AI could improve welfare of farmed chickens by listening to their squawks

Researchers say that artificial intelligence could be available within five years.

New research suggests that the technology that quantifies distress calls made by chickens housed in huge indoor sheds correctly distinguishes distress calls from other barn noises. In the future, a similar approach could be used to improve welfare standards in other animals.

25 billion chickens are raised around the world each year in huge sheds. It is possible to assess the welfare of such creatures by listening to their sounds.

"Chickens are very vocal, but the distress call tends to be louder than the others, and is what we would describe as a pure tonal call." It is not hard to pick them out.

Farmers could use chicken calls to gauge their level of distress and enrich their housing. It's impractical to deploy human observers in large flocks of chickens. It's not possible to quantify the number of distress calls with so many birds.

His team has developed a tool to identify distress calls from chickens. The tool was trained using recordings that had already been manually classified by humans.

The evaluation was published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

The goal is not to count distress calls, but to create conditions in which the chickens can live and have less distress.

To confirm the readings correlate, the team will need to make sure the recording equipment works in different types of chicken shed, as well as test it in farms with higher or lower welfare standards.

It may be easy to convince farmers to use the technology. The amount of weight gained and the number of deaths in a flock can be predicted by distress calls made by young chick.

It can be hard to convince farmers to use technology to improve their welfare when they have to produce animals for a set price. Distress calls are a good indicator of mortality and growth rates and this is a way of automation.

He said that similar technology could be developed to monitor pigs or turkeys, which are frequently housed indoors and are vocal.

The research was welcomed by the animal welfare group. We wouldn't want to see this replace physical inspections or reduce stock keeper-bird contact as this could lead to a loss of stockmanship skills or birds that are more difficult to handle.

The vocalisation of distress is just one welfare indicator, but there are a number of other physical factors which farmers should look out for.