To build the equivalent of a grunts-emotions dictionary, the researchers recorded over 7,400 sounds from 411 pigs, tracing their life experiences from birth through death. The team correlated the different calls with the pigs' activities and body language.
> The animals had positive emotions when nursing, reuniting with family, cuddling with litter mates and running freely. Negative emotions came from situations involving social isolation, fights, castration and waiting in a slaughterhouse.
They cracked pig grunts, and are building a translator for the rest of us. Nice.
> The animals had positive emotions when nursing, reuniting with family, cuddling with litter mates and running freely. Negative emotions came from situations involving social isolation, fights, castration and waiting in a slaughterhouse.
Not to be negative about the research, but I’m pretty sure I could have surmised the pigs’ emotional state in many of these situations (castration?!) without the benefit of a translator!
But I hope it’s successful, and they then develop beyond just positive vs. negative.
> Not to be negative about the research, but I’m pretty sure I could have surmised the pigs’ emotional state in many of these situations (castration?!) without the benefit of a translator!
That's the point. The obvious emotional states are necessary in order to correctly label the data for training. The interesting part is to then use the trained model to identify emotional states in situations where it isn't so obvious.
Garbage in garbage out. How do we know the emotional states are what they are? Better to use as label something objectively measurable but costly to observe like some internal brain or chemical state of the pigs.
How about just named after the situations they were observed in? Then when you give it a new pig sound, the model can classify it and we can decide how to respond to "slaughterhouse=0.8, castration=0.2" or whatever.
I'm especially suspicious of fighting being negative. Humans can get pleasure from fighting. Why not pigs?
I think the most important thing is that people/scientists are slowly acknowledging that animals can have emotions and aren't just machines. I hope this acknowledgment will help improving conditions for animals in farms.
I think anyone who has worked on the topic or had any experience with animals knows that, to varying degrees, animals can be happy or sad/distressed. Most people simply don't know about or would rather ignore the realities of industrial meat production.
I don’t disagree with you, but to the parents point, there’s a pretty long philosophical -> scientific history which held that animals didn’t have emotions
Is there? My understanding is that the widely held belief was that they didn't have fine grained emotions that were comparable to our own. So far this research doesn't change that, but might lay the ground work for exploring that further.
There is definitely a long history of thinking of humans as something separate from animals. We tend to define intelligence and sentience by the traits humans are showing and only slowly it becomes mainstream to realize that animals also can have complex behaviors and communication, not in the human way but still complex.
Descartes described animals as being basically machines without sensation, and I recall many college debates with a Kantian prof who towed a similar line (probs rhetorically, defending the text). More examples of this probably exist, the extent to which there were widely held beliefs pro or against I’m unsure. I don’t mean to be hand wavy maliciously, I just have distinct memories of some of these zany ideas from an almost degree in modern Phil
While I appreciate the sentiment pigs IMO are the wrong animals to start.
Pigs are supposed to be cheap and people aren’t supposed to care if we kill them, they become food, and maybe someday as carriers for human organs for transplant. Same with animals like chickens, just raise them and eat them. Seems pointless to focus on the emotions of these creatures. Better to start with animals like dogs and cats that are more meaningful to societies.
That’s the point. Pigs are very smart and emotional and people absolutely should care how they are being held. A lot of industrial farming is basically enormous cruelty and people should care.
A good start would be to treat them better while they are alive. It makes a difference whether their whole life is hell or whether they have a good life and only one bad day when they get killed.
"People aren't supposed to care" because that would have the catastrophic impact of pigs that are being farmed potentially living happier lives, and perhaps more people not eating them?
Because I don't think pigs are "supposed" to be slaughter fodder any more than <insert oppressed human class> is supposed to be enslaved/genocided/paid less/made into soap.
There were some videos a while back on a butcher torturing pigs in a slaughterhouse, which was leaked and showed inhuman practices. The pigs were squealing and grunting in absolute horror as they were tortured. It scares me to know exactly what emotions they were displaying during the torture.
While I don't know what happened in that case, was it worse than castration without anesthesia? Or is this fear you have more about the human intent than the effect on the animal?
"They cracked pig grunts, and are building a translator for the rest of us. Nice."
Let's assume humans grow up in meat farms, disconnected from all former culture developements. They are born into it. Get fed and separated by machines, castrated and in the end slaughtered. Would they develope meaningful language under these circumstances?
