Magic tricks for crows: how animals experience the world
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CORDIScovery podcast- Episode #21 - Magic tricks for crows: how animals experience the world
00:00:10:05 - 00:00:16:03
Abigail Acton
This is CORDIScovery.
00:00:16:05 - 00:00:38:10
Abigail Acton
Hello. Welcome to this episode of CORDIScovery With me, Abigail Acton. Today we're considering animal welfare and sentience research conducted back in 1995 established that a pigeon can tell a Picasso from a Monet. And by 2017, we knew that sheep can recognize faces from photographs. Surprised? So what else don't we know about the way in which animals experience the world around them?
00:00:38:13 - 00:00:59:05
Abigail Acton
Is there ignorance leading us to act in ways we wouldn't if we did know more? The animals that feed us, clothe us, entertain us? What is the nature of their intelligence and how sentient are they? Today we're asking Do we focus too much on spoken language and manual dexterity as markers of intelligence? If something doesn't have opposable thumbs and can't speak, does it mean that it isn't sentient?
00:00:59:11 - 00:01:21:12
Abigail Acton
What does sentience mean? And does it exist where we might not expect to find it? If we're more aware of the levels of awareness in the animals around us? What are we doing about our relationship with them? What developments are coming down the line to support animal welfare on farms, for example? Good job. We have three guests from EU supported Horizon 2020 projects to walk us through the maze.
00:01:21:14 - 00:01:39:16
Abigail Acton
Jonathan Birch is an associate professor at the London School of Economics Center for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science. In 2021, the review he led into the sentence of invertebrate animals resulted into the amendment of the UK government's animal welfare bill to include octopuses, crabs and lobsters. Welcome, Jonathan.
00:01:39:18 - 00:01:40:09
Jonathan Birch
Hello.
00:01:40:11 - 00:02:09:05
Abigail Acton
Associate Professor at the University of Leuven's Animal and Human Health Engineering Unit, Thomas Naughton leads research on sustainable precision livestock farming, covering animal health, welfare and productivity. Hi Thomas. Nicola Clayton is a Fellow of the Royal Society and Professor of Comparative Cognition in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge. She's particularly interested in the processes of thinking with and without words, comparing the cognitive capacities of corvids, self-reports and children.
00:02:09:06 - 00:02:33:12
Abigail Acton
Welcome, Nicky. Hello, Jonathan. I'm going to start with you. You were involved with the ASENT Project, which aimed to develop a richer picture of the links between sentience, welfare and the ethical status of Animals. The project set out to give an account the basic functional capacities involved in sentience. Can you explain what sentience means and what capacities or in what contexts could be considered as indicating sentience?
00:02:33:14 - 00:03:02:08
Jonathan Birch
Well, sentience is just a fancy way of talking about feeling. It's about the subjective feelings of animals experiences with a positive or negative quality. We can think of many examples of feelings from our own lives like pain, pleasure, anxiety, joy, contentment, boredom, frustration. And from thinking about those particular feelings, we can abstract this broader idea of the capacity to have feelings.
00:03:02:14 - 00:03:22:03
Jonathan Birch
Sentience may well be that lots of other animals don't have the same feelings. We have, but nonetheless, they may well be having subjective feelings and we need methods for studying that scientifically. On my foundations of animal sentience project is about trying to develop better methods for doing that.
00:03:22:05 - 00:03:36:04
Abigail Acton
Can I ask you then how can we measure it? So, for example, we know our dogs rejoice in a friend, stoic and a purring cat we assume as a contented cat. Are these examples of subjective awareness and how do we establish the capacity of subjective awareness in animals?
00:03:36:06 - 00:03:57:12
Jonathan Birch
I think we have to start by recognizing that this is a very, very difficult problem. So philosophers sometimes call the problem of other minds, and I think we to some extent need to get beyond the idea that it's just obvious what an animal is feeling. When we're interacting with our own pets. We often think it's obvious. We often think we know what a dog or a cat is feeling.
00:03:57:14 - 00:04:18:10
Jonathan Birch
But in fact, I think this is something we can't just observe and that we have to settle carefully with scientific evidence. My project has been particularly interested in invertebrates animals like octopuses, where people don't have that same reaction. So unlike with dogs and cats, they don't just look at an octopus and think, of course I know what it's feeling.
