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To build the equivalent of a grunts-emotions dictionary, the researchers recorded over 7,400 sounds from 411 pigs, tracing their life experiences from birth thr

To build the equivalent of a grunts-emotions dictionary, the researchers recorded over 7,400 sounds from 411 pigs, tracing their life experiences from birth through death. The team correlated the different calls with the pigs' activities and body language. > The animals had positive emotions when nursing, reuniting with family, cuddling with litter mates and running freely. Negative emotions came from situations involving social isolation, fights, castration and waiting in a slaughterhouse. They cracked pig grunts, and are building a translator for the rest of us. Nice.

axiosgunnar 5y ago
> building a translator This would be groundbreaking, civilization changing even
- lukeasrodgers 5y ago
  This would be pretty cool, but I don't see how it could go beyond translations like "I feel positive emotion related to nursing" and "I feel negative emotion related to pain." What if an adult pig makes "positive emotion related to nursing" grunts? Does that mean they are thinking about nursing? Or has the meaning of the grunt has changed over time? Are they reliving a childhood pig-fantasy? Is the meaning of their adult-pig desire structured by their child-pig experiences in a vaguely Freudian way? Does the grunt mean "food enjoyment" or "food enjoyment + recollection of nursing" or "food enjoyment + recollection of nursing + nostalgia for the Jungian archetypal teat"? These questions may seem ridiculous (and I suppose I am stretching them a bit for humour's sake), but I think ignoring them just leads to an impoverished behavioural science. Maybe that's the best we can do. I just don't see how we can make the leap from correlating events with acoustics to saying that we understand the meaning of a pig grunt. The idea that we could somehow discover a rich, nuanced emotional/meaningful life of pigs via such a means seems to me fundamentally misguided. We would need to be able to ask a pig what such and such a grunt meant, which obviously presupposes a fairly complex shared language. In the absence of this, we are just making assumptions. On the other hand, these assumptions certainly may be very plausible, and it seems reasonable to think that it would be very cosmically odd if such assumptions were dramatically off-base, due to our shared evolutionary history, physiology, and neural circuitry.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    > The idea that we could somehow discover a rich, nuanced emotional/meaningful life of pigs via such a means seems to me fundamentally misguided. Decoding vocal communication and basic emotional states, however simple and unstructured both of these might be, could easily enable us to bootstrap training of pigs for other forms of communication, such as computer-assisted button boards. AIUI, this has been done wrt. other comparable mammals, with some measure of success.
- pishpash 5y ago
  First application would be for babies.
mft_ 5y ago
> The animals had positive emotions when nursing, reuniting with family, cuddling with litter mates and running freely. Negative emotions came from situations involving social isolation, fights, castration and waiting in a slaughterhouse. Not to be negative about the research, but I’m pretty sure I could have surmised the pigs’ emotional state in many of these situations (castration?!) without the benefit of a translator! But I hope it’s successful, and they then develop beyond just positive vs. negative. And then do cats. Please.
- spaetzleesser 5y ago
  I think the most important thing is that people/scientists are slowly acknowledging that animals can have emotions and aren't just machines. I hope this acknowledgment will help improving conditions for animals in farms.
  - giantg2 5y ago
    I think anyone who has worked on the topic or had any experience with animals knows that, to varying degrees, animals can be happy or sad/distressed. Most people simply don't know about or would rather ignore the realities of industrial meat production.
    - trentgreene 5y ago
      I don’t disagree with you, but to the parents point, there’s a pretty long philosophical -> scientific history which held that animals didn’t have emotions
      - giantg2 5y ago
        Is there? My understanding is that the widely held belief was that they didn't have fine grained emotions that were comparable to our own. So far this research doesn't change that, but might lay the ground work for exploring that further.
        5y ago
nemo44x 5y ago
What I’m most interested in is if there is a correlation between between their emotional lifetime grunt series (or subset) and the consensus taste of their meat as opined by tastemakers and aficionados. It would be great to use this animals emotional state to influence the succulence of its tender flesh.
- cardosof 5y ago
  "Grumpy pig meat, now on sale! 20% off all depressed ribs!" Can't wait for the future. /s
  - apatters 5y ago
    Actually the idea is brilliant. If you can demonstrate empirically that meat from happy pigs tastes better, now you have the beginnings of a commercial case for raising the pigs ethically, which has the potential to drive far more improvement in livestock well-being than a million Internet virtue signals about animal cruelty.
    - cardosof 5y ago
      I agree with you, my concern is about what happens if the data doesn't point in that direction (tortured pigs taste the same) or if the market just accepts a trade-off (less quality for less price) disregarding their suffering. I believe technology is inexorable and we'll just have to see what happens next.
    - Mondialisation 5y ago
      Ethically killing someone for (taste) pleasure sounds like an oxymoron to me.
knighthack 5y ago
There were some videos a while back on a butcher torturing pigs in a slaughterhouse, which was leaked and showed inhuman practices. The pigs were squealing and grunting in absolute horror as they were tortured. It scares me to know exactly what emotions they were displaying during the torture.
- sacrosancty 5y ago
  While I don't know what happened in that case, was it worse than castration without anesthesia? Or is this fear you have more about the human intent than the effect on the animal?
- klyrs 5y ago
  So you're saying we shouldn't hook this into gpt3 to write poetry based on the pigs' emotional state?
hutzlibu 5y ago
"They cracked pig grunts, and are building a translator for the rest of us. Nice." Let's assume humans grow up in meat farms, disconnected from all former culture developements. They are born into it. Get fed and separated by machines, castrated and in the end slaughtered. Would they develope meaningful language under these circumstances? I doubt it. So you still could then build a translator for human gutural noises. But not for human language. You would have to analyse a normal human culture for that. Likewise, I would be much more interested in analyzing the grunts of free wild pigs.
puzzlepursuer 5y ago
Replying to this for visibility. Curious why this submission reached the front page. I’ve linked prior posts on the same topic, including my own. Does time of day affect ranking that much, or perhaps there’s an algorithm at work? The person who posted this article has >30 submissions over the past week. Maybe people recognizing a username has a big influence too. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30588423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30588423 - 4 days prior https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30594902 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30594902 - 4 days prior https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30612740 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30612740 - 2 days prior https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30639933 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30639933 - 8 hours prior
- cstejerean 5y ago
  Time of day definitely seems to affect ranking.

