At a slight tangent from your question.

In list context the regex returns all the matches.

#!/bin/perl5

use strict;
use warnings;

my $text = "The dog is black cat is white and the fox does not like th
+e cow or pig";
my (@array) = $text =~ /(cow|dog|pig)/g;
print "@array\n"; 

__DATA__
---------- Capture Output ----------
> "C:\Perl\bin\perl.exe" _new.pl
dog cow pig

> Terminated with exit code 0.
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