00:04:18:12 - 00:04:34:21
Jonathan Birch
In fact, the inscrutability is very, very clear when it comes to octopuses, and I think that gets us thinking in the right way because we immediately start thinking we need scientific evidence to actually help us make some progress on these questions and can't always rely on what we intuitively think.
00:04:34:23 - 00:04:44:11
Abigail Acton
When we talk about scientific progress. And I mean, what sort of experiments are conducted to quantify or assess sentience? How can we actually get that data?
00:04:44:13 - 00:05:05:07
Jonathan Birch
It's again, very difficult and there's no single line of evidence that is a smoking gun and that immediately tells you that an animal is sentience and that tells you what it's feeling. What we've got to do is develop multiple different lines of evidence. That is partly about looking at the brain and brain mechanisms, partly about looking at behavior and cognitive abilities.
00:05:05:13 - 00:05:36:01
Jonathan Birch
And when it comes to invertebrates, behavior and cognitive abilities have this special significance because their brains are completely differently organized from our own. So researchers around the world have been doing really interesting work lately, exploring sentience in octopuses and crabs and lobsters, using experimental designs that were previously used in mammals. Well, my own project has a strand that is about trying to develop new experimental setups for investigating sentience or the possibility of it in bees.
00:05:36:03 - 00:05:41:17
Abigail Acton
And tell us more about that. I mean, what how is that set up? What sort of experiments are you doing for that or your researches?
00:05:41:19 - 00:06:10:15
Jonathan Birch
So I can give one example of an experiment that one of my post-docs, Andrew Crump, worked on, and it was recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, PNAS. It's an experiment that draws inspiration from a kind of experiment that is used to assess pain in rats, where the thought is that one of the functions of experiences like pleasure and pain is to provide a common currency for decision making.
00:06:10:17 - 00:06:31:02
Jonathan Birch
They help you weigh up how bad something is. So, for example, if you're out running and you get a tiny little niggling pain in the tip of your toe, you might just think, I can run through that. That's really tiny. But if it's a very severe pain of a broken leg or something like that, you immediately realize you can't run through it and you have to stop and nurse the injury.
00:06:31:04 - 00:06:54:06
Jonathan Birch
So pleasure and pain help us make flexible decisions. And in rats, this was explored with an experiment where the rats had to go through a cold tunnel to access a sweet reward at the end. And the question was, will they trade off the sweetness of the reward they can access against the temperature they have to withstand to get it?
00:06:54:08 - 00:07:17:03
Jonathan Birch
And the fact that they do this trade off tells you something about how bad the cold is from their point of view. This is how good the the sweetness is of the reward at the end. And so this research experiment was doing a very similar thing. But with bees, where again, we vary the sweetness of the sugar solution that the bees can access at different platforms.
00:07:17:05 - 00:07:48:00
Jonathan Birch
And we also vary the temperature of those feeding platforms that the bee has to stand on. So we're looking for temperature ranges that a mildly aversive to the bee. We're not trying to seriously enter the bee, but temperatures of around 40 degrees that are experienced as aversive. And then the question is, will the bee trade off the sweetness of the reward it can access against the discomfort of having to withstand a certain temperature to get it, and the pattern of results for the bees looks broadly similar to the pattern for rats.
00:07:48:00 - 00:08:13:23
Jonathan Birch
So they do indeed make this tradeoff. So they're making these flexible decisions in a common currency. And for us, that's one line of evidence. It's not conclusive evidence that they're feeling discomfort when they stand on those heat pads, but it is suggestive of centralized integrative processing of that information. And we think that raises the probability of some experiencing feelings when they're making these decisions.
00:08:14:04 - 00:08:34:24
Abigail Acton
And it's very interesting that, as you say, they register these feelings or at least that the reactions mimic from bee to rat not the result, but the reaction is the same. The motivation is the same as well. That's interesting. No. Okay, excellent. What do you hope the impact of of this research could have in the future, and how are your findings feeding into policymaking now?
00:08:35:00 - 00:09:09:14
Jonathan Birch
We've already been involved in a in a substantial review of the evidence that is relevant to sentience in octopuses, crabs and lobsters that led to us advising the UK government to recognize the sentiments of these animals in law and take potential welfare impacts on them into account in future policymaking. So it was heartening for me at least, to see policymakers in the UK taking that issue seriously at all, because I think the welfare of animals is often neglected and the welfare of invertebrates is often even more neglected.
