You're hearing a pig greet a human at a pig research facility outside of Vienna, Austria.

The facility belongs to the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna, and it's kind of like pig heaven.

Pigs aren't constrained in crates. They're allowed to

roam around, to build their own structures. They basically just get to hang out. These recordings

are actually videos. In this one, three pigs are huddling together. My favorite recording

is this one, of a pig blowing bubbles into a puddle of water.

The idea is that these pigs get to live their best lives away from the constraints we usually put on them.

And that's because scientists want to see what pigs are really like without us.

And the pigs sort of, they just sort of lollop around, you know, like a cow wood, like a sheepwood

or a goat wood. And it sort of, it really did change my impression of pigs to see the

move against the landscape because we're just so unused to that, I think think we're so used to them either being in very churned up mud

or being in sort of quite industrial surroundings.

That's my colleague Henry Mance talking to me from our London studio.

I invited him on because last month he wrote a cover story for FT Weekend magazine about pigs.

It looks at some recent science that's showing us what many already guessed, but most of us

don't want to admit, that pigs are far more sentient and complex than we give them credit for.

I think basically the way we think about pigs is we don't think about pigs because to think about pigs is really uncomfortable.

And it's really uncomfortable because a lot of people find them beautiful animals, find them cute animals.

They're some of the first animals we see in storybooks.

And we don't like to think of them suffering because we know those of us who have seen them up close that they have abilities.

They have awareness.

And so I think we justify it to ourselves in various ways around, hoping that they're given good lives.

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