Artificial intelligence will take care of the well-being of chickens

Artificial intelligence that could improve the well-being of farmed chickens by eavesdropping on their cries could be available within five years. A new study has found that technology that detects and evaluates distress calls made by chickens kept in huge enclosed spaces correctly distinguishes them from other sounds with 97% accuracy, The Guardian reported on June 29.

Around 25 billion chickens are raised around the world each year, many of them in huge sheds. One way to assess the well-being of such creatures is to listen to the sounds they make. “Chickens are very vocal, but the distress call is usually louder than others,” says Alan McElligott, assistant professor of animal behavior and welfare at the City University of Hong Kong.

Theoretically, farmers themselves could listen to the calls of chickens to assess the level of their anxiety and, if necessary, take the necessary measures. However, in commercial chicken coops containing thousands or tens of thousands of chicks, human supervision is not practical. First of all, because their presence can cause even more tension, and because with such a large number of birds, an objective quantitative assessment of the number of distress calls is impossible.

Instead, based on recordings that were manually classified by human experts to determine what type of sound they represented, McElligott's team developed a deep learning tool to automatically identify chick distress calls.

According to an estimate published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, the algorithm correctly identified 97% of distress calls.

Convincing farmers to adopt the technology can be relatively easy, the newspaper notes. Previous research by scientists has shown that the distress signals emitted by young chickens can predict the amount of weight gain and the number of deaths in the entire flock over its lifetime.

Similar technology could be applied to monitor other farm animals, especially pigs or turkeys, which are also often kept indoors and "talk very loudly," the developers said.