BRILLIANT PIGCASSO

After she introduced two piglets to her animal sanctuary in the Cape Winelands, JOANNE LEFSON was intrigued when one of them became obsessed with a paintbrush. She gave it a canvas and paint and an artist was born. The pig's paintings now sell for thousands of dollars and are even owned by the likes of George Clooney

- JOANNE LEFSON

FROM the get-go it was notable how different in personality the two pigs were. One was gentle, inquisitive and had a soft expression in her eyes. The other was more dominant and obsessed with hoovering up anything, with or without nutritional value: dust, flooring, phones, gates, you name it.

I had done enough research to know that pigs in the wild develop complex social structures, learn from each other and love to play as much as possibly even more than - dogs.

What's more, on the scale with which we measure intelligence, pigs generally rank fifth, after humans, chimps, dolphins and elephants. They've been the subject of academic enquiry for decades, including experiments in 2021 at Purdue University in the US, where researchers discovered that they could train pigs to play video games, controlling a joystick with their snouts to hit moving targets, to get treats. And when the treats ran out, they kept playing anyway.

Bottom line: I needed to keep them entertained. During the day I'd try to encourage their sporting skills with a variety of balls and Frisbees. Rosie ate or destroyed everything within minutes. The other pig, who I hadn't yet named, was better behaved but inevitably ended up also chewing everything. With one exception. The builders had cleaned up neatly after finishing the construction of our barn, but had left behind an old paintbrush, which I casually chucked into our play session one day.

She nudged it, sized it up, prodded it and seemed genuinely intrigued. While everything else was fair game, the brush was protected, nurtured even, like a security blanket with bristles. Was she channelling the spirit of the great artist Francis Bacon? Either way, she had just made a name for herself: Pigcasso.

Then she picked up the brush. For 20, maybe 30, seconds, she just stood there, as if to say, "What next?" and then dropped it gently back to the floor.