Why/how are pigs used to find truffles? Do they have a natural affinity for them?
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They have an excellent sense of smell and naturally root out buried or hidden foodstuff to eat.
That can be trained from “find and eat” to “find and indicate” the same way we train dogs to chase and catch game without immediately eating it. The difference being that more traditional, predatory companions/working animals like dogs don’t care about truffles.
Clarity edit from a couple of replies: yes, we mostly use dogs for this now, the same way we figured out how to train them on all sorts of other things. Pigs being predisposed towards truffles are why they were the TRADITIONAL rather than current choice. Sorry for any confusion.
The pigs do have some natural affinity for truffles. Pigs have a much better sense of smell then humans but not quite as good as dogs. However their sense of smell is more tuned for mushrooms then dogs. For finding truffles they are about the same or maybe the pigs is slightly better. In addition to this they are much easier to train as they normally eat mushrooms. And they tend to prefer truffles. So training a hog to find truffles is like training a dog to find steaks. But they still needs to be trained to ignore other things and also to indicate where the truffles are rather then digging them up for themselves.
Pigs have great sense of smell and likes to dig out food from the ground to eat. So in the past, people would train pigs to sniff out truffles and not eat it, just lead the hunter to it. But, people don’t train pigs for truffle hunting anymore, they use dogs instead which are more reliable.
Truffles produce a scent caused by the same chemical in boar pheromones that female pigs find very sexy. Truffle sows smell smell it and go crazy, trying to dig up what smells like a hot hunk of a pig hiding underground. Truffle dogs on the other hand need to be trained to identify what a truffle smells like, so yes, pigs have a natural affinity for them.
Mushrooms are the fruit of fungus…special bodies adapted for dispersing spores to start the next generation.
Most mushrooms disperse partly or largely using wind. But truffles are located underground. So instead of wind, they are adapted to disperse using animals. To attract animals (mostly mammals, but also birds and insects) they produce a strong odor that attracts animals to eat them.
The actual main target of this odor seems to be a variety of small rodents, but wild boars (and also pigs) are also happy to sniff out truffles and eat them.
Pigs are foragers. Their entire way of life is based around using their sense of smell to find stuff in the ground, and dig it up. (Truffles included.)
The reason we’re trying to get dogs to do it tho is because pigs also have a habit of eating whatever they find lol
As many other comments have said, pig’s lives revolve around their sense of smell. I want to add an example though.
Truffles are also fungi that have co-evolved with pigs to help them proliferate / spread far and wide. They developed a scent that mimics that of a female boar in heat (that scent is through pheromones or chemicals that change behavior)
Imagine if you will you are very, very hungry and you smell your favorite food in the next room over, behind a locked door. You’re starving. First you’re going to find that door and find any possible way to get around it. Then you’re going to start trying to break down the door and get at it. Once you’re at it, you realize it’s not your favorite food, but eh you’re hungry and it seems similar enough.
Pheromones produce the same visceral reaction in animals and thus the same desire to get to the source. You can picture it as that vivid memory you want to re-experience. It puts you (and them) on auto-pilot.
The eli5est: Lonely girl pig mistakenly believes boy pig wearing truffle cologne is playing hide & seek.
The truffle smells an awful lot like a boy pig’s junk. The girl pig smells this junk coming from the dirt at the base of an oak tree and she does not ask questions — she simply pursues. And because girl pigs are kinky as heck, when they find the mushroom that smell’s like a boy pig’s junk, they eat it. That’s why dogs are trained to find truffles instead, the same way dogs are trained to sniff out anything. Dogs, kinky or otherwise, have no impulse to eat the boy pig’s junk.
No one is bringing up the actual reason:
We use female pigs, sows, for truffle hunting. When sows are in heat, they seek androstenal, which is a sex pheromone excreted bh male pigs.
Truffles happen to have this exact pheromone.
So we just use horny pigs to find dirt fungus to put on our very expensive food.
i ate a deliciouse truffle, swiss cheeze burger on tastey gormet type yumy bread
wat waz tha name oh ye smash burgers in warwick
fuckin good, truffle snuffin pigs, i thouhght it was dogs
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