Indication that the presence of older conspecifics reduces agonistic behaviour in piglets at weaning

Morrone, Beatrice; Bernardino, Thiago; Tatemoto, Patricia; Rodrigues, Frederico Augusto Mazzocca Lopes; Moraes, José Evandro de; Cruz, Thiago Dorsa Almeida da; Zanella, Adroaldo José

doi:10.1016/j.applanim.2020.105201

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…This suggests that in the musical stimulus groups, aggressive encounters last for less time, which could be considered less intense, even though aggressive behavior may still occur 48 h after regrouping. Previous studies have found that aggressive encounters can occur up to 48 h after regrouping [35], suggesting that the hierarchy has not yet stabilized [7]. The Poisson regression model confirms that there was a reduced rate of aggressive behavior at the feeder compared with the population without musical stimulation.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 66%

Adapted Original Music as an Environmental Enrichment in an Intensive Pig Production System Reduced Aggression in Weaned Pigs during Regrouping

Alvarez-Hernandez,

Vallejo-Timarán,

de Jesús Rodriguez

2023

Animals

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In intensive swine production systems,, the practice of regrouping unfamiliar pigs is common, often leading to aggressive behavior. Although the effect of different musical genres composed for humans has been evaluated in pigs to mitigate aggression, there have been few attempts to create music specifically for pigs. Here, we assess whether sensory stimulation through music, created by adapting the acoustic parameters in the sound mix, induces changes in the aggressive behaviors of pigs during regrouping. Six litters of 10-week-old piglets were randomly selected and assigned to different treatments. The control group (Group A) received no intervention, while Group B was exposed to music for two continuous hours in the morning and afternoon from the time of regrouping. Group C received musical stimulation for one continuous hour in the morning following regrouping. A significant reduction in the frequency and duration of aggressive behaviors was observed in the groups that received musical stimulation during regrouping. Additionally, social, and individual play behaviors showed a decrease in the musical stimulation groups. These findings provide evidence for the effectiveness of created music as a strategy in reducing aggressive behavior during pig regrouping, which can enhance the welfare of pigs and offer a practical solution for pig producers to minimize aggression and its associated negative impacts.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 66%

Adapted Original Music as an Environmental Enrichment in an Intensive Pig Production System Reduced Aggression in Weaned Pigs during Regrouping

Alvarez-Hernandez,

Vallejo-Timarán,

de Jesús Rodriguez

2023

Animals

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“…In order to enhance animal welfare and health in future husbandry systems, the analysis of animal interactions as well as their monitoring and prediction is of high importance in research and commercial farming. Reasons for agonistic or aggressive behavior are manifold [2,[6][7][8][9][10], contribute to a certain extent to the animal specific behavior, and also include a high variation between animals [2].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Detecting Animal Contacts—A Deep Learning-Based Pig Detection and Tracking Approach for the Quantification of Social Contacts

Wutke

Heinrich

Das

et al. 2021

Sensors

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The identification of social interactions is of fundamental importance for animal behavioral studies, addressing numerous problems like investigating the influence of social hierarchical structures or the drivers of agonistic behavioral disorders. However, the majority of previous studies often rely on manual determination of the number and types of social encounters by direct observation which requires a large amount of personnel and economical efforts. To overcome this limitation and increase research efficiency and, thus, contribute to animal welfare in the long term, we propose in this study a framework for the automated identification of social contacts. In this framework, we apply a convolutional neural network (CNN) to detect the location and orientation of pigs within a video and track their movement trajectories over a period of time using a Kalman filter (KF) algorithm. Based on the tracking information, we automatically identify social contacts in the form of head–head and head–tail contacts. Moreover, by using the individual animal IDs, we construct a network of social contacts as the final output. We evaluated the performance of our framework based on two distinct test sets for pig detection and tracking. Consequently, we achieved a Sensitivity, Precision, and F1-score of 94.2%, 95.4%, and 95.1%, respectively, and a MOTA score of 94.4%. The findings of this study demonstrate the effectiveness of our keypoint-based tracking-by-detection strategy and can be applied to enhance animal monitoring systems.

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Aggression in group-housed sows, weaners, and grower-finisher pigs

Verdon,

Rault

2024

Advances in Pig Welfare

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Indication that the presence of older conspecifics reduces agonistic behaviour in piglets at weaning

Cited by 4 publications

References 37 publications

Adapted Original Music as an Environmental Enrichment in an Intensive Pig Production System Reduced Aggression in Weaned Pigs during Regrouping

Adapted Original Music as an Environmental Enrichment in an Intensive Pig Production System Reduced Aggression in Weaned Pigs during Regrouping

Detecting Animal Contacts—A Deep Learning-Based Pig Detection and Tracking Approach for the Quantification of Social Contacts

Aggression in group-housed sows, weaners, and grower-finisher pigs

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