There are as many as 12,500 Duroc hogs snorting around the barnyards of Imani Farms, a pig farm in southwestern Ontario.
The farm's pens are filled with a variety of sounds that telegraph a different feeling or need. Stewart Skinner, a co-owner of the farm, said that pigs have a wide range of vocalizations. Farmers can sometimes be stumped by interpreting their calls.
Mr. Skinner said that this job would be easier if we could speak pig.
It will soon become easier to explain the emotions behind those oinks. The pigs are assessed based on the sound the animals make.
An associate professor of biology at the University of Copenhagen and an author of the study said that animal welfare is based on both the physical and mental health of animals. The sooner a farmer can discern whether an animal is happy or sad, the quicker the issues in the animal's environment that may affect its health can be fixed.
The more voluble pigs are, the more often they produce a wide range of sounds. Scientists in five research labs across Europe used hand-held microphones to gather roughly 7,400 distinct calls from 411 individual pigs. From birth to the slaughter, the calls were recorded.
Researchers assigned each sound a positive or negative emotional value based on what the paper calls "intuitive inference."
Most people do better than chance at guessing a pig's feelings based on its sound alone. Patterns emerge when you listen closely to enough pig calls.
When pigs are separated from their mothers or littermates, they make grunts that are shorter and have a one-note consistency in tone.
An unhappy pig sounds terrible. There were situations that produced cries of distress, such as being crushed by a mother sow, awaiting slaughter, hunger, fights and strange people in their pens. The screams, shrieks and barks recorded from animals experiencing fear or pain are more variable in tone and duration than the sounds of contentment.
Humans do a better job of interpreting an animal's emotional state when taught to listen for simple distinctions. Artificial intelligence was the best. The researchers were able to identify the animal's emotion 92 percent of the time.
The SoundWel project is sponsored by the European Union to improve animal health and welfare. Dr. Briefer said that the project is looking to partner with an engineer who can incorporate their data into an app or other tool that farmers could use to interpret their animals' calls and emotional state in real time.
Understanding animals' emotions has consequences. Britain's parliament is currently considering animal sentience laws that claim that animals are capable of thought and feeling, and that the government must take their welfare into account when making policies that might affect them. The EU recognized animal sentience in 2009.
Mr. Skinner said that a tool for decoding pig grunts could be useful on a farm.
The ability to recognize problems early is the most important factor in the success of treatment, according to Mr. Skinner.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