axiosgunnar 5y ago

> building a translator This would be groundbreaking, civilization changing even

lukeasrodgers 5y ago
This would be pretty cool, but I don't see how it could go beyond translations like "I feel positive emotion related to nursing" and "I feel negative emotion related to pain." What if an adult pig makes "positive emotion related to nursing" grunts? Does that mean they are thinking about nursing? Or has the meaning of the grunt has changed over time? Are they reliving a childhood pig-fantasy? Is the meaning of their adult-pig desire structured by their child-pig experiences in a vaguely Freudian way? Does the grunt mean "food enjoyment" or "food enjoyment + recollection of nursing" or "food enjoyment + recollection of nursing + nostalgia for the Jungian archetypal teat"? These questions may seem ridiculous (and I suppose I am stretching them a bit for humour's sake), but I think ignoring them just leads to an impoverished behavioural science. Maybe that's the best we can do. I just don't see how we can make the leap from correlating events with acoustics to saying that we understand the meaning of a pig grunt. The idea that we could somehow discover a rich, nuanced emotional/meaningful life of pigs via such a means seems to me fundamentally misguided. We would need to be able to ask a pig what such and such a grunt meant, which obviously presupposes a fairly complex shared language. In the absence of this, we are just making assumptions. On the other hand, these assumptions certainly may be very plausible, and it seems reasonable to think that it would be very cosmically odd if such assumptions were dramatically off-base, due to our shared evolutionary history, physiology, and neural circuitry.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  > The idea that we could somehow discover a rich, nuanced emotional/meaningful life of pigs via such a means seems to me fundamentally misguided. Decoding vocal communication and basic emotional states, however simple and unstructured both of these might be, could easily enable us to bootstrap training of pigs for other forms of communication, such as computer-assisted button boards. AIUI, this has been done wrt. other comparable mammals, with some measure of success.
pishpash 5y ago
First application would be for babies.

