Timely attention to chickens’ health helps improve their overall welfare.

Artificial intelligence (AI) can now distinguish between the squawks of healthy chickens and the distress calls of a bird that is unwell or injured. With thousands of fowl present on a poultry farm, this technology enables quicker attention to one or more troubled birds. In the future, the technology could be extended to other animals being reared on farms. (The Guardian)

Chicken calls and AI

A team led by Alan McElligott, an associate professor of animal behaviour and welfare at the City University of Hong Kong, has developed a deep learning-based model that can detect chicken distress calls from recordings of intensively farmed chickens.

The AI model was trained to distinguish between healthy squawks and distress calls by listening to recordings that had been classified as such by human experts.

In tests, the AI could identify distress calls with a high 97% accuracy.

“Chickens are very vocal, but the distress call tends to be louder than the others, and is what we would describe as a pure tonal call,” says McElligott. “Even to the untrained ear, it’s not too difficult to pick them out.”

This technology solves the huge problem of deploying human monitors at commercial farms where the number of birds could run into thousands. Not only would their presence unnerve the chickens, they would not also be objective in their identification.

Furthermore, research indicates that analysis of distress calls by young chicks could reveal the potential amount of weight gain and the mortality rate during the lifetime of a flock.

The technology is likely to be commercialized within five years.

“Our end goal is not to count distress calls, but to create conditions in which the chickens can live and have a reduced amount of distress,” says McElligott.

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