Pigs are wise - and clean

Paulo Whitaker / Reuters

Here's the dirt on pigs: They are perhaps the smartest, cleanest domestic animals known – more so than cats and dogs, according to some experts. But pigs don't have sweat glands, so they roll around in the mud to stay cool. A sign of their cleverness came from experiments in the 1990s. Pigs were trained to move a cursor on a video screen with their snouts and used the cursor to distinguish between scribbles they knew and those they were seeing for the first time. They learned the task as quickly as chimpanzees.