So I'm Eric Hutchinson I am
with the division of veterinary
resources with the NIH.
I am in charge of
the behavioural program there.
I'm here today to talk to you
about swine and their Ethology and
their cognitive well being
considerations in the laboratory.
This is the confession part is that I
am actually a primate centered person.
So this was an article that
came out about a year ago.
That was about an outbreak at a primate
facility, I don't bring it up to pinpoint
the facility or the outbreak, it's just
something I was reading in the newspaper
and then got to this paragraph about
four monkey-like rhesus macaques.
So I think that's an appropriate way
to think about me talking about swine
behavior.
So I'm swine behaviorist-like
veterinarian.
>> [LAUGH]
>> So I'm certainly not an expert, but
I have plenty of experience working
with swine, and being in charge
of their behavior, even if I don't
necessarily understand what they're doing.
But I thought that I could go ahead and
talk, can we get our conversation going.
So when I found out I was
gonna trying give this talk.
I was explaining to my
eight year old daughter.
That I have to give this talk and
she said.
We'll how hard could this be?
There's only five things you
need to know about pigs.
Really?
What are those things?
Well, pigs are smelly.
Pigs are pink, but
they can also be black and white.
Pigs like playing in the mud,
and pigs don't have manners.
This is a terrific way
to organize my talk.
So this is how we're gonna do it.
>> [LAUGH]
>> Pigs are smelly.
So pigs are,
their natural behavior out in the wild,
is that they are the wild boar of Eurasia,
and the reason that pigs are so
great, is that they
are ultimately adaptable,
they're like the Rhesus, or the humans
in terms of being a weeds species.
They're very intelligent,
they can adapt almost anywhere.
What's really important to note
is that their prominent feature
is this giant snout.
So pigs are smelly, right?
So they can smell very well.
It's basically a snout machine.
It's a snout with a rest of an animal
attached to it, in terms of behavior.
So that snort is very integral to pigness,
to being a pig.
So they have this terrific sense of smell.
That's how they hunt down, if they
don't do hunting out in the wild, but
they do hunt down all sorts of roots and
vegetables, fallen nuts and fruits.
They use that snout, it's powered by
those powerful neck muscles behind it,
so they use that snout
as both a bulldozer.
They can dig through completely
frozen ground in Siberia, looking for
fallen pinecones and nuts.
They dig their own burrows
through frozen ground, and
they can also uses it as a hand trowel so
he can be very sensitive with that snout.
So they're not just all force digging and
digging and digging.
Once they get close to something
that they're trying to find,
they'll slow down and be very delicate.
I like to say that pigs
practice extreme omnivory.
So much like us, they will find and
adapt to eating almost anything
that you can get calories out of.
So pigs are very good at
eating whatever they find,
and they're very good at
finding whatever they can eat.
So their social structures
are similar to macaques actually so
they have stable matrilineal groups so
they will have moms and aunts, and
sisters, and daughters that stay in
a group with male emigration at puberty.
So as the male get to where
they're gonna be sexual mature.
They get kicked out and that's where
they become natures natural bad ****.
Males develop these huge tusks.
During breeding season, they undergo
a subcutaneous tissue in their back.
Where it's essentially like growing
a set of armor for a few months.
They can grow up to 600 pounds.
They actually produce natural anti-venom.
So natural anti-snake venom.
And so, even if you are a predator,
and manage to capture a male pig,
just to spite you,
they've made themselves taste terrible.
So they have what's called boar taint,
where boars don't taste good.
So, pigs are designed to be this armored
creature, and especially the male boars.
I think that that's something that John
Bradfield kind of hinted at yesterday,
that maybe this thing
designed with weapons and
a shield isn't the best thing to put
together socially, especially when
this is all designed around the mating
behavior and breeding season.
So, adult male intact boars may not
be the best social candidates, but
that is not to mean that the rest of
pig-dom is not terrific at being social.
So, let's remember, these are an animal
that's designed with a low
center of gravity,
armor on the back weapons at the front.
Just a few other things that
are designed that way in nature.
So let's remember that basically
nature had to invent the tiger,
because it seemed silly to have bacon
at the top of the food chain in Russia.
So The next thing that my
daughter said was pigs are pink.
Well, in the wild they aren't really pink.
So how did we get from this,
what I would say on the left,
that's probably the most majestic picture
you will ever see of a pig, right?
>> [LAUGH]
>> Leaping through the air like a gazelle.
