Chicken clucks reveal whether birds are happy or sad, says study
‘These results could be used in Ai-based detection systems to monitor chickens’ ‘It could enhance welfare assessment in the commercial chicken industry’
HUMANS can tell if a chicken is happy or sad by the sound of its clucks, a study suggests.
A person can identify with 69 per cent accuracy if a cluck is from a satisfied or disgruntled bird, data show.
Scientists have said that the study proves that humans may have an innate ability to infer the state of an animal from audio cues only.
People can understand the moods of dogs, chimps and pigs by their noises, for example, but the theory has been extended to poultry. Researchers from the University of Queensland and the University of Lincoln created an online questionnaire that was made up of sound clips of 12 ISA brown hens.
The birds were recorded in two conditions: when they were given a treat and when there was no reward.
Six-second clips of sound from these were played to about 200 participants who were asked to say if the clips they heard were from chickens feeling a positive or negative emotion.
People answered correctly in 69 per cent of cases and the study found that participants’ level of previous interaction with chickens had no impact on detection level – to the surprise of researchers, who thought more experienced chicken farmers might be better attuned to the birds’ emotions.
Older people were better at identifying the chicken’s emotions than young people, however, and longer calls were often thought to be more negative.
The researchers hope that more work on how human ears process the sounds of the chickens could lead to computer systems that monitor coups for signs of distress and ensure a high quality of life for the animals.
“If future research could identify specific acoustic cues that predict how humans rate arousal in chicken calls, these results could potentially be used in artificial intelligence-based detection systems to monitor vocalisations in chickens,” the scientists write in their paper. “Furthermore, if such vocalisation monitoring was reliable, it would provide a convenient and cost-effective way to enhance welfare assessment methods in the commercial chicken production industry.”
They add that the findings “have important implications for the welfare of farmed chickens” because it shows that poultry workers can tell when their birds are distressed or content.
“Importantly, humans could identify reward-related calls, and this ability could enhance the management of farmed chickens to improve their welfare,” the authors write in Royal Society Open Science.
Past studies have shown that chickens possess basic numeracy skills, and are able to feel empathy and jealousy.
Mammals, amphibians and reptiles make vocalisations by pushing air from their lungs over the larynx, which makes vocal folds vibrate and produces sound waves.
A similar process occurs in birds but they have a syrinx instead of a larynx and the noise is altered higher up the vocal tract.
One can tell if a chicken is happy by the sound it makes, scientists have found. Perhaps we knew that already. Although most of us go for many a day without thinking about chickens, we are not at all surprised, if mention is made of them in print, to find a phrase such as “contented clucking”. But the scientists have now gone further. “Specific acoustic cues may embody a homologous signalling system among vertebrates,” says one who has worked on the project about which we report today. In other words, animals, at least those with backbones, share a common language. There is need for caution here. It is seldom easy to tell, for example, whether a tortoise is enjoying a lettuce leaf merely from its purrs and grunts. Even a dog’s growl may be ambiguous. On the road to becoming Dr Dolittles, we should not count our chickens.