Contrafreeloading is the phenomenon that animals prefer to ‘‘work’’ for food even though ‘‘free’’ food is
available nearby. In this study,we investigated whether pigs express contrafreeloading in a test situation where
the searching, finding and consuming of food items resembles a natural foraging situation. For that purpose, we
investigated whether pigs prefer an environment with straw and hidden food rewards (chocolate raisins) to an
environment with straw, but without hidden food rewards and with food rewards ‘‘freely’’ available in a trough. The results show that pigs express contrafreeloading when using a natural foraging task and they suggest that the reinforcing effects of anticipation, which occurs during natural foraging in the delays between searching and finding food, may contribute to the observed expression of contrafreeloading in pigs.