I can understand why cats and dogs are smart since they don’t have to be on survival mode every day.
What I don’t understand is why are pigs smart? And why are sheep dumb if pigs are smart? They are in the same height in the hierarchy of needs.
In: Biology
Pigs are both foragers and social animals. Social animals need to be able communicate with each other effectively. Foragers need to problem solve (how to get at a food item) as well as remember the location and seasonality of different food sources.
Humans, parrots, crows are also all foraging animals and known for their intelligence.
If your food source is all grass however (for example if you’re a cow or sheep), you don’t need a lot of intelligence to get at it (though neither are exactly the dumbest animals in the animal kingdom. They still need some smarts since they’re social).
Cats, dogs, and even pigs are carnivores. Pigs are more omnivores, they eat meat and plants. But sheep are herbivores, meaning they only eat plants.
In general, carnivores are smarter that herbivores. Carnivores need to hunt or they starve. My old biology teacher used to say, “It doesn’t take much brainpower to sneak up on a blade of grass”.
The more skill required to survive, the more intelligence you need.
A hunter has to be able to outsmart its pray. Social animals need to be able to communicate. Foragers need to be able to solve problems of how to get their food.
Herd animals on the other hand, like sheep, need to be able to find grass. That’s about it. They don’t need to be smart to survive, they just need to find grass and run faster than the slowest member of their herd.
On the reverse, look at rats. Small animal that eats basically anything it can. Yet, incredibly intelligent because before humans started leaving trash everywhere, they needed to be able solve problems to find food. They needed to avoid predators, while navigating terrain and also being fairly social animals that communicate.
Basically, animals are as clever as evolutionary pressure has required them to be.
A perfect example of this is Koala’s. They’re one of the dumbest animals on the planet. They quite literally have smooth brains. If you take the leaves they eat off the tree and put them on the floor, they don’t understand it’s food and will ignore it, even when hungry.
But that’s because they don’t need to be clever. They’ve evolved where practically nothing hunts them and nothing eats their food supply (because it’s poisonous as fuck and they’ve specifically evolved to eat it, despite how little nutrients it actually provies) so there’s no competition. There’s no evolutionary pressure that allows the smarter ones to thrive and the dumb ones to die. They just stay dumb and keep surviving.
It has everything to do with the animals they were domesticated from. Domestication itself hasn’t really had time to affect the animals’ intelligence much.
Cats and dogs were both domesticated from wild hunters (wildcats and wolves). In general, hunting animals tend to be higher intelligence than other animals, because they rely on their wits more to get food. That’s why domestic cats and dogs retain that intelligence.
Pigs were domesticated from wild swine, which were foragers, which also needed to be intelligent.
Contrast that with sheep and cows, which domesticated from wild herbivores. Herbivores in general are less intelligent than hunting animals because they don’t rely as much on their wits to get food. And sheep and cows are still dumb after domestication.
Cows arent the smartest but they are very curious and have friends i hear. Some people say cows are a lot like big dogs. They like to play and aparently can remember other cows and human faces.
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