Brosche, K., McGetrick, J., & Rault, J-L. (2025). Step aside! Assessing body awareness in pigs using a body-as-an-obstacle task. Animal Behavior and Cognition, 12(2), 172-234. https://doi.org/10.26451/abc.12.02.02.2025

Body awareness allows animals to perceive their own body as a tool or even as obstacle when interacting with their environment. Body-as-an-obstacle tasks have been employed to test body awareness in human infants, elephants, and dogs. Investigating body awareness in a farm animal species for the first time, we tested young domestic pigs (Sus scrofus domesticus, N=17, 8 male and 9 female, 7 weeks old) in a modified body-as-an-obstacle task. Pigs learned to push a sliding panel with their snout to access food rewards. This was achievable from two different positions: left or right, corresponding to on or off a mat. In the test condition, the mat on which pigs were positioned was attached to the panel via a chain. If body-aware, pigs were expected, after unsuccessfully trying from the mat side, to step off the mat and push from the other side. Subjects stepped off the mat and solved 52% of the "attached" trials. Additionally, they were significantly quicker, and more likely, to push from the other side after stepping off in a newly introduced control condition, in which the panel was blocked for a reason unknown to the pig, did not differ significantly from that in the attached condition. Hence, similar to previously tesed species, pigs can flexibly adjust their behavior to solve a body-as-an-obstacle task. Importantly, our findings also highlight the necessity of determining whether animals simply switch statregies and, thereby, succeed in body-as-an-obstacle tasks whenever they cannot identify the reason for the obstruction, or whether their sccuess indeed constitutes evidence for body awareness. 

Self-awareness, Body awareness, Body-as-an-obstacle task, Domestic pig, Sus scrofa domesticus