Why do we love dogs but eat pigs?

The objection

“Dogs are companions and pigs are livestock. Every culture decides which animals it keeps close and which it farms. Treasuring a dog while eating a pig is just how we sort the animal world, and there’s nothing hypocritical about it.”

The answer

Cultures do sort animals into pets and food, and the objection is right about that much. What matters is whether the sorting follows a real difference in the animals or only our habits. We protect dogs because they feel pain and fear, have minds and personalities of their own and can suffer.

Do pigs have the traits we protect in dogs?

As far as the research can tell, pigs have every trait we protect in dogs. They feel pain and fear: the UK government’s Animal Welfare Committee concluded in 2025 that the gas used to stun pigs for slaughter causes them pain and fear [3], and the UK’s Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act 2022 counts every vertebrate as sentient, the pig and the dog alike [4]. The evidence on their minds is thinner but points the same way. In a 2015 review published in the peer-reviewed International Journal of Comparative Psychology, Lori Marino and Christina Colvin wrote that relatively little is known about the psychology of domestic pigs, but that what is known suggests they are cognitively complex and share many traits with animals we consider intelligent. Having looked at work on cognition, self-awareness, emotion and personality, they concluded that findings in several areas are suggestive of a complex psychology, and called for more research [1]. The review was produced with grant money from The Someone Project, an initiative of the US farm-animal advocacy group Farm Sanctuary, and Marino was then executive director of the Kimmela Center for Animal Advocacy [11]. In a 2015 experiment, pigs that were spared an unpleasant treatment still changed their behaviour when they joined pen mates going through it, which the researchers read as emotional contagion, a simple form of empathy (Reimert et al.) [2].

Dogs do have the edge in reading people. In a small 2019 study of miniature pigs and dogs about four months old, all raised in families, the pigs oriented towards people and touched them about as much as the dogs did, but they looked at human faces less, and mostly when food was being withheld. When a person kept pointing at one of two containers, only the dogs, as a group, picked the one hiding food more often than chance. The authors suggested that pigs may be just as able to learn such cues and that people simply hold a dog’s attention more naturally (Gerencsér et al.) [12]. That may help explain why dogs are easier to love. It does nothing to make a pig’s pain matter less, and no trait the dog has and the pig lacks would justify slaughtering the pig.

Is the line between pets and food just habit?

The line is largely habit: which animals count as food varies from culture to culture, and experiments suggest that once an animal is classed as food, people credit it with less capacity to suffer. In a 2011 study by Bratanova, Loughnan and Bastian, people read about an animal in a distant country, and describing it as food there was enough on its own to lower how much they thought it could suffer, and with that their moral concern for it; describing it as killed, or people as responsible for its death, did not have that effect [13]. In three studies published in 2012, Bastian and colleagues found that people ascribe less mental capacity to animals they consider fit to eat, and that meat eaters deny those animals minds all the more when reminded that meat involves suffering [5]. In an earlier experiment, people who had just eaten dried beef rated a cow’s moral status lower than people who had eaten nuts (Loughnan et al., 2010) [6]. Habit explains the double standard without justifying it, and the line can move. Dogs have long been raised for meat in South Korea, and in January 2024 its National Assembly voted 208 to 0 to ban raising and butchering dogs for food and selling dog meat, from 2027 [7].

What does being classed as food mean for a pig?

It means being bred for slaughter: about 1.5 billion pigs were killed for meat worldwide in 2024, by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s count [8]. In England and Wales about 90% of pigs are stunned with high-concentration carbon dioxide, a government figure from the Food Standards Agency’s 2024 survey, cited by the UK government’s Animal Welfare Committee [3]. The committee found in 2025 that the gas causes pain, respiratory distress and fear before the pigs lose consciousness, which takes 21 to 60 seconds, and it recommended banning the method for pigs [3]. UK government advisers had already called it “not acceptable” in 2003 and wanted aversive gas mixtures phased out within five years [3]. In December 2025 the UK government said in its animal welfare strategy for England that it wants “to see an end to the use of CO2 gas stunning” and would ban it for pigs, subject to a consultation [14], but in a written answer on 22 October 2026 it said only that it “will consult”, with further details “soon” [15]. In Ireland, the agriculture minister said in a written answer to a Dáil question in June 2026 that most pigs are stunned the same way [9]. In South Australia in June 2023, the Australian campaign group Farm Transparency Project filmed a sow’s last moments in a gas chamber at a slaughterhouse in Murray Bridge, with the word “cull” spray-painted on her back [10].