AI Could Improve The Welfare Of Farmed Chickens By Detecting Distress Calls

AI has helped make the lives of humans so much easier, whether it’s in the field of data or even medicine, and now it could help improve the lives of farmed chickens. 

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How does the tech work?

Reported first by The Guardian, the tech works by detecting and quantifying distress calls made by chickens housed in massive indoor sheds, accurately detecting distress calls from other barn noises with a 97 percent accuracy.

The novel tech could allow farmers to denote stress levels, as well as better their housing conditions wherever necessary. While this can otherwise be done by manual inspection, doing the same for massive commercial farms with tens or thousands of chickens, a human ear cannot really work.

Firstly, the presence of the human could stress chickens out, and with such huge populations, objectively quantifying the number of distress calls is impossible, claim researchers.

The novel approach is a deep learning tool that identifies chicken distress calls from recordings of farmed chickens; the tool was trained using recordings that had already been manually classified by human experts to determine their representative sound.

Alan McElligott, an associate professor of animal behaviour and welfare at the City University of Hong Kong explained, “Our end goal is not to count distress calls, but to create conditions in which the chickens can live and have a reduced amount of distress.” 

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He added, “Sometimes it’s difficult to convince the farmers that have to deal with producing these animals for a set price for supermarkets and everyone else to adopt technology to improve their welfare. But we’ve already shown that distress calls are a good indicator of mortality and growth rates, and this is a way of automating the process.”

Researchers conclude by stating that a similar setup can be developed to monitor other kinds of farm animals such as turkeys, pigs etc. For more in the world of technology and science, keep reading Indiatimes.com.