[LAUGH] Hair streaming behind it.
And then we have our tiny little
bags of bacon that we've bred.
So how did we get there?
So we domesticated pigs about 13,000
years ago through breeding and
traditional husbandry practices.
We have adapted them for indoor life and
cohabitation with people.
Now some of those,
are not necessarily breeding.
Some of that is just practices like tusk
trimming, tail docking, and castration.
Are very traditional practices,
are traditional in the last 50 years or
so, practices that were designed
to allow pigs to be held
in maximum density production facilities.
So a lot of our pigs that we get into
research facilities still have these
things going on.
So they've had their tusks trimmed.
A lot of the males that
we get are castrated,
unless you're specifically
seeking out intact boars.
And a lot of them have
had their tails docked.
The pigs can also be black and
white, so we started with these
marked domesticated market pigs and
we end research have breed them further
to facilitate our model development.
And each breed has been selected
basically for physical or
physiological characteristics but
we have to remember that when we do
stuff like that a lot of times
behavior goes along for the ride.
So just like 67 black fixes.
Were selected for lots of characteristics
that have very little to being
jerks when they're males, but
ended up that way anyway.
This is how we can end up with certain
behavioral characteristics of some of our
pig breeds.
So the Yorkshire is probably the most
common market breed that's used for
research.
That's the classic pink
pig that you think of.
Their number one characteristic that
I would say that is important for
research is that if you keep them around
for very long they get very, very big.
And so the risk reward for
having a pig that's cooperative and
is used to handling becomes very high for
Yorkshire breeds.
We'll talk a little bit more about
that at the very end of my talk.
But I think if you're
gonna use Yorkshire's,
you definitely have to be aware that
they will get very big, very fast.
Yucatan's are another breed that's used
a lot in biobehavioral research and
biomedical research.
So they are a very docile breed so
they're pretty easy to get along with.
I find them very easy to work with, but
they definitely have a face
that only a mother could love.
Gottingen mini-pigs
are a special little breed.
So they are bred to stay small, basically,
their whole lives remain
manageable their whole lives.
But one problem that they present,
especially when socializing is they
tend to be what I would call libidinous.
So, there will be several
Gottingen mini-pigs in a group and
one will decide that he's going to
mount every single other Gottingen
mini-pig at all times always.
And so, that is an issue that you have
to manage somewhat actively to make
sure that you're not causing more
stress with the socialization and
then their are Sinclair mini-pigs.
This is just another example.
When I've worked with these guys, I found
them to be what I consider flighty.
So I think it was actually Karen that was
saying yesterday, that was the word that
she said and I was like, yeah, that's
about how I would describe who they act.
They're not necessarily the most
friendly of the pigs or
they're a little skittish, basically.
So, my daughter also said that pigs like
playing in the mud and indeed they do.
So, we should remember that we
should allow fulfillment of these
basic behavioral drives that pigs have and
all these other animals have.
That's what this conference is
all about as we need to maintain
the ability to model these animal's
environment like John said, so
that they can be the best models
that we can use for our research.
So, one thing that pigs are definitely
driven to do is rooting.
So, they can root up or root down.
So what I mean by that is if you have the
ability to spread forage out in bedding,
that's probably the best thing you can do
for a pig from an enrichment standpoint.
They'll go searching for very tiny treats
in very large amounts of bedding and
it takes up a lot of time, it fills
up their natural activity budget, but
I know that, that's not always possible.
So another thing you can do is you
can talk to your local toy vendor and
get a ball that's designed primarily for
primates, these challenger balls.
And you can put things in
these challenger balls and
you can hang it just above snout height,
so
that the pigs have to do this to root up
at the ball and get things out of it.
You can also make this, so
that the holes are only in the top.
So, they have to actually be able to
invert the ball to get the mount and
they'll be pretty motivated to get them.
So you can allow for that behavior even if
you're not gonna be able to use bedding,
but I do encourage use of
bedding if get can away with it.
The other thing that's important for
housing pigs is allowing them the chance
to explore and giving them cognitive
challenge, if there's anyway to do that.
One of the things that I'm gonna talk
to you about is positive reinforcement
training is a great way to give
pigs a cognitive challenge.
Candace Croney and
others have also done a lot of work,
looking challenging pigs with mazes and
memory tasks.
And basically, found that they
are these supremely intelligent
creatures that are depending on
the popular source that you want to use.
They are theoretically the fourth
most intelligent animal that we have
tested ahead of dogs.
