Researchers Discover Emotions of Pigs Through Grunts

Using hundreds of acoustic recordings gathered throughout the lives of pigs, from birth to death, an international team of researchers is the first in the world to translate pig grunts into emotions across a wide range of events and life stages.

The study, headed by the University of Copenhagen, ETH Zurich, and France's National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment (INRAE), has the potential to enhance animal welfare in the future.

Are pigs grunt worth a thousand emotions?

(Photo : Alvaro Calvo/Getty Images)

In a recent study, researchers from Denmark, Switzerland, France, Germany, Norway, and the Czech Republic transformed pig grunts into emotions, as per ScienceDaily.

The recordings were made in a variety of scenarios faced by commercial pigs, both favorable and bad, from birth to death.

Positive instances included piglets sucking from their mothers or being reunited with their families after being separated.

According to Dailymail, missed nursing, brief social isolation, piglet fights, piglet crushed by the mother, castration, and handling and waiting in the butcher shop were among the emotionally draining situations.

The researchers then evaluated the audio recordings to distinguish between good and negative events and emotions.

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'Happy' grunts showed by a short grunt

The researchers also devised numerous pretend circumstances for the pigs in the experimental stables to elicit more complex emotions in the center of the spectrum.

These contained a toy or food-filled arena and a comparable arena with no stimulus. In addition, the researchers introduced fresh and unexpected things into the arena for the pigs to interact with.

The pigs' cries, behavior, and heart rates were observed and recorded along the route.

The scenarios in between the extremes were very intriguing.

The researchers discovered a new pattern after a more comprehensive study of the sound data that indicated what the pigs experienced in specific scenarios in greater detail.

There are substantial differences in pig sounds when they explore positive and bad settings. In the best-case scenario, the calls are much shorter, with just slight amplitude variations.

Grunts, in particular, begin loud and progressively decrease in frequency.

They can identify 92% of calls to the proper emotion by training an algorithm to detect these noises, reveals Elodie Briefer.

Animal emotions are being monitored by farmers

Simultaneously, low-frequency calls (such as barks and grunts) were heard in situations where the pigs were experiencing positive or negative emotions.

Animal emotion study is a newer discipline, having arisen in the last 20 years.

It is now widely recognized that the mental health of livestock is critical to their overall well-being.

Nonetheless, today's animal welfare is largely concerned with the physical wellbeing of cattle. There are several systems available to farmers that can constantly detect an animal's physical health.

Analog technologies for monitoring animal mental health have yet to be created.

The study's researchers anticipate that their algorithm will pave the way for a new platform for farmers to monitor the psychological well-being of their animals.

They have taught the system to decode pig grunts, Elodie Briefer added, and now they need someone who wants to turn the algorithm into an app that farmers can use to enhance animals' well-being. 

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