on primates. Our work has shown that dominant pi gs use the privileged knowledge of a subordinate to their own advantage in a competitive foraging situation. While such exploitative behaviour is like ly to be based on rapid learning about the subordinate's behaviour, it is a lso possible that 'higher' cognitive abilities such as visual perspective t aking could be involved. Ongoing work uses an adaptation of the Guesser-Kno wer paradigm to test whether pigs are indeed capable of visual perspective taking.