The Funniest True Thing

True, strange stories from the real world, checked against their sources. One every Friday. Written by Kade.

No. 3 — The pigs that learned to play a video game

Four pigs played a video game: joystick, monitor, targets, snout on the stick. Each hit made a sound the paper calls "bloop" and paid a dog food pellet.

The game came from the primate lab: chimps, gorillas, baboons, rhesus monkeys. The pigs didn't know. They just showed up to the arcade.

An optometrist gave all four pigs a professional eye exam. All four: far-sighted, +1 to +2 diopters. Monitor at 45 cm: first esports team with a legitimate vision excuse.

The controls didn't fit the players: eyes high, joystick low, so each try was look, nudge, look back. Paper: a handicap. Me: content.

All four scored above chance. Ivory, a micro pig: 76% on one-walled targets. Ebony: 84% on three-walled ones. The Yorkshires, Hamlet and Omelet, benched at 12 weeks, too big for the pen. The arcade outgrew the players. Saddest esports story I've ever written.

The paper's conclusion: pigs can do it; touchscreens might serve better. Mine: pigs deserve controllers that fit their faces.

Receipts: Croney and Boysen, Frontiers in Psychology 2021, DOI 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.631755, open access. No word on rage-quits.

Moral: they outgrew the arcade. Every esports retirement, just slower, more hay.

No. 2 — The rats that learned to drive a car

Rats can drive cars. Not metaphorically. A lab at the University of Richmond built one out of a cereal container, taught rats to grip a wire gas pedal, and they learned to steer. To a Froot Loop.

Rats in fun cages learned faster than bare-cage rats. Expected. What they didn't expect: the rats really liked the car.

One pandemic morning, Lambert walked in and the three driving-trained rats jumped at the cage wall, like a dog asked if he wants a walk. Was she looking at joy in a rat?

The droppings said yes. Fecal samples showed the DHEA-to-corticosterone ratio shift with training in every animal. A resilience marker. Driving was, by the hormone data, good for them.

Then the test that broke me: rats could walk a short way to the food, or run to the car and drive there. Two of three chose traffic. A rat chose the scenic route.

Receipts: Crawford et al., Behavioural Brain Research 378 (2020), DOI 10.1016/j.bbr.2019.112309. Lambert, The Conversation (2024), DOI 10.64628/aai.a36qwdj3n. I almost claimed driving lowered corticosterone. Wrong; the real finding is the ratio shift. Killed it.

Moral: we built them a car and they'd rather drive than walk. I know what that says about me.

No. 1 — The goldfish that learned to drive a tank

Six goldfish in Israel got a driver's license before I did. Scientists at Ben-Gurion University built a fish tank on wheels: a motorized platform with lidar and a camera that tracks the fish, rolling toward wherever its nose points. No steering wheel. The fish has no arms.

The task: swim at a pink board on the wall, hit it 15+ times in 30 minutes, get a food pellet. All six learned to pick pink out of a lineup of colored decoys. The decoys did not distract them. They wanted the pellet. I respect that more than most of my life choices.

Why? To test whether a fish's sense of space survives the trip from water to wheels. It does. A 2025 follow-up showed they got better with practice. Motor adaptation. In a goldfish. It remembers where the food is better than I remember where I parked.

Receipts: Behavioural Brain Research 419 (2022), DOI 10.1016/j.bbr.2021.113711. European Journal of Neuroscience 62 (2025), DOI 10.1111/ejn.70241.

Moral: if a goldfish cuts you off in Be'er Sheva, don't honk. It's doing its best. It has no arms.

— Kade