Eavesdropping on emotions: Using vocalisations to unravel links between animal happiness and welfare

Animal welfare represents a major public policy concern and a societal challenge. Positive emotions are a critical component of good welfare, thus a core focus in animal welfare sciences is finding reliable indicators of emotional valence (i.e. whether an emotion is positive or negative). Vocalisations are promising because they contain information about emotional valence that could be noninvasively and automatically detected. Currently, advances in data-driven computational techniques and measurement of animal emotions together allow us search for a vocal indicator of valence (VIV) that is potentially evolutionarily conserved across bird species – a possibility that has never yet been explored. This would have conservation applications for detecting of emotions and welfare in endangered species. This project will use a comparative, computational, and integrative approach to identify VIV in domestic poultry in controlled, laboratory setting that could enable classification of VIVs in an endangered penguin species.

Keywords:vocalisation, bioacoustics, emotions, happiness, positive welfare

Disciplines:Veterinary ethics and ethology, Behavioural ecology