Unlocking the Secrets of Animal Communication: Dogs Show Things to Humans but Pigs Do Not

This study shows that directing humans’ attention to interesting locations may not be something that every domestic animal can do.

“Domestic animals seem especially predisposed to referentially communicate with humans,” explains Paula Pérez Fraga, PhD student of the Neuroethology of Communication Lab at the Department of Ethology, Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary, and first author of the study. “However some human-socialized wild animals can do this as well, thus domestication might not be key for this communicative ability to emerge after all.

To test this hypothesis the researchers compared the behaviors of similarly raised companion animals from two domestic species: dogs, which rely heavily upon visual communication, and pigs, which do not. The pigs belong to the Family Pig Project, a long-term scientific project that allocates miniature pigs to human families where they are raised in a very similar manner to a family dog. This provides a unique opportunity to compare the two species’ human-oriented behaviors.

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