So it's a good thing that Dr. Burns had
already left before I said that, but
the other thing about pigs is that they
like playing with social partners.
So pigs, again are very social.
Again, with that tiny caveat
of intact male boars.
But again, intact boars are not the most
common thing in research facilities.
So most of the pigs that you will
work with are a very social species.
They should be given the change to be
social with other con specifics and
the other thing you should be aware of
that if you deny them the chance to engage
in their natural behaviors just
like any other animal out there,
you should expect that they are going
to develop some abnormal behaviors.
Now in pigs that tend to
manifest as cage chewing or
destruction of cages, or
whatever toys you've put in there.
It can also manifest as aggression toward
other pigs or toward handlers and humans,
and then they will develop locomotor
stereotypies just like most of our other
animals if they aren't given
the opportunity to express their normal
behaviors.
So again, we heard yesterday
from AAALAC from USDA and OLAW,
that social species should be
housed socially as a default.
And I just wanna say that it was
interesting, listening to John talk about
how some ACC just hadn't considered some
of these things before the recent edition
of the guide came out, because I was at
a facility that just hadn't considered
social housing pigs and it wasn't
the guide that convinced us to do it.
It was actually that we had an early
morning project with pigs and we hadn't
really had one of those before, so we were
coming in as the pigs were waking up and
we kept finding these pigs that were
housed in kennels next to each other
with cyclone fencing
laying next to each other.
So you would never find a pig laying on
its side without another pig next to it,
so they were paired up.
And so, it's just one of those
things that was like a light bulb
went off in our attending
veterinarian's mind.
It's like, this is silly.
We should be housing these guys together.
So, we pulled out those
sections of cyclone fencing.
And suddenly, we had socialized pigs.
And of course, everything went great,
but it doesn't always go great.
So, social introductions and
housing pose a similar variety and
types of challenges as for primates.
So there are certain types of
pigs that are easy to socialize,
certain types of pigs that
are harder to socialize.
Younger animals and litter mates
are the ideal social partners,.
So younger animals are more
tolerant of others,
they're more into play behavior and
exploration.
And obviously, litter mates,
if you can get them and
have them identified as litter mates,
they're easier to socialize,
cuz they're already familiar
with those animals.
The other to remember is that different
breeds do have different social
tendencies.
Again, I talked about
the Gottingen mini-pigs,
they have this persistent mounting issue.
So a bit of how to and I wouldn't
say that this is prescriptive and
that everybody should be
doing it exactly this way,
this is just how we do it at the NIH and
we do socialize a lot of pigs at the NIH.
We don't have the ability for
protected contact.
But again, if you have kennels that
are separated by cyclone fencing,
you can put pigs next to each other.
And basically, allow them to explore each
other though the cyclone fencing and
do the slow introduction system
like you would with primates.
But if you don't have that,
it's still okay to go ahead and
try just socializing with
immediate full contact.
Obviously, you want to monitor that.
As you initially socialize them,
you do need to watch them and
make sure they're engaging
in normal exploratory
behaviors not doing the persistent
mounting thing, not fighting.
When we can, we do introduce pigs
in an expanded and neutral area.
So, this is actually a picture of that
here where we're socializing pigs in this
hallway outside of their kennel.
We have an enclosed hallway
right outside the kennel and
that's where we do our introductions.
So we basically, release both pigs out of
their single cage out into this hallway
and they get a chance to familiarize
themselves with each other there.
And the main advantage of that
is if one pig wants to escape,
there's room to do so.
So, that is the problem with doing
a pair in a normal sized enclosure.
If they decide that they're going to
fight, it becomes this pig circle
where one is trying to escape and
they don't have anywhere to go and
then you end up having to intervene,
which puts your staff in danger.
The other thing that we try and
do is if we have space for it, if we can,
we do groups.
Groups are advantageous for
a lot of reasons, but
the main one is they give you a lot more
flexibility as pigs are used for study.
Or if one doesn't get
along with the others,
you can maybe pull out a pair rather
than just separating one all by itself.
So, if we can, we do groups.
The other thing to remember is
that they do require followup.
Just like any other animal
that you're socializing,
doing social introductions for the first
time, you need to remember to go back and
actually check how they are doing later.
So food aggression is pretty common
in pigs, and so you need to make sure
everyone's getting sufficient
access to food at feeding times.
The good news is that pigs eat very
quickly, so if you do have to separate for
feeding it doesn't take very long.
