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Who's a clever sausage? Pig solves jigsaw puzzle in under a minute

Pig's are often said to be the world's most intelligent domestic animals

Jack Simpson
Friday 20 March 2015 14:30 GMT
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Moritz the Pig was able to finish the puzzle in under a minute
Moritz the Pig was able to finish the puzzle in under a minute (YouTube/ Nicolle von Eberkopf)

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Could this be the world’s most perceptive porker?

A pig in Germany has proved just how smart swine can be after a video showed it completing a jigsaw in under a minute without any human help.

Moritz the Pig, was filmed by his owner Nicolle von Eberkopf at their home in Berlin using only his mouth to complete the “pigsaw puzzle” in just 52 seconds.In the video, Moritz picks up the different pig-shaped pieces, placing them quickly into their corresponding coloured holes without even a hint of making a “pig’s ear” of it.

The extraordinary video was first uploaded onto YouTube on the February 11 but has recently gone viral, receiving over 141,000 views.

Despite pig’s having the reputation as “dirty” and sometimes “stupid” creatures, scientists have long acknowledged pigs as the “cleanest” and “most intelligent” of all domestic animals.

And this has been backed up by science. Studies at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1990s showed that pigs could be trained to move video game cursors with their snouts and were able to easily distinguish on a screen between scribbles that they had seen before and those that they did not recognise.

According to scientists, the only other animal that came close to the pigs when it came to this task were chimpanzees.

This was followed up last year, when complex experiments at Wagenigen University in The Netherlands discovered that pigs could experience empathy, an emotion previously thought to be exclusive to humans.

In the experiment scientists discovered that pigs responded to each other’s feelings when they lived in the close quarters of a pig pen.

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