The technology, which can quantify distress calls made by birds housed in sheds, correctly distinguished distress calls compared to other barn noises with a 97% accuracy level, according to a new study. Until now, farmers have had to rely on stockmanship to distinguish welfare issues in individual birds and the deployment of human observers in large flocks is impractical and can further stress the birds. "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 stress…" Alan McElligott, associate professor of animal behaviour and welfare at City University, Hong Kong, told the Guardian newspaper: "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." His team has developed a deep learning tool to automatically identify chicken distress calls based on recordings of individually farmed chickens. "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 stress," said McElligott, who believes the technology could be commercially available within 5 years.

Artificial intelligence that could improve the welfare of farmed chickens by eavesdropping on their squawks could become available within five years, researchers say. The technology, which detects and quantifies distress calls made by chickens housed in huge indoor sheds, correctly distinguished distress calls from other barn noises with 97% accuracy, new research suggests. A similar approach could eventually be used to drive up welfare standards in other farmed animals. Each year, about 25 billion chickens are farmed around the world – many of them in huge sheds, each housing thousands of birds. One way to assess the welfare of such creatures is to listen to the sounds that they make.

An AI has been trained to identify and count chickens' distress calls. Farmers could use the tool to improve conditions for chickens raised on crowded commercial farms. As of 2020, there were more than 33 billion chickens around the world, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Many of these animals live in poor conditions, packed together with little ability to move around or do things chickens like to do. "Despite the basic concerns about not being hungry or not being thirsty, there are still serious welfare concerns about how they're produced," says Alan McElligott at City University of Hong Kong.

Scientists have found that goats are drawn to humans with happy facial expressions. The result suggests a wider range of animals can read people's moods than was previously thought. The team showed goats pairs of photos of the same person, one of them featuring an angry expression, and the other a happy demeanour. The goats in the study made a beeline for the happy faces, the researchers report in the journal Open Science. The result implies that the ability of animals to perceive human facial cues is not limited to those with a long history of working as human companions, such as dogs and horses. Instead, it seems, animals domesticated for food production, such as goats, can also decipher human facial cues.