31 Facts About pigs

Hi, I'm Craig and this is Mental Floss on YouTube

Around here, we talk about pigs sometimes, and when we do, we put money into this piggy bank

And when we fill the piggy bank up, we're gonna have a pork chop party. One of the most common big questions around here is

are you gonna do a video about pig facts so that you have more opportunity to put money into the piggy bank

Well, to answer your question, no. April Fools! It's all pigs all the time around here

I'm sure that Winston Churchill once said, I like pigs. Cats look down on you, dogs look up to you, but pigs treat you like an equal

Unless you're an animal farm. Anyway, that's the first of many facts about pigs I'm going to share with you today in this video sponsored by our Pork Chop Party Fund

So the basic theme of today's video is that pigs have been extraordinarily successful as a species

Like, there have been domestic pigs since over 10,000 years ago. Pigs are technically omnivores, but their diet only consists of about 4% animal and insect matter

The rest is plants. That's how we should all eat, by the way. Pigs can also be tremendously heroic, like in 2000, a pig named Prue from Wales rescued her owner who was stuck in a bog

The owner was able to get a rope around the pig, and then the pig pulled her out

Speaking of which, in 1984, a pig named Priscilla saved a boy from drowning in Houston

The boy had swam out too far, but he managed to grab onto Priscilla's leash and she swam him to shore

She probably swam herself to shore, but he was holding on! Experts claim that pigs are about as smart as three-year-old humans

They're even considered smarter than dogs. In fact, trained pigs are more reliable than dogs when it comes to sniffing out things like

mines and explosives and gunpowder. This makes me wonder, Mark, why do we have dogs at all

They just like worse pigs Now let talk about wild pigs aka feral pigs They can be found on every continent except Antarctica Merritt says that I pronounced Antarctica wrong There a C in there so I sorry Antarctica

Anyway, in the US, feral pigs cause over 1.5 billion dollars in agricultural damage every year

And feral pigs can be found in 47 of the 50 American states. Experts estimate that there are between 6 and 8 million of them in the US

Thing of which, Denmark has about 13 million pigs. Compare that with their population of humans, around 5.6 million

More about how smart pigs are. In a study conducted at Penn State, researchers found that pigs were able to learn to play

a video game faster than chimpanzees. Dogs were not able to figure out how to play it at all

Pigs can also use mirrors. In a 2009 study published in the journal Animal Behavior, researchers proved that pigs can

use a mirror to find hidden food. It's possible that this shows them as being as self-aware and intelligent as apes and dolphins

There are four toes on each of a pig's feet, but they only walk on two of the toes, so it looks like they're perpetually tiptoeing

Anyway, putting most of their body weight on the third and fourth toes of their hooves make them what's known as even-toed ungulates

That puts them in the same order as giraffes, deer, and llamas. Man, the Wall of Magic has a lot of even-toed ungulates. There's our giraffe

Then we've got our French llama, and Eevee is kind of a deer. There are a lot of cannabis plants, aka marijuana, in Bhutan, and historically it was used to feed pigs until the country got television in 1999 and learned that it could be used as a drug

In the United States, March 1st is National Pig Day, a holiday that started in 1972 thanks to a pair of sisters who considered pigs to be, quote

one of man's most intellectual and domesticated animals. In the Bahamas, there's a beach that locals call Pig Beach because feral pigs like to lay on the beach. They'll even swim out to incoming boats

Speaking of which a few pigs know how to surf including one in Hawaii and one in New Zealand Because they already know how to swim it relatively easy to get them to hop on a board Although to be fair I also know how to swim and at the end of my three surf lesson

in which I was guaranteed my money back, if I couldn't stand up, I got my money back

In 2014, the Seal Beach City Council in California voted to remove pigs from the list of non-domesticated animals

that were allowed as pets in the community. This was mainly because of a 235 pound pig named Bubba, who was disturbing neighbors

But people protested the decision, so Bubba was given a permit, making him the only pig allowed in Seal Beach, California

So hopefully this video is helping you to learn to love pigs, but of course not everyone does

In 2014, a woman got kicked off of a US Airways flight, for instance, for bringing a 50 to 70 pound pig onto the plane

It began defecating in the aisles, because, you know, where else was it going to defecate? Those restrooms are tiny

The woman was allowed to have the pig in the first place because it was her emotional support animal

but in the end it was decided that the needs of the other passengers were also important

and it was deemed necessary to get that mental flossing pig out of that mental flossing plane

The reason pigs lay in the mud a lot is because they don't have many sweat glands, so they need other ways to keep cool

So, if you're sweating like a pig, you're basically not sweating very much

Since about 1998, there's been a major problem in the U.S. in which people buy what's known as a mini-pig

But the problem is that mini-pigs keep growing until they're not mini-pigs, they're like 500 pounds

These pigs aren't bred particularly well, and there's no way to predict how much they're going to grow

So, as much fun as it would be to have a pig as a pet, they're smarter than dogs, they're better at sniffing minds, maybe we do need dogs after all

In 2014 a study was published in the journal Science Translational Medicine in which researchers were able to put genes into pigs that basically allowed them to grow their own pacemakers Okay let move on to some famous pigs Miss Piggy was originally named Miss Piggy Lee after the singer Peggy Lee

According to a photographer for Life magazine, Arnold the pig from Green Acres was very well trained

The guy claimed, We rented the pig and he came with his handler and the pig would do anything you wanted the pig to do

The pig was overwhelmingly cooperative. That's a marked departure from a lot of human actors

Anyway, as you know from our episode on children's books, Olivia the pig was named after Ian Falconer's niece

but Falconer designed Olivia's appearance based on another girl. Coincidentally, her name was also Olivia

Well, that or he was lying so that people wouldn't compare his niece to a pig

In one early cartoon, it was revealed that Porky Pig's love interest, Petunia, was also his sister

Why are the villains in Angry Birds pigs? Well, because the game was designed in 2009 and the creators were inspired by swine flu

And after filming the movie, Babe actor James Cromwell became a vegan

Meanwhile, the many pigs who collectively played Babe continued to eat meat, but just 4%

And finally, I returned to my salon to tell you about the origin of piggy banks

We don't know for sure when they started, but most experts believe it was around the 15th century in Europe

People used to keep spare change in something called a pig container, which meant clay

but you know, pig sounds like pig, so the next natural step was containers shaped like pigs

Thanks for watching Menopause here on YouTube, which is made with the help of all of these nice people who will finally, thanks to this video, maybe get their staff pork chop party

Thanks again for watching, and as we say in my hometown, don't forget to be awesome. Eh, 20 bucks should cover it