From farm to screen: How a TV documentary funded pig emotion research

Can animals have emotions, and do they actually express them?

These are the questions that have preoccupied Associate Professor Elodie Briefer at the Department of Biology at the University of Copenhagen (UCPH) ever since 2010.

Researchers are now in agreement that animals do have emotions. But this recognition only took root in science about 30 years ago — primarily driven by research into animal welfare and through the use of animal models in developing medication for people with mental disorders.

Elodie Briefer recently took on a collaboration with a company within the media industry to advance her recent research on pigs’ emotions and welfare.

The production company Snowman Productions planned a documentary on pig welfare focusing on facial recognition and pig vocalisations. The agreement was that the production company would cover the costs of translating pigs’ grunts and squeals into emotions using the research by Elodie Briefer and her team over recent years.

Snowman Productions covered about half of the expenses for the research group’s work, which involved collecting data from nine different locations with slaughter pigs in Denmark and Germany, and conducting one and a half years of research at the department. In return, Snowman Productions got the research that is the basis of a highly debated documentary on the Danish public service medium DR called If Pigs Could Talk.

Basic research versus film production

Elodie Briefer’s collaboration with Snowman Productions came about when documentary filmmaker Miki Mistrati contacted her in September 2022.

Miki Mistrati had read about Elodie Briefer’s participation in a major EU project from 2016, which focused specifically on pigs’ emotions. She had developed a database of pig grunts and squeals that, combined with a machine learning model, allowed researchers to interpret pigs’ emotions. These emotions could be identified in situations such as when the animals received food or toys, or when they were isolated.

Both the TV crew and Elodie Briefer were keen to work scientifically with pig emotions, but for the researchers, the differences between conducting fundamental research and producing a documentary proved to be a challenge.

»Snowman Productions required the documentary to be completed within a specific timeframe, as media companies must adhere to strict production schedules. But research doesn’t work that way, and the timeframe was a limitation for us,« says Elodie Briefer. Nonetheless, she has many positive things to say about the collaboration:

»We had a really good, professional relationship with the film crew. We reviewed all the material in advance were able to comment on it. Miki Mistrati changed everything that was an issue in terms of the science, so we are very satisfied with the documentary. It is solidly backed by research,« says Elodie Briefer.

She is also pleased that the documentary explains the researchers’ work, acknowledges that their findings are based on preliminary data, and clarifies that only a relatively small number of pig herds participated in the study.

Scientific integrity

Elodie Briefer and her research team were well aware that they needed to be extra diligent when collaborating with a media company.

»My team and I were very conscious of the fact that the documentary would be seen by a large audience and would therefore have a significant impact on pig welfare. For this reason, it was crucial that everything was accurate when it was broadcast,« says Elodie Briefer.

However, there was one thing they did not manage to do.

»Of course, it would have been ideal if we had been able to publish our results in a peer-reviewed scientific journal before the documentary aired, but that takes time. Instead, we did what is typically done in such situations: we presented and discussed our preliminary findings,« says Elodie Briefer.

Finally, there was the matter of securing the necessary legal agreements before filming could begin.

»We did everything we could to ensure that our scientific integrity remained intact. We had a written agreement drafted by lawyers at the University of Copenhagen, which, among other things, ensured that only we could comment on our research findings,« says Elodie Briefer.

Criticism — but not from pig farmers

Elodie Briefer and her team got a lot of attention in both Danish and German media. Some pig producers even called her from Germany to thank her after the documentary aired on German television.

But there was one thing that surprised her:

»To my surprise, the criticism of our work has only come from colleagues in an animal welfare group. They commented on the broadcast and wrote things online that they believed to be flaws in our work — without first asking us what it was that we had actually done,« says Elodie Briefer.

»The animal welfare group, for example, wrote that it is important where you place the microphones in the barns. That is true. But this is, of course, something we considered carefully. They did not ask us about our choices and preferences, but simply assumed that we had not thought about microphone placement at all,« says Elodie Briefer, who adds a further point:

»Some of them also assumed that our 2016 database (which plays a role in the film project, ed.) consisted only of pigs that were alone when they grunted and squealed, making it useless for decoding pig sounds in barns with many pigs. That is also incorrect because the pigs in that project were recorded both as single pigs, in pairs, and in groups,« says Elodie Briefer.

Is there an app on the way?

The funding from Snowman Productions was of significant help to Elodie Briefer’s research group in terms of their work on pig emotions. The question now is how close her team is to developing an app that could, via the pig farmer’s mobile phone, provide insights into the welfare of the herd’s pigs.

»Unfortunately, we are still quite a way off,« says the researcher.

Currently, her team can identify and classify pig sounds in noisy environments, but they cannot do so based on long-term recordings. This is simply too challenging with the type of artificial intelligence available to them.

»I know many researchers who have the same problem. It is a difficult task that would require an additional six months of work, for which we first need to secure financial resources,« says Elodie Briefer.

Moreover, Elodie Briefer estimates it would take a further two to three years of research to be absolutely certain they have identified the precise correlation between pigs’ vocal expressions and their welfare before they can develop an app for farmers that accurately reflects the pigs’ well-being.

Finally, there is another unknown factor that researchers can hardly account for: Poor welfare that does not manifest itself. Pigs, like humans, can indeed have silent emotions, such as in cases of depression.