Abstract
Previous research proves dogs’ outstanding success in socio-communicative interactions with humans; however, little is known about other domestic species’ interspecific skills when kept as companion animals. Our aim was to assess highly socialized young miniature pigs’ spontaneous reactions in interactions with humans in direct comparison with that of young family dogs. All subjects experienced similar amount of socialization in human families. In Study 1, we investigated the appearance of human-oriented behaviours without the presence of food (Control condition) when a previously provided food reward was withheld (Food condition). In Study 2, we measured responsiveness to two types of the distal pointing gesture (dynamic sustained and momentary) in a two-way object choice test. In the Control condition of Study 1, the duration of pigs’ and dogs’ orientation towards and their frequency of touching the human’s body was similar. In the Food condition, these behaviours and orienting to the human’s face were intensified in both species. However, pigs exhibited face-orientation to an overall lesser extent and almost exclusively in the Food condition. In Study 2, only dogs relied spontaneously on the distal dynamic-sustained pointing gesture, while all pigs developed side bias. The results suggest that individual familiarization to a human environment enables the spontaneous appearance of similar socio-communicative behaviours in dogs and pigs, however, species predispositions might cause differences in the display of specific signals as well as in the success of spontaneously responding to certain types of the human pointing gestures.
Highlights
IntroductionAs opposed to the intensive usage of dogs for various work-related purposes throughout history (e.g., hunting, guarding and shepherding) and their current popular role as a companion animal living in and as part of the human family, pigs, on the other hand, have been used until very recently as a livestock animal species almost exclusively
Behavioural data from the literature provide evidence that domestic, as well as nondomestic animal species are able to successfully engage in interspecific communicative interactions with humans; they seem to be responsive to human referential signals (forElectronic supplementary material The online version of this article contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.Dogs (Canis familiaris) and pigs (Sus scrofa domesticus) are both highly social, group-living domestic animals with domestication histories of clearly different duration and trajectories
Pigs in the Food condition oriented more to the E’s body than in the Control condition and they tended to orient more than dogs in the Food condition, whereas post-hoc comparisons revealed no difference between dogs’ Body-orientation in the two conditions (Fig. 1)
Summary
As opposed to the intensive usage of dogs for various work-related purposes throughout history (e.g., hunting, guarding and shepherding) and their current popular role as a companion animal living in and as part of the human family, pigs, on the other hand, have been used until very recently as a livestock animal species almost exclusively. Traits in dogs’ behaviour such as willingness to closely cooperate with humans must have been important criteria during their domestication process (Miklósi et al 2003; Hare and Tomasello 2005; Gácsi et al 2009a)—though whether this has played a major role has been questioned recently (Hare et al 2010; Katz and Huber 2018), while excessive breeding and optimizing meat stock was the most important criteria for pigs
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