Perfunctory pigs and pups with personality

Do pet pigs like us?

Calling your dog your fur baby might not be all fluff, according to a study from the ethology department at Eötvös Loránd University (Sci. Rep. 2024, DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-63529-3).

The scientists used a “strange situation test” in which a pet, their owner, and a stranger interact in a testing room to determine whether dogs are attached to their caregivers like babies are. The pet they compared the dogs to might surprise you: pigs.

Though less common companions, these squealing household members function in the family in a way similar to woofers—even more so than their feline acquaintances. More dependent than cats, pigs seek contact with humans like dogs do, which is why they make a good comparison for dogs, the study’s authors say.

But are the curly-tailed creatures attached?

The team considered several components of animal attachment: attached pets treat their keepers as harbors from hazards and safe bases from which to explore, and they show certain behaviors when reunited after separation-induced stress.

During the experiment, the owner and stranger would enter and leave the exam room at different times. When their owners left the room, the dogs were far more likely to follow them to the door—and stand by the door—than the pigs. Neither pet would follow the stranger when they left, though the pigs were just as likely to stand by the door when either the stranger or the owner was absent. When their owners entered, the dogs would typically greet them, whereas the pigs were a hair more likely to greet the strangers.

The animals’ behavior indicated to the scientists that, while the pups showed attachment to their humans, the pigs coolly accepted whoever was there. This result was consistent when the researchers tested the pigs when they were a bit older.

Pet pigs’ nonchalance may be related to their predomestication lifestyle. Wild pigs, like wolves, live in intricate social groups, but their community style is fission-fusion: boars only integrate themselves during mating season and leave after. Wolf packs are highly enmeshed, though, and as the dog-wolf lineage split, artificial selection of these canines as pets has driven dogs’ pack-like relationship with human families. Pigs, on the other hoof, have been selected for meat and medical purposes.

The researchers concluded that “the domestication process and intense human socialization alone are not enough” to evoke pets’ attachment, study author Anna Gábor said in a press release. So while you can accurately call your dog your fur baby, you might not be able to call your pig your bristle baby; they’ll take you or leave you.

A dog’s disposition

If you’re trying to decide which fur baby to adopt, an experimental AI algorithm might be able to help you. Like the Myers-Briggs for dogs, the algorithm sorts canines into distinct personality types.

Scientists sponsored by the tech start-up Dogvatar built the pup personality testing algorithm, and their results were published early this year (Sci. Rep. 2024, DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-52920-9).

Before letting the algorithm off the leash, the research team fed it thousands of responses from the University of Pennsylvania’s long-standing Canine Behavioral Assessment & Research Questionnaire (C-BARQ). Broadly used by trainers and researchers to assess pooches’ potential for working in roles like guiding, therapy, or detection, C-BARQ covers attributes such as whether the dog would chase a squirrel or is friendly to other hounds.

From the C-BARQ profiles, with those attributes weighted, the algorithm clustered five personality types: excitable/hyperattached, anxious/fearful, aloof/predatory, reactive/assertive, and calm/agreeable.

Beyond measuring puppy personalities, Dogvatar aims to provide monitoring systems to guide behavioral development, particularly for trainers and working-dog organizations. So, one day, AI might help you mold your perfectly matched fluffy best friend.

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