Understanding Vocalization Might Help to Assess Stressful Conditions in Piglets

Abstract

Simple SummaryThis research aimed to analyze the possibility of assessing piglets’ welfare using the records of their vocalization. The trial was done in a pig commercial farm, and we recorded the vocal signals from piglets in several stressful exposure situations. Data mining techniques were applied to the processed signals in order to obtain a stress classification using the recorded data. We found that, using the piglets’ vocalization, it was possible to identify the most frequent stressful conditions at the farrowing phase, namely: pain, cold and hunger.AbstractAssessing pigs’ welfare is one of the most challenging subjects in intensive pig farming. Animal vocalization analysis is a noninvasive procedure and may be used as a tool for assessing animal welfare status. The objective of this research was to identify stress conditions in piglets reared in farrowing pens through their vocalization. Vocal signals were collected from 40 animals under the following situations: normal (baseline), feeling cold, in pain, and feeling hunger. A unidirectional microphone positioned about 15 cm from the animals’ mouth was used for recording the acoustic signals. The microphone was connected to a digital recorder, where the signals were digitized at the 44,100 Hz frequency. The collected sounds were edited and analyzed. The J48 decision tree algorithm available at the Weka® data mining software was used for stress classification. It was possible to categorize diverse conditions from the piglets’ vocalization during the farrowing phase (pain, cold and hunger), with an accuracy rate of 81.12%. Results indicated that vocalization might be an effective welfare indicator, and it could be applied for assessing distress from pain, cold and hunger in farrowing piglets.

Discerning Pig Screams in Production Environments

“…In this study, there were five features assessing the formant structure. These features did not specify the exact values of the formants as in literature [ 41 ] but attempted to give an indication if a formant structure was present. Furthermore, a data representation called Chirp Group Delay (CGD) [ 30 ] was applied for the first time on animal vocalisations while previous studies applied LPC coefficients to represent this structure in stress vocalisations [ 26 , 41 ].…”

“…These features did not specify the exact values of the formants as in literature [ 41 ] but attempted to give an indication if a formant structure was present. Furthermore, a data representation called Chirp Group Delay (CGD) [ 30 ] was applied for the first time on animal vocalisations while previous studies applied LPC coefficients to represent this structure in stress vocalisations [ 26 , 41 ]. Moreover, other sounds present in a pig barn such as barks [ 21 ] and coughs [ 42 ] were shown to possess certain formant structure but these sounds were not included in this research paper.…”

Pain in Pig Production: Text Mining Analysis of the Scientific Literature

“…Behavioural indicators are not invasive as well as not intrusive as they do not disturb the animal during recording. Vocalizations, one of the most impactful words highlighted by the text mining, are the main pain indicators in pigs (da Silva Cordeiro et al 2013;Ison et al 2016). The association among tokens showed the term 'vocalization' being related to 'acute stress', meaning that very frequently the two concepts were reported together in the analysed texts.…”

A Novel Method for Broiler Abnormal Sound Detection Using WMFCC and HMM

“…Based on these findings, there were different methods of animal vocalization analysis reported in recent years [3]. For instance, acoustic technology has been used to assess pig sex, age, distress, heat stress [4][5][6], and piglet stressful conditions [7,8]; recognize bovine and pig respiratory disease [9][10][11][12]; and monitor cattle, goat, and sheep behaviors and feed intake [13][14][15][16][17][18]. Similar work has been conducted with poultry.…”