The other thing to look for is wounds on
the ears, and tail, so sometimes those
can be kind of subtle, there isn't
necessarily going to be blood everywhere.
Obviously, it's pretty
obvious when you come in and
there's all over the cage
that something went poorly.
But you do want to look for
bites on the ears and bites on the tail.
And then watch for
scratches along the back.
Those are usually pretty obvious.
But remember,
those don't always actually mean fighting.
A lot of time scratches on the back
are indicative of mounting,
which is part of a normal
dominance hierarchy establishment.
So troubleshooting, for specific pairs.
Again, this mounting issue is something
that a lot of people have asked about.
It very common with mini pigs,
it does tend to reduce over time as the
pigs figure out the dominance hierarchy.
The problem is if you, if it's happening
so much you can't tolerate it you won't
necessarily be able to give the group or
the pair long enough to figure that out.
So you kind of have to figure,
you have to decide for yourself, and for
your facility, how much of this mounting
behavior you're going to tolerate
before you separate a pair, or
separate a pig away from a group.
For food aggression, it's like I said,
it's pretty easy to separate pigs for
feeding.
And it usually doesn't take very long,
so it's not a huge time sink.
You can also install or utilize blinds, so
if you have cages that are set up where
there's a solid wall in the back and an
opening at the front, usually just feeding
them in the back is sufficient
to stop that feeding aggression.
You can also pair a chronic mounting
animals with larger animals so
if you socialize a group of five and
one of animals decided that it's going
to mount everybody in that group,
you can pull that one out and
if you have an older animal around,
the good news about pigs, is they get
bigger as they get older very quickly.
And so, you can find, you don't have
to find an animal that's much more than
a month older and they'll be significantly
larger than their newer counterpart.
If you put that mounting
animal with a larger animal,
we've found that it sometimes helps
this establish dominance hierarchy.
More programmatic troubleshooting.
So, if you're finding that a lot
of your pairs are breaking down or
a lot of your groups are breaking down,
some of the things you can do to address
that is to actually
request litter mates or
documentation of who the animals
have been with from your vendor.
And a lot of vendors obviously
don't send that along.
But a lot of pigs that you're sent,
if you're ordering four pigs,
they'll often be litter mates just by
accident or by convenience of the vendor.
But you may not know that
unless you ask the question.
So you might be getting great social
partners, and just by random chance,
pairing them with somebody who's
not a great social partner.
So it's worth asking
the question of your vendors.
The other thing to remember is that
groups allow more flexibility.
Also be aware of shipping stress.
So if you do a pair on the first day that
pigs show up and it doesn't work out, that
doesn't mean that those pigs are jerks and
that they can never be socialized.
Obviously a lot of stuff happens during
shipping that is stressful to pigs.
That's why there's such
a thing as shipping fever.
It's not It's not an innocuous thing to
get transferred to a new facility and
so throwing them to a new facility and
then trying to pair them on that same day
although it a lot of times works, when
it doesn't work it doesn't necessarily
reflect on the individual
pig as being unpairable.
The other thing is that pigs have been
shown to engage in cooperation and
there's some evidence that they show
empathy which is a pretty big deal
in the animal cognition world.
Obviously, as you would guess,
it's controversial, but, so
one idea that you might consider is giving
pigs the opportunity to cooperate or
work together on a task.
Or just put them in a foraging area so
they can spend some time foraging
together where they're both occupied and
just kind of occupying the same space.
That might help with introductions.
All right, so now for,
pigs don't have manners.
That was all of the socialization.
Obviously, I think,
the best way to exchange information
on pig socialization is
during the breakout sessions.
If you have questions,
we can talk among people that have ideas.
Pigs can learn, so
the pigs are very intelligent.
They're very amenable to training
because they're very intelligent, but
also because they
are extremely food motivated.
That's a good training subject, is
an animal that's definitely food motivated
and can figure out what
you're asking of it.
Also be aware that training pigs
has high reward, especially for
these larger breeds.
Again, if you're dealing with Yorkshires
and find out that you're going to have
to keep them in your facility
more than a couple months,
you should be prepared to have a very
large Yorkshire who won't necessarily
cooperate with you unless you are active
about making sure that it will.
So training animals can facilitate
husbandry, medicine, and research.
And again, I'm going to try and
convince you that that's not very hard.
So the kind of classic approach for
handling pigs has been
the Panepinto sling and this is
probably the best known method, and
this is very effective where
prolonged restraint is necessary.
