WELF ▶▶▶ARE
WUR Wolf, de- veloped by the Farmworx group, analysed animal facial features. The programme rec- ognises and evaluates 14 fa- cial feature com- binations and seven emotional states of cows and pigs.
without animals being aware and provides an unfettered re- sult in real time without any probes being surgically inserted. The benefit of this is early detection of any illness or disease so that treatment or confinement is swiftly provided. Consid- erably reducing, if not eliminating, any contagious ailment from being spread throughout an entire farm also protects valuable livestock. WUR Wolf identifies animal emotions based on four principal facial expressions – neutral, aggression, happiness and fear. To build a database, the test sample of pigs was used to de- termine the correct algorithm. A number of artificial intelli- gence (AI) algorithms and camera and infrared imaging sys- tems were used to gather data, such as eye retinal detection and the complex simulation of a neural network, to produce an automated emotion evaluation from what might be called a thinking computer. Such technology has previously been utilised for human aids to produce interactive robots, in the advertising industry to determine consumer preferences, and as an education tool, to name a few.
Difficulties ahead The quantum leap to apply such technology to animals is in its infancy. This early scientific work basically breaks down an animal’s emotions into positive and negative. The areas of fuzzy logic, baselines and stress defined by species are still largely unexplored. The ability to produce a framework of how animals feel must take the areas of affected emotion, feelings and mood into account.
40 ▶ DAIRY GLOBAL | Volume 8, No. 2, 2021
To define the complexity of these areas, affected emotion is a reaction to an initial stimulus, whereas feelings span short or longer times while mood occurs in the background and makes an emotion either positive or negative overall. Over 65 emotions have been attributed to humans but, as already mentioned, our ease of communication makes the complex task of interpreting them much less onerous. How many emotions animals have is the crux of the ongoing study. The input of data includes such things as the appear- ance of eyes, ear position/posture, age, orbital cheek or snout tightening, nose bulge, eyelid movement and the animal’s body and tail postures that a computer programme will need to mull over before giving an analysis of emotion. Further refinement of programmes like WUR Wolf show promise in identifying stress in farm animals. In the mean- time, efforts are underway to develop an economical and us- er-friendly sensing platform for emotional check-up of farm animals. Farmers possessing this tool would provide better management through continuous computer monitoring that would lead to illnesses being identified and treated quicker which, in turn, would increase production levels to make a business more profitable. The old saying that a content cow is a happy cow could possibly never be truer with facial recog- nition technology. Farmers and business owners would also be grinning with such an animal emotional health tool.
References available upon request. The author can be reached at
suresh.neethirajan@
wur.nl.
PHOTO: HERBERT WIGGERMAN
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