Artificial intelligence that can improve the well-being of farmed chickens by listening to chicken calls could be available within five years, researchers say . New research shows that the new technology can detect and quantify distress calls from chickens in large indoor sheds, distinguishing them from other barn noise with 97 percent accuracy. Similar methods could eventually be used to improve the well-being of other farmed animals. Around 25 billion chickens are raised worldwide each year—many live in huge coops, each housing thousands of chickens. Listening to the sounds they make is one way to assess the well-being of such creatures. Alan McElligott, Associate Professor of Animal Behaviour and Welfare at City University of Hong Kong, said: “Chickens have a very loud voice, but calls for help tend to be louder than other sounds, what we call pure-tone calls. “Even untrained. It’s not hard to tell them apart by their ears.” In theory, farmers could measure the distress of the chickens based on their crows and tend to them if necessary. In commercial flocks of thousands or tens of thousands of chickens, however, it is impractical to have human observers. On the one hand, the presence of humans may put further pressure on the flock, McElligott said, and the number of chickens is so large that it is impossible to objectively quantify the number of distress signals.
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