mft_ 5y ago

> The animals had positive emotions when nursing, reuniting with family, cuddling with litter mates and running freely. Negative emotions came from situations involving social isolation, fights, castration and waiting in a slaughterhouse. Not to be negative about the research, but I’m pretty sure I could have surmised the pigs’ emotional state in many of these situations (castration?!) without the benefit of a translator! But I hope it’s successful, and they then develop beyond just positive vs. negative. And then do cats. Please.

spaetzleesser 5y ago
I think the most important thing is that people/scientists are slowly acknowledging that animals can have emotions and aren't just machines. I hope this acknowledgment will help improving conditions for animals in farms.
- giantg2 5y ago
  I think anyone who has worked on the topic or had any experience with animals knows that, to varying degrees, animals can be happy or sad/distressed. Most people simply don't know about or would rather ignore the realities of industrial meat production.
  - trentgreene 5y ago
    I don’t disagree with you, but to the parents point, there’s a pretty long philosophical -> scientific history which held that animals didn’t have emotions
    - giantg2 5y ago
      Is there? My understanding is that the widely held belief was that they didn't have fine grained emotions that were comparable to our own. So far this research doesn't change that, but might lay the ground work for exploring that further.
      - 5y ago

nemo44x 5y ago

What I’m most interested in is if there is a correlation between between their emotional lifetime grunt series (or subset) and the consensus taste of their meat as opined by tastemakers and aficionados. It would be great to use this animals emotional state to influence the succulence of its tender flesh.

cardosof 5y ago
"Grumpy pig meat, now on sale! 20% off all depressed ribs!" Can't wait for the future. /s
- apatters 5y ago
  Actually the idea is brilliant. If you can demonstrate empirically that meat from happy pigs tastes better, now you have the beginnings of a commercial case for raising the pigs ethically, which has the potential to drive far more improvement in livestock well-being than a million Internet virtue signals about animal cruelty.
  - cardosof 5y ago
    I agree with you, my concern is about what happens if the data doesn't point in that direction (tortured pigs taste the same) or if the market just accepts a trade-off (less quality for less price) disregarding their suffering. I believe technology is inexorable and we'll just have to see what happens next.
  - Mondialisation 5y ago
    Ethically killing someone for (taste) pleasure sounds like an oxymoron to me.

knighthack 5y ago

There were some videos a while back on a butcher torturing pigs in a slaughterhouse, which was leaked and showed inhuman practices. The pigs were squealing and grunting in absolute horror as they were tortured. It scares me to know exactly what emotions they were displaying during the torture.

sacrosancty 5y ago
While I don't know what happened in that case, was it worse than castration without anesthesia? Or is this fear you have more about the human intent than the effect on the animal?
klyrs 5y ago
So you're saying we shouldn't hook this into gpt3 to write poetry based on the pigs' emotional state?

hutzlibu 5y ago

"They cracked pig grunts, and are building a translator for the rest of us. Nice." Let's assume humans grow up in meat farms, disconnected from all former culture developements. They are born into it. Get fed and separated by machines, castrated and in the end slaughtered. Would they develope meaningful language under these circumstances? I doubt it. So you still could then build a translator for human gutural noises. But not for human language. You would have to analyse a normal human culture for that. Likewise, I would be much more interested in analyzing the grunts of free wild pigs.

puzzlepursuer 5y ago

Replying to this for visibility. Curious why this submission reached the front page. I’ve linked prior posts on the same topic, including my own. Does time of day affect ranking that much, or perhaps there’s an algorithm at work? The person who posted this article has >30 submissions over the past week. Maybe people recognizing a username has a big influence too. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30588423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30588423 - 4 days prior https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30594902 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30594902 - 4 days prior https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30612740 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30612740 - 2 days prior https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30639933 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30639933 - 8 hours prior

cstejerean 5y ago
Time of day definitely seems to affect ranking.