00:09:09:16 - 00:09:38:14
Jonathan Birch
And so it's great to just see people discussing this issue. We wanted our report to start a wider conversation about this topic, and we think that conversation should be broad enough to include insects as well. We think there's growing interest in insect farming, a lot of talk of insect farming and hope that this might be part of the answer of meeting the world's protein needs sustainably, but a total lack of welfare guidelines, regulations.
00:09:38:16 - 00:09:53:01
Jonathan Birch
No one knows what a humane slaughter is for an insect, for example, or what high welfare farming looks like. So we want to start a discussion of that issue as well and just broaden people's horizons. I think when it comes to talking and thinking about animal welfare, it's.
00:09:53:01 - 00:10:25:00
Abigail Acton
True that if it's an animal that we're not used to being around, and if it's an animal that really doesn't look anything like us, we tend to classify it as being something that probably doesn't have much in the way of feelings or isn't particularly sentient. So yeah, that's an interesting one. I like the argument or the concept that you put forward about the fact that the octopuses don't look like our dogs but says an unfamiliar territory and causes us to rethink what our interpretation actually is and that maybe we should come to looking at our dogs and cats with a clean slate as well and rethinking that too.
00:10:25:01 - 00:10:31:16
Abigail Acton
Yeah, very interesting. Thank you very much, Jonathan. Does anyone have any questions or observations to make to to Jonathan? Yeah.
00:10:32:19 - 00:10:56:22
Nicola Clayton
I was just going to say that I think one of the critical arguments here in this area of science and in my own is this whole idea of converging evidence to bear on a problem that no single one experiment is going to prove a point. But actually, if all roads lead to Rome, then you've got to Rome.
00:10:56:24 - 00:11:04:03
Nicola Clayton
And I think that's exactly the approach that you're taking, Jonathan. And a lot of the work that you're doing.
00:11:04:05 - 00:11:14:23
Abigail Acton
Like a jigsaw puzzle really, I suppose you're putting in pieces and overall, bit by bit, after the passage of a bit of time, a larger picture becomes apparent, I guess, yes, Tomas.
00:11:15:00 - 00:11:40:10
Tomas Norton
I'd like to ask a question because I think particularly from the work we do, we learn more and more about the animal and their response and how they react in different situations. We get a stronger understanding of the personality, but how far should we go with that? Because particularly when you talk about farm animals, we see more and more that they are quite intelligent.
00:11:40:12 - 00:11:56:08
Tomas Norton
But do we should we, Jonathan, go into that territory where we try and demonstrate the intelligence of these animals? Is it a case that it harms the animal production? Yeah. What is your perception of that?
00:11:56:10 - 00:12:19:00
Jonathan Birch
I think we shouldn't be afraid of knowledge in this area. I think we have to know we have to try and understand the welfare needs of animals as best we can. We have to try not to overestimate their sentience and intelligence, but we have to try not to underestimate it either. And we have to be thinking about how we can give them suitably enriched environments that are properly enriched for their actual cognitive abilities.
00:12:19:02 - 00:12:41:10
Jonathan Birch
I think with octopuses, for example, it's incredibly hard to imagine how they could really be properly farmed with high welfare. And that's a concern because some companies are trying to set up octopus farming operations. I think in general, with all farm animals, we have to think about how we can give them good lives, how we can give them environments in which they can express their full range of cognitive abilities.
00:12:41:13 - 00:13:05:16
Abigail Acton
Excellent. Thank you very, very much. Thomas, I'm going to turn to you actually, AutoPlayPig or to give your project, its full title “Automatic Detection of Play Behavior in Young Pigs as a measure of positive affective states” was set up to meet the need for a more effective way to monitor farm animal welfare. So your project brought together advances in artificial intelligence with an interest in how playfulness in pigs indicates well-being.
00:13:05:18 - 00:13:09:06
Abigail Acton
What caused you to think of applying AI deep learning to pick farming?
00:13:09:20 - 00:13:28:19
Tomas Norton
Well, thanks for the question. I've got to be honest. I've been reared in the agricultural family, come from an agricultural community, so for me, this is a kind of an interesting topic for a long time. I'm also an engineer and I did my Ph.D. in a field called Computational Fluid Dynamics, but I applied it to car housing.
00:13:28:19 - 00:13:52:01
Tomas Norton
So that's you can you can see already the link added. I tried to set it for a long time now and actually, to be honest, I think that farmers do a really good job when it comes in general to finding the animals. They are custodians of the land and the countryside, but also animal welfare and a lot of them have a lot of respect for the animals they produce.
