• Question: why cant pigs fly and if they cant why dont they grow wings?

    Asked by gingers4justice to Hywel, Joseph, Patience, Poonam, Rachael on 15 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Joseph Cook

      Joseph Cook answered on 15 Jun 2010:

      Pigs can’t fly because they don’t have wings. Their DNA dictates how they grow so there is nothing they can do about it.

    • Photo: Dr Hywel Jones

      Dr Hywel Jones answered on 15 Jun 2010:

      Pigs can’t fly because they don’t have the equipment to do so, i.e. wings! If it was advantageous for pigs to fly in terms of evolution then they would slowly evolve to develop wings. In fact that has already happened. Small flightless dinosaurs found an evolutionary niche by being able to at first glide and then later to evolve feathers and to fly. They found this gave than an advantage over other flightless similar creatures and thus we got birds. For mammals (pigs are mammals) a similar thing happened later in evolution and we got bats and other flying mammals, who also found it advantageous to fly in order to find food and avoid predators.
      You’ll notice that birds and bats etc. are all quiet small, this means they can fly without using too much energy (owls bones are hollow to make them even lighter). Pigs are just too heavy and would need enormous wings and muscles to fly and this is just not good use of energy.

    • Photo: Poonam Kaushik

      Poonam Kaushik answered on 15 Jun 2010:

      Pigs r lethargic first of all, they have got huge weight and small surface to volume ratio so they can’t fly coz of that!

      They don’t need to adapt for flying coz their food is available on earth! If somehow their food starts flying they might evn adapt for flying as well u never know!!!

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