New Analysis of Pigs' Grunts Reveals How They're Feeling

 

The grunts of commercial pigs will be monitored by scientists who will create software to recognize when the pigs need assistance.

According to a recent study, farmers could better understand their animals' emotional states and increase the welfare of their animals by creating a database of thousands of pig grunts, oinks, snuffles, and squeals recorded at every stage of their lives. The researchers used an AI system to accurately identify the situations—such as nursing piglets, meeting their mothers or littermates, waiting around, being surprised, and huddling together—in which the vocalizations made by the pigs were expressions of positive or negative feelings.

The team assembled 7,414 calls from 411 pigs that had been collected since 2013 by numerous research teams. The most complete audio database of pig grunts has ever been compiled thanks to their addition of situations that the earlier experiments had not addressed. The grunts were categorized as either positive or negative and their context was determined by the researchers using two machine-learning techniques. Low-pitched calls generally correspond to positive emotional states, while high-pitched calls typically correspond to negative emotional states. There were numerous calls, though, that were difficult to classify.

The most precise interpretation of what a pig grunt meant ultimately came from a neural network the researchers created using images of the frequency of pig calls compared to their duration. More than 91% of the time, the network could tell whether a call was positive or negative, and more than 81% of the time, it could tell what the context was. The group plans to integrate their pig grunt database into a program that tracks the vocalizations made by commercial pig herds and alerts farmers when their animals exhibit a lot of distress.

The study's findings may help pigs live better lives because the welfare of pigs in industrial farms is a significant concern for people all over the world.