00:13:52:03 - 00:14:19:07
Tomas Norton
And therefore for me it's important to help them to quantify this actually, how well are they are farming? And I'm talking about the good farmers, the people who respect their animals, and that is more and more challenging for them. Why? Because we can see that even though the number of farms are decreasing on average throughout Europe, the pig farmers, for instance, have halved in the last 20 years.
00:14:19:09 - 00:14:52:16
Tomas Norton
The number of animals have doubled. So it is very difficult for them to follow individual animals. And what we would like to do is bring them the tools to enable them to quantify health and welfare. Welfare is an important aspect that we're interested in, and that's what this project is about. It's not about quantifying the negative aspects of welfare, but indeed looking at the positive aspects to playing, for instance, between young pigs individual playing and also the interaction with enrichment of birds.
00:14:52:16 - 00:15:01:09
Tomas Norton
This is a very interesting thing that can indeed help us understand these animals and balance how welfare can be balanced on the farm.
00:15:01:11 - 00:15:14:05
Abigail Acton
Okay. Yeah. Super. And and I guess you were looking at pigs, the young pigs playfulness as a metric to judge whether they're stress free and healthy. That was, I suppose, the benefit of looking at that particular aspect of behavior.
00:15:14:07 - 00:15:48:21
Tomas Norton
Yeah. And I think when you look at the research, like there is some nice research coming out from Canada that shows that yeah, if you enhance the environment and you promote playing activities, there can be a lot of production benefits later on as well. For instance, the robustness of the animal, the immunity can be strengthened and because they become more flexible in our thinking and you can stress them a little bit more later on, or at least are more robust because you offer this an environment where they can interact and play with each other.
00:15:48:21 - 00:16:01:03
Tomas Norton
And actually we will have our aim is to try and enable the welfare of scientists to do a better job in the future, to better design the environment and enrichment conditions.
00:16:01:05 - 00:16:11:08
Abigail Acton
Okay. So that's the goal and that's what you were looking at. Can you tell me a little bit more about the technology behind it? So what tools did you actually use and what information did they capture?
00:16:11:10 - 00:16:40:17
Tomas Norton
Okay, so our interest is the use of computer vision tools. And there we look to visual response of behavioral responses of the animal. And in particular, for this case, we're looking to different types of playing locomotor play, social play, for instance. And we try to capture this information on an individual level, and that's that's really what at the moment, that's what artificial intelligence can enable us to do.
00:16:40:19 - 00:17:04:24
Tomas Norton
We can look to these behaviors that could easily be confused by a person with running, with walking. But now with these tools, we can actually classify them correctly as being events. And then because with camera you can remotely capture this data 24/7 in a perfect world. But of course we have to develop the research and move towards there.
00:17:05:04 - 00:17:10:17
Tomas Norton
It won't be overnight, but there's a lot of really interesting advantages that this technology can bring.
00:17:10:19 - 00:17:26:01
Abigail Acton
I guess it also strips out any notion of subjectivity as well, of course, because I suppose if you have humans monitoring and trying to assess whether their pigs are content and so on, some person's notion of what they're seeing might be different from someone else's or someone might just feel tired and miss something.
00:17:26:02 - 00:17:53:24
Tomas Norton
Indeed. And that's, you know, also that's the starting point of developing these algorithms because you really need good expertise in order to develop a good technique. And the kind of behavior science that goes into that needs to be very strong. For instance, in this project, Mona Larsen, who is my postdoc at the time, she's now associate professor in Orissa University, it took her a considerable amount of time to actually agree.
00:17:54:02 - 00:18:16:16
Tomas Norton
What is locomotor playing? What are these different play about? Because indeed we need consistency and then when you have this level of consistency, you can develop the algorithms, but it just tells you your starting point needs to be very good at the beginning. And of course after you've come past that point, you can reapply it. That's the idea that we can reapply many different paths.
00:18:16:20 - 00:18:26:05
Abigail Acton
Picture Yeah, that becomes replicable. Yeah. So how do you see the role of artificial intelligence and deep learning evolving in the analysis of animal welfare? Could it go beyond farms?
00:18:26:10 - 00:18:47:04
Tomas Norton
You know, I think we have a lot of things to do in the livestock production space. Actually, I think we should begin to look at the farming of animals as a kind of collaboration between the animals and the farm, not just the farmer actions. And the animals are affected by these actions, but more like what are the needs of the animals?
