People have co-evolved with dogs as companions for a long time. And many people have fond memories of dogs and experience with them as part of a family. This is not generally true of pigs even if their hearts are closer to ours. Even as someone who doesn't like dogs, I find the idea of harming one (even with a good reason) worse than harming a pig.

Pigs are more intelligent and equally social. Humane society says they're as smart as 3 year old children. [1] Apparently tests show they've got about the same problem solving skills as chimps.

[1] https://www.humanesociety.org/animals/pigs

I believe GP post still holds up since it was regarding companionship and human emotions. It said nothing of pig intelligence.

I was about to say, aren't pigs smarter than dogs generally? Seems like a strange line to draw.

Obviously it's very culture specific, but pigs are quite far from 'man's best friend'.

My sister has a pet pig (a 150+-lb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_Pot-bellied); it lives in the house with everybody else and forages in the backyard. I can't say I'd ever thought of keeping a pig as a pet, but it's a perfectly fine creature, gentle when it's not being provoking, and intelligent and quite communicative.

I can't see it being "man's best friend" (dogs have a bunch of special abilities that pigs don't) but both pigs and goats play an important enough role to call them "man's best helpers"

Arbitrary standard gets drawn and then pigs get condemned to failing to meet it

Pigs don’t pull sleds. They don’t hunt. They don’t play with children. They can’t manoeuvre a flock of sheep. They won’t even try to ward off a bear. They’re bad at sniffing truffles, because they eat them. They won’t run ahead of a fire engine, clearing the way. And they most certainly won’t cuddle up in camp.

Dogs are extremely versatile and have helped humans over thousands of years. Pigs, on the other hand, are tasty.

It’s not that arbitrary.

It's arbitrary because of how human-centric it all is.

You're make my point.

Isn't that life? Or society at least.

I didn't say there was any logic or deep meaning to it, just that someone being willing to sacrifice pigs but not dogs for scientific research doesn't surprise me at all. In mine, even vegetarians generally find the idea of those in others eating dogs (more so than pigs et al.) abhorrent.

Why does intelligence get to be the barometer for this? To me, pigs are essentially big rodents that also happen to be quite delicious. When I eat pork I don’t care how the pig’s intellectual potential will never be realized. I get a side of eggs and go on with my day.

What else would matter? Ethical dilemmas stem from the sentience of a given being. Killing a cell is not really morally questionable, since it is just a (very) complex machinery. While we are ourselves also an even more complex machinery on a physical level, we have certain emerging properties that are not found in cells, but are found in dogs, pigs, etc.

So one can very well claim that torturing beings that can feel pain is wrong.

> So one can very well claim that torturing beings that can feel pain is wrong.

That’s fine and all except we don’t live in a morality version of the matrix. Philosophical arguments hardly effect human behaviors at large.

> Killing a cell is not really morally questionable

Perhaps. But once the cell is fertilized there’s a large population of prolifers that beg to differ yet there is objective no intelligence at this stage of life.

Humans are not so rational as I think you’d like them to be. They also just are rather uncaring hence while this argument/PETA and so on don’t usually change anyone’s feeling towards the issue.

As many aspects in our society, appearance matters the most.

What does that even mean? Plenty of people find farm animals adorable, why else would we have petting zoo's?

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that humans eat meat, and we've gotten quite used to processing certain species of animals for their meat.

Canine (dog) hearts are also very similar to human hearts. Historically, they were the predominant large animal model for cardiovascular diseases and many landmark studies used them. For some disease models a canine heart resembles an "old human heart" better than a pig heart.

The public sentiment is much more favorable for using pig hearts opposed to dog hearts. It's not nice having to explain that you kill dogs for your research.

I've kicked a lot more people than dogs, so it probably has more to do with dogness.