An investigation of the University of Antioquia, in Colombia, successfully focuses on improving the welfare of pigs using music. “Our research aims to improve animal welfare,” acknowledges Dr. Maria Camila Ceballos. “Animals give us so much that we believe we should give them a better quality of life. The life that animals live should be worth living,” he explains.
With that goal in mind, Ceballos and his teammates Bernard of Jesus Rodriguezz, Juliana Zapata y Ariel TarazonaThey hope that music will be key in helping to improve the lives of pigs throughout the industry.
“In the pig industry, the production system is too intensive and that type of system is stressful for animals”, comments Ceballos, who has been working to improve animal welfare since the beginning of his career, in Colombia, Brazil, the United States and Canada. “When we came up with the idea of creating music for pigs, we intended to use it as environmental enrichment. Environmental enrichments are used to improve the quality of life for animals that are in captivity,” he stresses.
Among various ideas, they chose to use music because it is a more accessible option than other types of environmental enrichment, such as physical ones. “What we have is an animal enrichment program that allows us to intervene in a less invasive way,” says Zapata. “Then, We thought it was necessary to create a stimulus or a sensory environmental enrichment that all pigs cann enjoy simultaneouslywithout competing with his peers”, he sums up.
“Music has advantages like it’s not expensive or invasive, and that makes it easy to implement in production systems. Therefore, we started working on the creation of music for this species, taking into account its hearing range and focusing on acoustic elements that generate positive responses”, point out the experts. Although similar studies have been carried out using classical music, they state that not all compositions generate positive emotions in animals “which, in the end, is the desired objective”. That’s why they decided to create their own music for the cause.
Thus, to date, Dr. Rodríguez has composed more than 47 different pieces of music specifically for animals. Thanks to them, “we were soon able to identify which pieces of music were favorable for pigs. We did an analysis to find out what kind of music generated a positive response. Through this analysis, we were able to conclude some parameters, such as a recipe for creating music for pigs.”
The research group has already published in Nature his first round of findings and is preparing to publish his most recent discoveries, such as the identification of acoustic parameters for creating species-specific music and how that music influences agonistic behaviors and physiological responses to stress.
“Probably the pig industry will be able to use this tool to improve pig welfare. Nevertheless, we cannot assume that only through the use of music we can provide good well-being. The animal welfare it is multifactorial and depends on many elements, such as facilities, nutrition, management, health and whether the environment allows the pigs to perform natural behaviors”.