The Smartest Animal in the World

PIGS! The most intelligent of mammals and perhaps of all living things!

My personal knowledge of them began as a child on a farm where I was given the job of ‘looking after’ the smaller and newer born pigs( we also had cows, horses, ponies, chickens, cats, and many dogs)

Among my snall pigs was a Berhshire boar who ,even tiney, decided that because I fed him, and thus was the source of his most important( at that time) function, he made a decision to get me to do what HE wanted me to do. This at about the age of three months. At first, he isolated himself from the other pigs, so he’d get “first” when I poured the (milk-based) pig feed into his trough. As he grew bigger, he used belligerance against his brethren and sisteren to get more food than they.

When he graduated to corn on th cob, he would gather as many cobs as possible and take them to a corner protected by his body(and TEETH!) and eat then snarling at any interruptions.

When huge and grown, I noticed that he was getting BIGGER and BIGGER but not eating as much in his pen. What was going on? I returned from some night thing late at night, and on suspicion, went to his pen. I found the gate unlatched but “pushed to”. I very stealthily went to the huge corn crib, a large affair locked by the barn, and full to the top with last years corn on the cob, used to feed all of the animals, not just pigs.

My pig(I named him “Grunt”) had opened the latch of the crib and was inside filling up his considerable belly!

Carefully, I waited in the late Virginia night. He left the pen, full and grunting with pleasure, and carefully nosed the crib door shut, pushing the latch til it clicked. He then waddled to his pen, entered and pulled that door shut!

But he ended up as sausages in spite of his high intelligence, while I was away at school!

Much later in life and recently, at my daughters remote ranch in Florida, we were for years plagued with wild pigs, the descendants of pigs from fifteenth century ships that wrecked on the Florida coast. Hundreds of them ran about on my daughters 28 acres, freely, because she lives a hundred miles away and no one is at the ranch.

One day as i sat on the back stoop, feeding my huge Newfoundland dog, a very large pig appeared with a horde of piglets. As the dog seemed to want to KILL them all, I confined him in the ranchhouse, and sat there with the bag of dog food on my lap

The old pig rooted her way to get just in front of me…she had great fangs and was very big..the little ones were rooting alongside her; she slowly came up to me and put her big long snout on my knee…this a WILD pig? She was asking me to be friendly and give her and piglets dog food. I did.

The next morning wth the dog asleep inside the house, I sat down on the outside step, and that precipitated a huge rush of maybe(a hundred?) wild pigs of all sizes, shapes and colors! I retreated behind the screen of the porch. But my mama pig of yesterday was there in front and wanted, please, more dog food! She had gone back to the wilds behind the ranch, and told the entire Florida wild pig population to come and get a free(dogfood) dinner!