Bex threw a few pellets down for the pig and stood. Maybe she was a natural. There wasn’t much she was good at. It gave her a warm feeling inside to think she might be a natural pig trainer. And that her dad might be proud of her.

‘We can get her doing fetch next,’ he said. ‘It takes a bit of work to build up to that, but she’s well capable of it.’

Bex left the pen and sat opposite her dad, squinting into the sun. The thought of a pig playing fetch was funny, but she wasn’t sure why. She knew they were clever. And they recognised her too. She was already growing attached to them.

Bex adjusted the parasol to stop the light dazzling her. Her dad had rigged up an electric motor, so it could take itself up and down. She wondered if he’d have been happier as an engineer. He made his bizarre household robots, and he’d taught himself plumbing and electrics and woodwork. But she supposed he’d never questioned that he’d take over the family farm.

‘Why do you train them?’ Bex asked.

‘It’s fun and it makes them easier to handle. It’s less stressful for all concerned.’

‘Are they as clever as dogs?’

‘They’re certainly very trainable. I’m not sure comparing intelligence between different species is helpful.’

‘Why not?’ She didn’t want the conversation to end. He felt like a proper dad when they were training the pigs together, and discussing it afterwards. At other times they couldn’t talk. There were silences you could drive a tractor through.

Her dad looked at her and spoke as if he cared what she thought. ‘Take the “mirror test” that humans are so fond of. An animal passes the test if it recognises itself in a mirror. Do you think that makes an animal intelligent?’

Bex thought about it. ‘I guess so …’

‘But is it not biased towards visual animals? Imagine if there was such a thing as a “smell mirror” that reflected back your own unique aroma. Do you think you’d recognise your smell reflection?’

Bex laughed. ‘I kind of hope not.’

‘So does that make you stupid?’

She was desperate for him not to think she was stupid. To take her seriously like he did Kirsty. ‘I get your point. We look at it from our perspective all the time, not giving animals much credit for stuff they do better than us.’

The pig she’d been training had finished the pellets and collapsed into a muddy puddle, settling down as if she was on a spa day, readying herself for a massage.

‘We mustn’t anthropomorphise them either,’ her dad said. ‘They’re different from us and they want different things.’