So there are lots of protocols where
pigs have to be held still for,
on the order of an hour or more.
In those cases the Panepinto sling
is probably still the best option.
It can be used with large pigs that
you haven't had the change to train
necessarily before.
So, in a lot of cases this
will still be the best option.
But do be aware that it can be
stressful if you haven't sensitized
the animals to it.
So you have to get
the animal to the sling,
you have to get the sling cranks up.
It makes loud noises, you're lifting
the animals up, and then obviously they're
being lifted into the air,
which isn't a natural thing for them.
So do be aware that that's
not totally innocuous.
But, you can also engage in a few
pretty simple things to make handling pigs
a lot easier later in life, and early and
positive human contact is one
of the easiest things you can
implement in your facility,
that will reap big benefits.
So this is just an example,
this is a brand new pig that
has never been handled before.
And this is an example of two things.
This is an example how it's a pain in the
**** to try and handle a brand new pig.
But also, this is an example of the kind
of handling that we do for pigs,
just to get them used to it.
So she's just putting her hand on them,
basically trying to run
through a fake physical exam.
As you would guess the pig is
not very tolerant of it, but
very motivated by shoelaces.
>> [LAUGH]
>> So this is the much older version,
so remember that tiny little pig doing
all of that, if you got to this size and
then that pig acted like that,
it would be very difficult, right?
So this is a pig,
that was not a pig, okay.
This is a pig that has had some training,
so he's going to flip his ears
a little bit because he doesn't
like playing with his ears.
But she's able to basically run through
a hands on exam while this pig is just
standing there, and if this pig didn't
want to stand still for a hands on exam he
wouldn't have to, he's plenty big that he
could push her around if she wanted to.
So obviously that's not very complicated.
That's just handling getting
them used to handling.
That's not something that
takes a Ph.D exactly.
So target training is another simple
training task that's I would say
slightly more advanced.
But at least, you're getting into
the positive reinforcement training here.
But target training facilitates so
many other things.
Facilitates so many other tasks and
behaviors that can be useful.
So I have sped this video up considerably,
so
that you can see the entire training
process of target training a pig.
Target, treat.
You can see that this isn't
like 20 times speed, right?
Target, treat.
And then she just lays her target down any
he knows that he's supposed to go that
area of the treat.
So that was three trial learning everybody.
That was a pig that had arrives that day,
and had just been let out of the pen.
So, obviously,
we got lucky with our subjects.
They aren't all that easy.
But, man, did I get lucky with my subject.
So, that was three trial learning
using a target, going to a target.
And then, once you have that target
trained, you can, obviously,
use that to do a lot of other things.
So, you can facilitate medical exams,
facilitate transfer to another area.
And this is an example of that.
So again is this is that same pig.
This is exactly 45 seconds after we
have ever let that pig out of its pen in
our facility.
And she's targeting him down to a scale.
So she has to, that's a little scary,
she has to raise that door, and
then she puts him in the scale.
So now we've weighed our pig.
Again this is a minute after we've
let this pig out of the pen for
the very first time in our facility.
So that's pretty cool right?
I mean that's pretty nice.
I wish my monkeys would
train behaviours like that.
>> [LAUGH]
>> You can
also train pigs to cooperate with
a lot more complicated procedures.
We actually had an investigator.
We had pigs that were
compromised cardiovascularly.
We were having to do a lot of procedures
that we're requiring sedation post
cardiovascular compromise where that
sedation is a danger to the experiment,
danger to the pig.
Because there already
are cardiovascular compromised.
So we're having to sedate them to
do things like remove sutures.
We're having to sedate them to
do things like drain an abscess.
We're having to sedate them to do
things like apply ointment even.
Like simple stuff like that.
And so sedations for each of those things,
each time, that's a danger.
And so
we're taking a risk with this experiment,
with this pig that we can get around
with positive reinforcement training.
So I'm gonna walk you through step
by step the super-complicated
procedure whereby we got pigs to
hold still for suture removal.
So this is Ashley, who is our trainer.
So, first she's holding
a treat in front of the pig.
I would like you to notice that this
pig is being socialized while it's in
the training procedure, so we don't
necessarily have to separate the pigs out.
I can't argue that the other pig is doing
any observational learning right now,
but so she's holding a treat there.
She raises it over his nose.
And then pushes back.
You've probably never seen
this behavior before, right?
We like to call it pork butt recumbency.
>> [LAUGH]
>> So she's just dog-sitting this pig.
