What kind of jerk does that? The answer was me, apparently.

I'm Angela Duckworth. I'm Stephen Dubner. And you're listening to No Stupid Questions.

Today on the show, what separates people from non-human animals?

I mean, my dog has a 401k. Also, why do we pace when we're stressed or anxious?

Like in the Bugs Bunny cartoons that somebody's waiting outside the delivery for a baby to come.

So, Angela, I recently came across a paper in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, which I was so charmed by that I asked you to read

it so we could talk about it. It's called acquisition of a joystick-operated video task by pigs.

How could I forget? For the listener, I'll just explain these experiments were carried out at

Penn State University. There were four pigs, a pair of Yorkshire pigs named Hamlet and Omlet,

and a pair of Panapinto micropigs named Ebony and Ivory, I guess after Stevie Wonder and

Paul McCartney, or the song of that name. Or after piano keys. And the paper describes what

the pigs were and were not able to learn in these experiments manipulating a video game

joystick with their snouts. And what I really want to know is tell us how it changes your

thinking as a psychologist, if at all, about non-human animals, their capabilities, the way

we should think about them perhaps differently, and about ourselves

differently.

Well, thank you, Stephen, for broadening my academic horizons.

I would not have read this paper on video games and pigs, were it not for our friendship.

So first, I will just say that when I read this line, I literally

laughed out loud. After 12 weeks of training, Hamlet and Omlet were terminated from the experiment

because they had grown too large and no longer fit within the constraints of the test pen.

Academic research is tough. You lose 50% of your research pool, just like that.

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