I doubt it. So you still could then build a translator for human gutural noises. But not for human language. You would have to analyse a normal human culture for that.
Likewise, I would be much more interested in analyzing the grunts of free wild pigs.
Replying to this for visibility. Curious why this submission reached the front page.
I’ve linked prior posts on the same topic, including my own. Does time of day affect ranking that much, or perhaps there’s an algorithm at work? The person who posted this article has >30 submissions over the past week. Maybe people recognizing a username has a big influence too.
What I’m most interested in is if there is a correlation between between their emotional lifetime grunt series (or subset) and the consensus taste of their meat as opined by tastemakers and aficionados.
It would be great to use this animals emotional state to influence the succulence of its tender flesh.
Actually the idea is brilliant. If you can demonstrate empirically that meat from happy pigs tastes better, now you have the beginnings of a commercial case for raising the pigs ethically, which has the potential to drive far more improvement in livestock well-being than a million Internet virtue signals about animal cruelty.
I agree with you, my concern is about what happens if the data doesn't point in that direction (tortured pigs taste the same) or if the market just accepts a trade-off (less quality for less price) disregarding their suffering.
I believe technology is inexorable and we'll just have to see what happens next.
This would be pretty cool, but I don't see how it could go beyond translations like "I feel positive emotion related to nursing" and "I feel negative emotion related to pain."
What if an adult pig makes "positive emotion related to nursing" grunts? Does that mean they are thinking about nursing? Or has the meaning of the grunt has changed over time? Are they reliving a childhood pig-fantasy? Is the meaning of their adult-pig desire structured by their child-pig experiences in a vaguely Freudian way? Does the grunt mean "food enjoyment" or "food enjoyment + recollection of nursing" or "food enjoyment + recollection of nursing + nostalgia for the Jungian archetypal teat"? These questions may seem ridiculous (and I suppose I am stretching them a bit for humour's sake), but I think ignoring them just leads to an impoverished behavioural science. Maybe that's the best we can do.
I just don't see how we can make the leap from correlating events with acoustics to saying that we understand the meaning of a pig grunt. The idea that we could somehow discover a rich, nuanced emotional/meaningful life of pigs via such a means seems to me fundamentally misguided. We would need to be able to ask a pig what such and such a grunt meant, which obviously presupposes a fairly complex shared language. In the absence of this, we are just making assumptions.
On the other hand, these assumptions certainly may be very plausible, and it seems reasonable to think that it would be very cosmically odd if such assumptions were dramatically off-base, due to our shared evolutionary history, physiology, and neural circuitry.
> The idea that we could somehow discover a rich, nuanced emotional/meaningful life of pigs via such a means seems to me fundamentally misguided.
Decoding vocal communication and basic emotional states, however simple and unstructured both of these might be, could easily enable us to bootstrap training of pigs for other forms of communication, such as computer-assisted button boards. AIUI, this has been done wrt. other comparable mammals, with some measure of success.
> The animals had positive emotions when nursing, reuniting with family, cuddling with litter mates and running freely. Negative emotions came from situations involving social isolation, fights, castration and waiting in a slaughterhouse.
There's something deeply sad about this. Speaking as someone that regularly eats meat (I had bacon this morning), the prospect of animals have emotional inner lives is the #1 thing that makes me consider vegetarianism.
If you can stomach it (and, frankly, I think anyone who eats meat should know how their food makes it to their plate), I suggest watching Earthlings [0] or Land of Hope and Glory [1].
For reference, an estimated 99% of all farmed animals in the US live in factory conditions [2].
If you prefer books, Eating Animals and The Omnivore's Dilemma are also classics and worth reading. As far as I know, not much has changed since those books were written.
I think it's having to watch it die that really horrifies people. I know someone who took his kids to a small farm to see a cow get slaughtered and help prepare the meat. At first I thought it was kind of messed up and unnecessary. But honestly after thinking about it, everyone should be doing that. People should see where their meat comes from, realize something had to lose it's life for that meal. People would care more about mistreatment in factory farmed meat if they had to see the real emotions of farm animals
I agree, and I hunt. I get good meat and at a low cost. The animal lives a good life, free to do as it pleases, gets a chance to reproduce, and gets a chance to escape/avoid. If I do succeed it's over very quickly. No stressful trip to a slaughter house, no CAFO, etc. It can also help avoid over population of specific species and associated issues like car accidents (although in many cases it's an imprudent driver).