So again,
this is a pretty easy procedure to do.
But once the pig is trained to sit,
and you can get it to sit and
get to sit on command.
Sit is a behavior that's exclusive to
wiggle around or run around the cage.
So if you can get them to sit
consistently, you can do a lot of stuff.
So this is actually a gastric tube that's
passed into this pig to deliver it
medication while its leg is
being examined which is the area
where they're gonna have sutures that
have to be remove from this pig.
So again this pig is only been here for a
few days and we've got to train to do this
because we don’t have a whole ton of
time between the animal arrived and
when the procedures starts.
So, in a few sessions a day,
and a few days,
we're able to get these
pigs to hold pretty still.
And then eventually you can do
it when it's just one person.
Again, anyone that's done animal
training knows that they can do
incredible things with animal training,
but pigs are just as capable as anything
else to learn how to do these procedures.
And it's not all that hard.
So in summary, pigs are smelly.
No.
Okay so evolution and our domestication
and breeding have shaped pigs and
their behavior in ways that should
be acknowledged in captivity.
So we have to remember that
the pig in our facility
is driven by all the things that
the pig out in the wild is driven by.
but that we've mucked about a little bit
and caused a few other little nuances.
They should be given the opportunity
to explore, forage, and root.
Those are basic behaviors for a pig, just
like a monkey needing time to search for
it's food or time to process it's
food with a foraging board or
whatever pigs that opportunity as well.
Pigs are social and should be socialized,
and this requires effort, just like for
any other species, but it's worth it.
So you're giving the pigs maximum
benefit with a social partner.
Also, they're intelligent, and they can be
easily trained to cooperate in husbandry,
veterinary, and experimental procedures.
And I hope that those videos have helped
convince that it's worth the minimum
investment of time.
So obviously,
I have lots of acknowledgements.
My DVR behavior team is every time
in this talk that I said I or
we, what I really meant is they.
So, they are the ones that
do all this training.
And they are the ones that do
all the pig socialization.
So I owe all this to them.
And then, I use a number of
photos from Michelle Ekstein
whose another DVR person so,
thank you guys.
[APPLAUSE] Also, I happen to know
that Joe is a pig behavior expert.
So if, during the breakout section,
you have questions about pig behavior,
and I look at you with a dump blank look,
be sure and ask Joe.
Yes, please.
>> So.
In terms of This will make
every lab animal that.
>> [LAUGH] Perfect.
>> Or get the And that actually
>> [INAUDIBLE]
>> So, to cut a long story short,
I had a grad student
called Monica Allmore,
who spent a lot of time
looking at pig enrichment.
And in terms of rooting substrates,
peat or mushroom compost, fantastic.
You can autoclave it.
But certainly our
disease management team at Stanford fell
on their heels when I suggested that.
So the other thing that you can do
that works really really well is
hide their food inside straw.
So again you can get straw in, you can
autoclave straw, and you can actually get
feed bins that are used in farms that
they have to really work to pull almost
every piece of straw out and after again a
little bit of food will come out and a lot
of the abnormal behavior in pigs occur
because we feed them concentrate feed.
So these are animals that root around.
They find a little tasty thing and
that motivates them to root
around a little bit more.
And if you give them all
of their feed in one go,
they'll eat it in twenty minutes and then
they spend the rest of the day looking for
more food which turns
into the stereotypings.
So if you can actually make their
food delivery space out by, for
instance, hiding their food
in straw That's awesome, and
if you don't want to invest
in those metal bins,
you can do it with milk crates [LAUGH]
which is actually one of the things we do.
And Jeff who is here is being, is coming
out with all sorts of awesome things for
our pigs as well.
In terms of socialization,
this work that I did with a guy called
Jeremy Marcin Ford, where we actually
looked at the behaviors that were
occurring during socialization to later
predict whether those animals would fight.
And it was brilliantly complex,
amazing work,
which of course meant that it didn't work.
And the long and the short of that is, you
have to give them a way to break contact.
So there has to be something that
they can get behind to get away
from the other animal.
Just like primates, really.
So if you're trying to socialize them
first in too small of a space where
there's not a screen or
something that they can get behind,
that's when they're gonna fight.
But if they can break contact, get behind
a screen, then they'll come out again,
reinitiate and that's sort of
the secret sauce to socializing pigs.
So there you go, that's my two cents.
>> Great.
>> And I'll shut up now.
>> Thank you.
[LAUGH]
