If you have ever seen a hog truck driving a load of pigs to the slaughterhouse and felt sad, this story might cheer you up. When a Joanne Lefson of Cape Town, South Africa, saved a piglet from a hog farm, she knew she was giving it a chance at a better life or any life at all.
She didn’t expect that her piglet would grow up to be a famous artist.
She brought the pig to live at Farm Sanctuary SA, and the pig quickly started eating everything she could find. The only thing she didn’t eat was paintbrushes, and that gave Lefson an idea. She was going to train the pig to paint. She used a positive reinforcement training method to accomplish this task, and she named the pig “Pigcasso.”
While Pigcasso is definitely a rare animal artist, she isn’t the only one. There are plenty of other animals who have painted, too. Big cats, rhinos, apes, and even stingrays have been known to make art with a paintbrush and canvas, but are they really artistic?
Some people doubt it.
Kristina Horback, assistant professor of animal science at the University of California-Davis claims that Pigcasso is just doing what she knows to do. She said:
“Pigs investigate their environment with their snout and mouth and actively grab, bite, lick, move, and root objects when given the chance.”
An interesting thing about Pigcasso’s work is that it contains red paint.
Pigs are dichromatic, meaning they only see blues, greens, and yellows.
Pigcasso’s owner thinks that the experts are trying too hard to analyze the paintings. She said the pig is painting and that art is something that shouldn’t be analyzed so much.
She said:
“The gift is just to look at Pigcasso’s art and not be ruled by trying to define it.”
Pigcasso is so popular that she has sold many of her paintings.
She also has her own Facebook page where she shares her art, as well as videos of her making it. Who are people to say that the paintings this pig makes aren’t art?
Pigcasso’s life has defiantly changed since her days on the hog farm. The good news is, it’s changed for the better and allowed her to avoid being sent to the slaughterhouse. She is the first non-human to ever have her own exhibition. Who knows what other amazing things Pigcasso can master?
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