An Interactive Feeder to Induce and Assess Emotions from Vocalisations of Chickens
Format of work:
Journal Article
Event presented at / Journal Name:
Animals
Speaker / Contact Author's Name:
Antonis Golfidis
Speaker / Contact Author's E-mail Address:
antonis.golfidis@kuleuven.be
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Research aim:
To develop and a feeder that chickens would voluntarily interact with and produce vocalizations after receiving rewarding or aversive stimuli.
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Background:
Chickens’ vocalizations can reflect emotional states, however, we do not yet know how negative vocalisations differ from positive positive vocalisations. Thus,
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Approach:
We used a sensor that would activate the feeder when it detected a chicken nearby. The feeder would randomly dispense a positive food reward (rice or mealworms) or a negative food reward (rice mixed with a bittering agent) or air puffs, which birds find aversive.
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Key finding:
To enable us to study vocal emotions in chickens, we built an interactive feeder that randomly gave rewarding or aversive stimuli. We found chickens were motivated to voluntarily engaged with the feeder and vocalised on over 50% of the trials in which they interacted, showing potential of the device for emotional assessment in poultry.
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Industry or policy relevance:
The results bring us a step closer to being able to monitor emotional states in chickens using vocalisations, which is ideal because it is a cost-effective solution that can be used to continuously and non-invasively monitor animals.
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Route for practical application:
This device is being used to collect vocal data from birds in positive and negative emotion inducing scenarios. This data will be analysed to see whether there are specific aspects of sound that differentiate positive vocalisations from negative vocalisations. Next steps are to automatically detecting calls and testing the robustness of the detection when there are more individuals in the recordings.
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Confidence in findings and next steps towards realising impact:
The device itself is used to collect data for study purposes, but we found that the chickens were highly motivated to engage with the feeder, despite having food ad libitum and the possibility of negative stimuli. Thus, it has the potential to be an enrichment device.
Funders:
KU Leuven internal funds: C24M/22/022 (3E220566)
Links to Open Access Publications or DOI:
Citation:
Golfidis, A., Kriengwatana, B. P., Mounir, M., & Norton, T. (2024). An Interactive Feeder to Induce and Assess Emotions from Vocalisations of Chickens. Animals, 14(9), 1386. https://doi.org/10.3390/ani14091386
