Most people can correctly guess a bird’s mood when they hear the sounds of a hen, according to a recent study conducted by Australian researchers with the participation of a guest lecturer from the Estonian University of Life Sciences.
Sometimes people say that some animals seem somehow sad or rather happy. Do such statements belong purely to the realm of humanization, that is, the attribution of human traits to a non-human, or do they have a truth behind them? A group of Australian scientists have now clarified the matter. Their study showed that most people can correctly guess a bird’s mood based on a chicken’s voice, Science News reports.
The team asked nearly 200 volunteers to listen to 16 different recordings of chicken voices. In half of the recordings you could hear the sounds of the chickens, so to speak, enjoying their food. It was the short, rapid clucking that the flock of chickens made just before feeding.
However, in half of the recordings the grunting and clucking of chickens could be heard. When the chickens were presented with an empty food dish, they made long, low-frequency vocalizations. About 69 percent of the subjects were able to distinguish the sounds of happily excited chickens from the grunts of frustrated birds.
To elicit vocalizations with different emotional nuances, the researchers had previously trained the chickens to associate the contents of the food bowl offered to them with different sounds. For example, a ring might be associated with a particularly fatty mealworm, and a buzz with an empty bowl. So it was that the hens began to rejoice when they heard some noise and when they suddenly saw an empty bowl, they made disappointed noises.
According to the working group, farmers and chicken breeders could do more to listen to them and for the well-being of their departments. Sound monitoring systems that keep an eye on the mood of the entire herd are already in use on large farms, The Guardian reports. More broadly, however, the study is yet more evidence that humans can capture emotions from the vocalizations of other species. The latter possibility had already been suspected by Charles Darwin, who laid the foundations for the theory of evolution.
The research was published in the journal Royal Society Open Science.
2024-01-04 08:38:00
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