New technology evaluates chicken clucks and correctly distinguishes distress calls from others
"Chickens are very vocal, but they are a distress signal,usually louder than others,” – says Alan McElligott, associate professor of animal behavior and welfare at City University of Hong Kong. “Even for an untrained ear it is not difficult to distinguish them.”
In theory, farmers could use screamschickens to determine their stress levels and, if necessary, improve their living conditions. However, in commercial flocks containing thousands or tens of thousands of chickens, the use of human observers is impractical. Instead, McElligott's team developed a neural network to automatically identify "distress signals" chickens The neural network was trained on recordings that had already been manually classified by human experts.
According to the evaluation results, published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, the algorithm correctly identified 97% of “distress signals”.