00:18:47:06 - 00:19:11:16
Tomas Norton
How do we respond to these needs as quickly as possible? There are some interest in examples coming in the literature. For instance, in Germany, they've done some work on car feeding of cells where they call in order to reduce the aggression between cells. They called the cells with a particular cell acute that's linked with an individual cell to feed at the feeder.
00:19:11:18 - 00:19:52:03
Tomas Norton
And then they reduced the incidence of this expression between individual cells by beef. And I think this is a step towards this collaborative way of working with animals. And artificial intelligence can really help because we can get more information about these animals build up kind of avatar of what what, how we expect animals to behave in certain situations and use their intelligence, just like Jonathan said, to try and think, would you use this tool to help them to improve their welfare, their conditions, and also have a benefit for the farmer that's a win win.
00:19:52:05 - 00:19:58:12
Abigail Acton
There we go. Perfect. Thank you very much, Thomas. Does anyone have any questions or observations to make on Thomas's work? Yeah. Jonathan.
00:19:58:14 - 00:20:37:19
Jonathan Birch
Yes, thanks. I wanted to ask what you see is the role for human judgment in all this, because what you're describing reminds me a bit of the use of AI in medical imaging where you no longer need a human reader to look at screening images from cancer screening, because I can classify these images just as well. But when you ask patients, do they want that, a very strong message from these patients seems to be they still want some human involvement, they still want their image to pass the eyes of a human reader at some point because it's so important and there's more trust in the judgment of a human.
00:20:37:19 - 00:20:46:00
Jonathan Birch
I wonder if you think some of those points might carry over to the animal welfare case and whether there's still a really crucial role for human expertise in this area as well?
00:20:46:05 - 00:21:07:06
Tomas Norton
I completely agree. I don't ever believe that we should take the expertise out of the hands of farmers. You should always have some level of expertise and knowledge because in the end he's running the farm and he has a lot of many different things to deal with. But the benefit of this technology is not to run things automatically.
00:21:07:11 - 00:21:34:03
Tomas Norton
per se but to give the farmer more information that he can make more informed on better informed decisions because he can be amongst these animals. 24 /7 It's just not possible. So it's really about giving that extra bit of information, giving support in terms of what decisions could be made in this kind of scenario and help him make the right decision.
00:21:34:05 - 00:21:47:21
Tomas Norton
So I believe that there will always be the need of a caretaker of the farmer to ensure the welfare of the animal and the animal system is too complex to just leave it in the hands of computing.
00:21:47:23 - 00:21:49:22
Abigail Acton
Nicky, you had something you wanted to say.
00:21:49:24 - 00:21:51:00
Nicola Clayton
Yeah, I just wanted to.
00:21:51:00 - 00:21:52:02
Nicola Clayton
Question the role of.
00:21:52:02 - 00:22:28:20
Nicola Clayton
All three keys. Obviously, when you were talking about the AI machine, the emphasis, you were saying was visual and you also mentioned acoustic cues. And I was thinking that, you know, for many farm animals, including pigs, olfaction is one of their major sensory worlds, and it's one that we as human beings are not so good at. And I wondered if there was any way of having the AI almost help us human beings, farmers and non farmers who, you know, love animals like the
00:22:29:01 - 00:22:37:12
Nicola Clayton
Three of us be able to attend to cues that perhaps we're not naturally so good at and they are so good at.
00:22:37:14 - 00:22:49:18
Tomas Norton
Yeah. So, Nick, you mean to offer the pigs some different types of enrichments based on what they're actually doing it at a certain moment. That’s what you mean?
00:22:49:23 - 00:23:15:03
Nicola Clayton
Well, that could be one way of doing it. The other would be just finding out if there's something that we're missing about their communication system because we're not nearly as good at smell as them might it be that using AI devices alert us to things that I was going to say. We can't say, but I mean, we can't smell as well as they can, but we can't perceive.
00:23:15:03 - 00:23:34:01
Nicola Clayton
So could we used as a tool to help us understand them better because there may be parts of what they're trying to communicate to other pigs and to us that we can't detect very well because of limits in our sensory and cognitive capacities.
00:23:34:03 - 00:24:20:11
Tomas Norton
Indeed, I think it's a very good point that the thing is, all of this leads against what is available in terms of sensing technology. We need to work more with the people developing novel sensor systems and give some kind of leads on what could be potential. And of course, this often takes a long time and it takes a long time for sensors to be developed because there is a lot of steps in developing robust hardware and that what that has meant is that there is, in terms of what we have available to us, what we could apply on farms and in farming like in violence, are typically camera or typically microphones, accelerometers.
