Do these pigs sound happy or sad European scientists have
developed an artificial intelligence algorithm capable of finding out their
goal is to create a tool that can decode pigs
calls and update farmers on their well being. Researchers
say once fully developed, it could also be used
to label farms and help consumers make informed choices.
The A I algorithm was developed from thousands of pig
recordings taken in different settings. What noises do they
make when they play? How about when pigs are
isolated or in competition for food? Then we started
by combining all the recordings. We have Lod Mandel
Breer is a behavioral biologist at the University of Copenhagen
and co lead of the study. So we have
this huge database of calls that are produced in specific
emotions, specific context by many different peaks and kinds
of peaks and ages. And then we developed A
I or artificial intelligence that could tell us be trained
to tell us if the calls that we recorded were
emotionally positive or negative. They found that short grunts
typically indicate positive emotions while long grunts often signal discomfort
, high frequency sounds like screams or squeals usually mean
the pig is stressed, for instance, when they
are in pain, fight or are separated from each
other. The study of animal emotions is a relatively
new field. It recognizes the mental health of livestock
as vital to their overall well being, most current
animal welfare strategies focus on physical health and use systems
that monitor these aspects for farmers, Mandel Breer says
she began working on the project in 2016 with the
explosions of a methods, it actually becomes more and
more easy to do these things. We made a
lot of progress in our team. The algorithm demonstrated
that pigs kept in outdoor free range or organic farms
with the ability to roam and dig produced fewer stress
calls than conventionally raised pigs. Mandel Briefer says the
technology could be developed into an app for farmers to
enhance their animals welfare. And the researchers say the
information could one day be used by consumers to make
informed choices with enough data. Mendel Briefer says the
method could also potentially be applied to understand the emotions
of other mammals.