I would love to have higher quality, better treated meat than what's normally available in the grocery store. In some cases it's possible to get it at a local farm. Pork is tough to find that way. Chicken can be tough to find at a good price. Beef is actually pretty common and a fairly decent price. Although as a side note, they still have to endure the trip to the slaughter house to be USDA inspected.
As far as I can tell (not a hunter myself), getting shot through center mass seems like one of those least miserable ways that an animal can die in the wild. Starvation, disease, or being torn apart by a coyote all seem like worse and slower deaths.
"If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegetarian."
I don't know if it is 100% true, but I am certain most people would turn into vegetarian. As time has passed due to ruthless industries, I think we should replace vegetarianism with veganism.
The videos of slaughter houses and commercial farms is readily available. Many documentaries include it and it's even been broadcast on the news. Some people have made changes based on that, but I think it's a small number, not "most".
I think there is difference between vicarious experience vs real view. I don't think I have ever seen any news related to egregious violation by animal industries. In fact, I think news are accomplice to such violation because they are afraid of negative PR and keep advertising "happy" cows, green farms as a mean of propaganda through advertisements.
I think I can relate to this with war. If people see war with their eyes they would empathize it. But, if US media shows how they are doing some favor to humanity (like how media show how animal are important for human diet blah blah) many people are oblivious to war.
I still hold my opinion that if human see the egregious violation of animal industry in real time, or they have to kill animal themself for food, most would abstain meat for sake of emotions.
"I don't think I have ever seen any news related to egregious violation by animal industries."
Just search for it. There are articles and videos about it on various networks like NBC, fox, etc.
"... or they have to kill animal themself for food, most would abstain meat for sake of emotions."
Well, there are about 15 million hunters in the US. It's also reasonable to expect that many more people would start/return to to hunting if that were the only way to get meat. And for areas like cities where it's impractical, I think many people would not be bothered by having to kill a domestic animal for meat if it was the only way.
84% of vegetarians and vegans return to eating meat. Seems like pretty strong evidence to support the idea that a majority of people would still eat meat, even if they had to witness or perform the killing. Would a significant majority stop eating meat? Probably, but current levels are 2% vegetarian or vegan in the US. I don't see that going beyond 49% even if you had to kill the animal yourself.
Any evidence to even tentatively support your side?
While certainly interesting research, I don't think this necessarily supports plants having emotions and/or inner lives so much as it demonstrates a sensory-feedback loop. That said, whether we consider that as "pain", or what organisms we consider capable for feeling pain is an interesting question. I frequently bring DFW's Consider the Lobster up in my personal life just because it challenges our definition of "the capacity for pain" as convenient for peace of mind.
FWIW I don't really bother trying to make ethical arguments for vegetarianism/veganism because of these tricky definition problems. I think it's a bit easier to argue for reduced meat consumption for ecological reasons, or to reduce the need for factory farming, etc.
From a dietary perspective it's mostly irrelevant: due to thermodynamic inefficiencies, raising and consuming animal( product)s will inevitably involve farming more plants than eating them directly.
So unless only some plant species have emotions, veganism is nevertheless the best one can do (short of synthesizing food from scratch at a molecular level)
From an evolutionary perspective, I don't see why plants would have emotions. In animals it makes sense as a mechanism to steer our actions in a more survival-prone direction.
But AFAIK plants have extremely limited agency, so I don't see why evolutionary pressures would favor the development of emotions in plants .
A chemical response to vibrations caused by insects chewing doesn't imply pain or any other emotion.
Animals feel pain in part to learn in a dynamic environment, for example to run away from the source of pain. What evolutionary advantage would there be in a plant that feels pain or emotions?
"the prospect of animals have emotional inner lives is the #1 thing that makes me consider vegetarianism."
Why would you think, they have none in the first place? Because they cannot talk? Babies can't either. But they show their emotions. Just like any (higher) animal.
I'd wonder if it was enough information to create a pig UX for a machine. Starts with flashing a light or making a sound when it hears certain patterns of noises, becomes stimulus response like Pavlov experiments, but adapts to a more sophisticated command language for food, water, flavors, nutrients, etc. Then see if the initial group can teach new pigs to use the grunt language system, or if nursing sows teach their piglets the grunting system. Eventually, there will probably be groups of pigs who use the grunting system to identify each other and align based on learned behaviors, only driven by stimulus response and perhaps without true sapience or consciousness, and it will basically be twitter for pigs.
