Playing with pigs and lasers

Pigs, like humans, can get bored. Perhaps they’d like to play a game to amuse themselves? Even better, with interacting humans? A project designed to examine such possibilities is underway at Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht and Wageningen University Livestock Research Department in The Netherlands. It’s called ‘Playing With Pigs’ and is “researching the complex […]

‘Pigness’ (Cinematic and Televisual) – a thesis

One of academia’s most prominent accounts of ‘Pigness’ in motion pictures was authored in 2010 by Dr. Mark von Schlemmer (University of Central Missouri, Department of Communication and Sociology) in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy,  With reference not only to leading examples of cinematic pigs (like Babe and […]

Involuntary Hippophagia (2): Horsemeat and Hamsters

Improbable readers may be familiar with the Pork-Cat Syndrome (a link between allergic sensitivity to pork meat and cat epithelia), details of which were first published in 1994. Perhaps less well known though is the Horsemeat-Hamster Syndrome, which could have implications for those who have been exposed to the current UK outbreak of Involuntary Hippophagia. […]

Hoping to Understand Heads and Tails, Indicatively

Heads and tails are two sides of the many-sided coin that is emotion. This study explores several sides, including those two: “Indicators of positive and negative emotions and emotional contagion in pigs,” Inonge Reimert, J. Elizabeth Bolhuis, Bas Kemp, T. Bas Rodenburg, Physiology and Behavior, vol. 109, no. 17 January 2013, pp. 42–50.  The authors, […]