Vocal individuality of Holstein-Friesian cattle is maintained across putatively positive and negative farming contexts

Abstract

Cattle mother-offspring contact calls encode individual-identity information; however, it is unknown whether cattle are able to maintain individuality when vocalising to familiar conspecifics over other positively and negatively valenced farming contexts. Accordingly, we recorded 333 high-frequency vocalisations from 13 Holstein-Friesian heifers during oestrus and anticipation of feed (putatively positive), as well as denied feed access and upon both physical and physical & visual isolation from conspecifics (putatively negative). We measured 21 source-related and nonlinear vocal parameters and stepwise discriminant function analyses (DFA) were performed. Calls were divided into positive (n = 170) and negative valence (n = 163) with each valence acting as a ‘training set’ to classify calls in the oppositely valenced ‘test set’. Furthermore, MANOVAs were conducted to determine which vocal parameters were implicated in individual distinctiveness. Within the putatively positive ‘training set’, the cross-validated DFA correctly classified 68.2% of the putatively positive calls and 52.1% of the putatively negative calls to the correct individual, respectively. Within the putatively negative ‘training set’, the cross-validated DFA correctly assigned 60.1% of putatively negative calls and 49.4% of putatively positive calls to the correct individual, respectively. All DFAs exceeded chance expectations indicating that vocal individuality of high-frequency calls is maintained across putatively positive and negative valence, with all vocal parameters except subharmonics responsible for this individual distinctiveness. This study shows that cattle vocal individuality of high-frequency calls is stable across different emotionally loaded farming contexts. Individual distinctiveness is likely to attract social support from conspecifics, and knowledge of these individuality cues could assist farmers in detecting individual cattle for welfare or production purposes.

Individual differences in human voice pitch are preserved from speech to screams, roars and pain cries

“…With regards to voice F0, this may be due to anatomical constraints ( probably linked to individual differences in vocal fold length) that maintain the relative inter-individual differences in F0 across the typical ranges for each vocal type. While few studies have investigated the stability of F0 differences across the vocal repertoires of other species, there is evidence that cues to individual identity may also be preserved across call types in nonhuman mammals, including red deer [17], rhesus macaques [34] and cows [35].…”

Vocal production in postpartum dairy cows: Temporal organization and association with maternal and stress behaviors

“…The static information content of free-ranging cattle vocalizations has already been comprehensively studied through spectrographic analyses (Padilla de la Torre et al, 2015;Green et al, 2019). Cattle naturally reside in herds, with their vocalizations facilitating social interactions (Padilla de la Torre et al, 2015), providing stable cues to individual identity across different emotionally valenced contexts (Green et al, 2019).…”

“…The static information content of free-ranging cattle vocalizations has already been comprehensively studied through spectrographic analyses (Padilla de la Torre et al, 2015;Green et al, 2019). Cattle naturally reside in herds, with their vocalizations facilitating social interactions (Padilla de la Torre et al, 2015), providing stable cues to individual identity across different emotionally valenced contexts (Green et al, 2019). However, compared with the free-ranging environment, the soundscape in a commercial production setting is often dominated by ambient noises such as those from farm vehicles, aggregations of cattle, milking machinery, farm staff, and calls of other animals cohabitating in the cattle sheds (Arnold et al, 2007).…”

“…These ambient noises may influence the signal-to-noise ratio of sound recordings or lead to signal clipping (Bishop et al, 2019), which can, in turn, distort the spectrographic properties of the vocalizations. Ambient noises may also overlap in the frequency domain of the cattle vocalizations, as they contain both low-frequency (Padilla de la Torre et al, 2015;Bishop et al, 2019) and highfrequency components (Padilla de la Torre et al, 2015;Green et al, 2019), making signal filtering ineffective. However, it is important to measure vocalizations in the production environment, as replicating stressors under controlled experimental conditions may not yield commercially applicable welfare-related results.…”

Talking to Cows: Reactions to Different Auditory Stimuli During Gentle Human-Animal Interactions

“…Cattle have highly developed auditory abilities: their hearing ranges from 23 Hz to 37 kHz (Heffner, 1998 ). Vocalizations are an integral part of their intraspecific communication (Kiley, 1972 ; Watts and Stookey, 2000 ; Green et al, 2019 ); for instance, in an affiliative context, cows direct low-frequency calls toward their calves (Padilla de la Torre et al, 2016 ). But cattle are also responsive to human vocalizations: calves can learn to be called by individual names (Murphey and Moura Duarte, 1983 ) and cows learn to follow specific calls to go to the milking parlor (Albright et al, 1966 ).…”