But more seriously, the idea of using ML to adapt to building complex interfaces for animals driven by more subtle stimulus response is pretty fascinating.
I think it would be preferable if you didn't phrase comments like this in the inflammatory way you chose to phrase it.
Specifically using the word "nope" to open a sentence in response to another comment that communicates empathy is inflammatory. This is because it is dismissive of the other individual's feelings/opinions.
Maybe that person is also tired with such egregious violation of animal right? Pigs are smart animal, and I think they deserve good life and the best way to help them is not eat them.
Nobody chooses the genes they are born with. Its a discrimination at its best. We stopped slavery probably 50 years ago. At past, I bet there were people like "Nope! I am not going to do menial job. Its my personal agent, so do whatever you want....".
My wife and I have a Reductress day to day calendar, and I can't help but think it's not a coincidence that this frontpaged HN the same day as this article came up on the calendar:
There is actually the beginning of a pig dictionary in this article. A "little oink of appreciation." Squeals of direction. Yeah I think they've cracked it.
Great Scrabble word :) According to https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gruntledgruntled is a humorous neologism introduced as a back-construction by P. G. Wodehouse in The Code of the Woosters (1938): He spoke with a certain what-is-it in his voice, and I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.
Actually I expect this is sponsored by the likes of PETA. It obviously aims to make the animals appear more anthropomorphic, so no one will want to eat them anymore.
The intelligence of pigs is fairly well established. Is your argument here that the act of domesticating pigs has increased their intelligence over time?
I'm not all that up to defending my straw man, but I am horrified by the treatment of livestock, and the Iowa Select Farms stories made me realize, that level of cruelty has been extant for probably (tens of) thousands of years.
If only 130,000 years ago, evil pigs used humans for livestock, not only ate them, but ensured their cruel short lives, and humans revolted and turned the tables on the pigs, so they deserve cruel treatment, because they're adverse to human existence.
But that is scifi. In truth, a number of people have been killed by pigs, but as a species, pigs don't really threaten humans. We don't need to eat pigs, and even more cruelly, pigs are just business. But once you realize how much these interesting animals have in common with people, which is not apparent by their unflattering names nor our general familiarity with them having vague knowledge of various farm animals since childhood, the idea of consuming one or part of one becomes revolting in the same way that cannibalism is revolting. I used to eat pork steaks, and even though I could talk about taste, I don't care what it tastes like anymore. Taste is just not that important, and, most importantly, it can be and has been entirely simulated so that no one could tell the difference.
I'll just say it, I don't think humans should eat pigs anymore, period, let alone continue to treat them so horrifically. We should, through ethical programs (not killing) reduce their population over generations to a healthy representative of the species, and just let them go and not mess with them any more unless nuisance animals need to be moved. Because they're mentally absolutely no different than human children, and we should, as a species, have compassion for others like us, that experience the world in pretty much the same, mammalian way.
And all the other animals, too, we should stop killing everything immediately, and back out of encroaching on the remaining wild habitats. And we should, over generations, massively reduce the Earth's human population, but let the off-world human population grow as much as practical.
Because, otherwise, very soon, in two generations, maybe ten, Earth is totally going to suck, the whole stinking place, because of humans and terrible things done and caused by humans. If Earth succeeds in ridding itself of humankind, life will go on beautifully for a long time before another species becomes like humans and destroys all the environments.
I try to stay positive. I feel good knowing I lived at a time when the Amazon Rainforest still existed and there were still glaciers in some places. And maybe, just maybe, this research can generate compassion for living creatures that are mentally a lot like humans, and we know this for sure because their brains are just like human brains. Duh.
Ever since I was a small child it was obvious to me that there would be a time when humans no longer ate other animals. Not in my lifetime of course, as that and other insanities such as inflicting misery on other humans is still well ingrained, accepted, and promoted.
> The animals had positive emotions when nursing, reuniting with family, cuddling with litter mates and running freely. Negative emotions came from situations involving social isolation, fights, castration and waiting in a slaughterhouse.
They cracked pig grunts, and are building a translator for the rest of us. Nice.