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.
They cracked pig grunts, and are building a translator for the rest of us. Nice.