Scientists could soon be able to translate pigs’ oinks, squeaks, squeals and grunts into words.
An artificial intelligence tool is currently being developed by researchers in the hopes of understanding what those noises mean, especially for pigs that live on a farm.
“Emotions of animals are central to their welfare, but we don’t measure it much on farms,” study co-leader Elodie Mandel-Briefer, a behavioural biologist at University of Copenhagen, told Britain’s Sky News.
The AI program is being created in part to help improve the animal’s life and could potentially alert farmers to negative emotions and stresses, researchers say.
“It’s absolutely fantastic that my colleagues at the University of Copenhagen have found a way to answer the banal question: what do pigs actually think about the way we treat them,” Professor of Animal Welfare Peter Sandoe told Danish broadcaster DR, according to The Local.
To build the algorithm, scientists from universities in Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, France, Norway and the Czech Republic are compiling recordings of pig sounds at different times during the day as well as different scenarios.
Those scenarios include when pigs are at play, in isolation and when competing for their next meal.
The study has already found that pigs living outside or on free-range or organic farms produced fewer stress calls when they were freely able to roam and play in the dirt.
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“Once we have the tool working, farmers can have an app on their phone that can translate what their pigs are saying in terms of emotions,” Mandel-Briefer said.
Researchers found that when pigs make short grunts, it is typically for positive emotions, while longer grunting may reveal discomfort.
When they are stressed, pigs usually make loud screams or squeals.