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. 2013 Sep 12;3(3):923-34.
doi: 10.3390/ani3030923.

Understanding Vocalization Might Help to Assess Stressful Conditions in Piglets

Alexandra Ferreira da Silva Cordeiro  1 , Irenilza de Alencar Nääs  2 , Stanley R M Oliveira  3 , Fabio Violaro  4 , Andréia C M de Almeida  5 , Diego Pereira Neves  6
Affiliations

Understanding Vocalization Might Help to Assess Stressful Conditions in Piglets

Alexandra Ferreira da Silva Cordeiro et al. Animals (Basel). .

Abstract

Assessing 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.

Keywords: animal welfare; classification algorithm; pig farming; sound signals.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
(a) Animal isolated in the corridor. (b) Assumed pain stress; piglet firmly held by the animal handler.
Figure 2
Figure 2
(a) Piglets prevented from nursing due to the rubberized fabric. (b) Piglets after the nursing constraint.
Figure 3
Figure 3
(a) Vocalization’s sonogram of piglets under normal welfare (baseline); (b) vocalization’s sonogram of piglets being squeezed (assumed to produce pain); (c) vocalization's sonogram of piglets feeling cold; (d) vocalization's sonogram piglets feeling hunger. The formants (dotted red line), the sound intensity (yellow line), and the frequency of pitch (in blue line) are shown in each sonogram.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Hit rates (%) vs. minimum number of objects per leaf.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Kappa statistics (%) vs. minimum number of objects per leaf.
Figure 6
Figure 6
Number of rules (%) vs. minimum number of objects per leaf.
Figure 7
Figure 7
Decision tree generated by the C4.5 algorithm.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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