Pigs Have Feelings, Too

I am sure that this comes as no surprise. Even if you did not grow up on a farm or have never read George Orwell’s Animal Farm, you have probably suspected that pigs have feelings too. 

Obviously, the researchers who are hard at work decoding the feelings that pigs are constantly expressing are not doing it just to produce better bacon. No, they want to endow pigs with inalienable human rights, with citizenship and with the right to vote.

Now, if we could only teach them proper table manners…. And shouldn't they all be toilet trained?

You knew it was coming, so why resist?

Just in case you feel outraged or at least befuddled by this absurdist extension of the notion of rights-- an extension that, along with Kamala Harris, will make us the laughing stock of the world-- I am confident that the morally self-righteous animals who want to give pigs human rights will make a carve out-- for male chauvinist pigs.

Because, you know, as well as I do, that male chauvinist pigs have no feelings. They are evil and must be eliminated. There, time to go back to your pork chops, made more tasty by the intrepid researchers who recognize that pigs have feelings.

Just in case you think I’m kidding, take a whiff of this report from the New York Times:

Decoding the emotions behind those oinks could soon become a little easier. Researchers in Europe have created an algorithm that assesses pigs’ emotional states based on the sound the animals make.

“Animal welfare is nowadays widely accepted to be based not only on the physical health of animals, but also their mental health,” said Elodie Briefer, an associate professor of biology at the University of Copenhagen and an author of the study published this week in the journal Scientific Reports. The sooner a farmer can discern whether an animal is pleased or distressed, the faster any issues in the animal’s environment that may affect its health can be addressed.

So, researchers want to learn how to decode pig language-- and No, despite what you think, they are not speaking pig Latin:

Pigs are among the more voluble of domestic animals, producing a wider range of sounds more frequently than relatively taciturn goats, sheep and cows. To crack the code of pig communication, scientists in five research labs across Europe used hand-held microphones to gather roughly 7,400 distinct calls from 411 individual pigs. The calls were recorded during all types of situations in the life span of a pig, from birth to the slaughterhouse.

A good listener can discern, by the tone of different oinks, whether a pig is happy or sad:

Unsurprisingly, an unhappy pig sounds awful. Situations that produced cries of distress included being inadvertently crushed by a mother sow (a common peril for piglets), awaiting slaughter, hunger, fights and the unwelcome surprise of strange people or objects in their pens. The screams, squeals and barks recorded from animals experiencing fear or pain are both longer in duration and more variable in tone than the sounds of contentment.

One imagines that this will improve the way farmers treat pigs. But, more importantly, for the empathy mongers among us, is interpreting the animal’s emotional state. In that way we will know how better to diagnose their psychological distress and prescribe the proper medications.

When taught to listen for these simple distinctions, humans do a better job of accurately interpreting an animal’s emotional state, Dr. Briefer said. But artificial intelligence performed best of all. The researchers’ algorithm, designed by co-author Ciara Sypherd, correctly identified the animal’s emotion as positive or negative 92 percent of the time.

Just in case you thought I was joking about according pigs their full human rights, the British Parliament is on the story:

Understanding animals’ emotions has practical and legal consequences. Animal sentience laws like the one currently before Britain’s parliament assert that animals are capable of thought and feeling, and that the government must take their welfare into account when making policies that might affect them. The European Union recognized animal sentience in 2009.