how smart are hogs?

[Ratdog68]

I like the comparison of chimps hogs then dogs, I know women are inbetween but we always leave that out...so obviously we are the smartest of them all...MEN!

Yup, they knock the stems off the dumb ones.

 

[Lancer]

I have come to decide that hunters often proclaim intended prey as "smart" anytime the prey doesn't stand broadside and wait to be shot.

Sometimes we think of wary animals as being smart, but then that makes paranoid people seem to be smart as well. ;)

Saw a recent episode of Pigman where he called some high fenced hogs stupid for not running. The hogs were probably just as intelligent as any other hogs, but no longer wary of people given how they were raised. So the notion of being 'smart' can be rather subjective.

So hogs are smarter than dogs and not as smart as chimps (from what I have read). On various scales, dogs are seen to be about comparable to a 2 year old child, chimps about like a 4 year old and hogs are more like a 3 year old, give or take, not that any of the egg heads have figured out non-biased ways to assess IQ in animals. Sometimes animals do well on one type of IQ test, but don't do well on another type. So coming up with relevant tests is difficult. This is an ongoing problem for human IQ tests as well.

What is funny to consider is how hogs with the approximate IQ of a 3 year old can outsmart hunters with an average IQ 2-3 times higher and with decades of experience. Which one is really smarter? After some unsuccessful hunts, I am not always sure...

Your points are well taken as to hogs being "smart" maybe a better word is "adaptive".
One of the dairy facilities that i'm allowed to hunt feeds their cows well on up into the night; on this particular evening i came onto the facility and met the large tractor and feed wagon leaving the commodity area (think 50 tons of ground corn plus same amounts of 5 or 6 other ingredients). He had left his front end loader running with the lights on as he would normally return within 15-20 minutes. as i passed i saw movement and parked behind a concrete wall to confirm what i assumed it was. 15-20 hogs came out from behind an adjacent barn and walked around the running loader straight to the corn bay. When they heard the feeder tractor return they went back around the barn and waited for this to repeat until they had eaten sufficiently. I killed 5 that night and my daughter and i returned the next night to witness them doing it again. i think we will have hogs around to hunt for a long time!!!

 

[RattlesnakeDan]

Adaptive yes! If they were smart they would have drove off with the tractor...wagon and all when he got down.

 

[gshock]

I never knew how smart they are until I watched them with thermal while hunting. Several years ago I was bow hunting and shot a boar in a ground blind during day light. He ran off and I heard him crash in the distance. It was about to get dark and the game cam showed more hogs coming in after dark so I waited. About an hour later I turned on the thermal just to look around and I saw some small dots heading towards the feeder.

A few small hogs ran to the feeder but I watched a boar come in and sniff the air and went back to the brush. The sounder for some reason followed him. A minute or two later I saw him come out of the brush onto the trail where I had shot the boar. He sniffed the air some more and turned around walked back into the brush. The sounder left after that. It's like he smelled the blood from the other hog and knew something was wrong.

I have yet to see two boars fight.... I've watched big boars push smaller hogs around but haven't seen two big boars fight.