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At any given time, there are as many as 12,500 Duroc pigs sniffing around the barns of Imani Farms, a pig farm in southwestern Ontario.
The pens of the farm are a cacophony of squeaks, screams, barks and grunts, with each voice telegraphing a different emotion or need. According to Stewart Skinner, 38, the farm’s co-owner, pigs are expressive animals with a wide range of sounds. Interpreting their call can sometimes surprise even experienced farmers.
“I often joked that this would be a lot easier if we could talk pig,” said Mr. Skinner.
Deciphering the emotions behind these oils may soon become a little easier. Researchers in Europe created an algorithm that evaluates the emotional state of pigs based on the sounds the animals make.
“Animal welfare is now widely accepted as being based not only on the physical health of animals, but also on their mental health,” said Elodie Briefer, associate professor of biology at the University of Copenhagen and author of the study. Published this week in the journal Scientific Reports. The sooner a farmer realizes whether an animal is satisfied or distressed, the sooner any issues in the animal’s environment that may affect its health can be addressed.
Pigs are among the more vocal pets and produce a wider range of sounds more often than relatively quiet goats, sheep, and cows. Scientists at five research labs in Europe used handheld microphones to collect about 7,400 different calls from 411 individual pigs to crack the code of pig communication. Calls made in all kinds of situations throughout a pig’s lifespan, from birth to slaughter, were recorded.
The researchers then assigned each sound a positive or negative emotional value based on what the paper calls “heuristic inference.” In other words, the researchers made an educated guess as to how the pig felt about the event in which the audio was recorded (i.e. feeding, good; castration, bad).
On first listen, most people tend to have slightly better luck guessing a pig’s feelings just by looking at their voice. Listen closely enough, though, and patterns emerge.
The grunts associated with positive emotions (sounds that pigs make when feeding, running, or reuniting with their mother or calf friend after a separation) tend to be shorter and have a single-note consistency in tone.
Not surprisingly, an unhappy pig sounds awful. Situations that caused cries of grief included being accidentally crushed by a mother pig (a common danger to piglets), waiting for carnage, hunger, fights and unwanted surprises of foreign people or objects in their pens. Screams, squeals, and barks recorded from animals in fear or pain are both longer in duration and more variable in tone than sounds of satisfaction.
Dr. Humans do a better job of accurately interpreting an animal’s emotional state when taught to listen to these simple distinctions, Briefer said. But the AI outperformed them all. The researchers’ algorithm, designed by co-author Ciara Sypherd, accurately identified the animal’s emotions as positive or negative 92 percent of the time.
It is the product of work SoundWell, a project supported by the European Union to improve animal health and welfare. Dr. Researchers on the project now want to partner with an engineer who can incorporate their data into an app or other tool that farmers can use to interpret their animals’ calls and emotional states in real time, Briefer said.
Understanding the emotions of animals has practical and legal implications. animal sensitization laws as right now in front of the UK parliament claims that animals have the ability to think and feel, and that government should consider their welfare when making policies that may affect them. European union recognized animal sensitivity in 2009.
Mr. Skinner said a cost-effective and user-friendly tool for solving pig grunts could be a valuable asset on a farm.
“The ability to spot problems early is the biggest determining factor in the success of treatment,” said Mr. Skinner. “Any tool that can be adapted to barn settings that will increase understanding of how individual animals feel will have value.”
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