00:24:20:13 - 00:24:37:05
Tomas Norton
But the types of yeah, there's I think there's a plethora of other potential signals that we should character and indeed we need to work out with with the technology developers to do this. There is a lot of unexplored territory.
00:24:37:05 - 00:24:59:23
Abigail Acton
I think it's interesting that you mentioned that, Nicki, because I was just thinking something that Thomas told me earlier about the benefit of AI in this way is that it's noninvasive. And actually, Thomas, if it was possible to develop some sort of sensor that could pick up a chemical signature, for example, you would be able to read off stress may be, I mean, they must be communicating all sorts of things via their senses of smell.
00:24:59:24 - 00:25:24:13
Abigail Acton
Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, that would be really interesting. Very good point, Nikki. That's fascinating. Well, and that brings me to you, Nikki, correctly. Thank you, Thomas. Turning to Nikki now, CAUSCOG your project considered tool use as a way to gain a better understanding of causal cognition in corvids and humans. Nikki Why Corvids and children? It's interesting that you were considering such completely different species in tandem.
00:25:24:15 - 00:26:01:11
Nicola Clayton
Well, when it comes to cognitive abilities, when it comes to thinking skills, the corvids that’s the members of the Crow family that includes the Jays, Ravens, Rooks and Magpies that extremely intelligent. And what's interesting about them is a bit like the octopus that Jonathan was mentioning at the beginning of our conversation today. They have very different brains from mammals, so bird brains are nucleated and mammalian brains are layered.
00:26:01:13 - 00:26:34:18
Nicola Clayton
Now let me give you an example to make that clearer. Imaging a cake. A bird brain is like a fruitcake. It's full of little bits and pieces, all arranged higgledy piggledy and mammalian brain is like an Austrian chocolate cake. It's got six layers of stuff. So it immediately raises interesting questions about how very clever animals, for example, corvids and human beings might be able to problem solve.
00:26:34:20 - 00:27:05:20
Nicola Clayton
And the interesting thing is not whether they're the same or whether they're different, but the complexity, the pattern of similarities and differences, why children rather than adult human beings because of the problem of words. If you look in children and in animals such as crabs or cephalopods or pigs, you transcend the problem of what we do about this thing that someone can talk and use when we can.
00:27:05:20 - 00:27:07:06
Nicola Clayton
Right. Another stop.
00:27:07:08 - 00:27:27:18
Abigail Acton
Right? Absolutely. So So, yes, there's that commonality. And then at the same time, a huge disparity that then that's the matrix or the. Yeah, the interface between the two. That's interesting. And how did you assess cognitive ability and how did it differ between the Jays? I believe you were using JS for your experiments and the children involved. What was the experiment and how did you interpret it?
00:27:27:20 - 00:27:57:01
Nicola Clayton
Well, you know, there's many ways of looking at problem solving, and I just wanted to pick a simple one because that way you can manipulate the various different variables or factors involved and in that way try and get a better understanding of what they can and cannot do. So the task we used was based on an Aesop's Fables, the crow in the picture, and in the original fable.
00:27:57:03 - 00:28:30:11
Nicola Clayton
There's a thirsty crow and he encounters a jug or picture of water and it plops stones into the jug to raise the water level so it can drink. Now, I wouldn't dream of making my corvids thirsty. That would be an unpleasant thing to do. But you can tempt them in another way, a very simple way. All members of the Corbett family that I have had the pleasure to work with, loved worms particularly wax worms, strictly speaking, wax moths.
00:28:30:13 - 00:28:59:23
Nicola Clayton
I am a biologist by training and they love these, they are the Belgian truffles of the corvids world. So you simply block the worms floats on the top of the water, but the water level is too low for the bird to be able to get the worm, And then you give it some objects that can plop into the tube and ask whether it understands that you need to plop items that sink into a tube containing water.
00:29:00:00 - 00:29:27:19
Nicola Clayton
And actually, if the tube contains air or solid like sounds, it's pointless. And the Jays rapidly do this and they pump ones at sinking rather than ones that float. And the interesting thing was we also tested children and I was thinking children be really good at this because most children have had baths with sponges, floating bath soap that sinks.
00:29:27:21 - 00:29:58:24
Nicola Clayton
But the children didn't spontaneously solve the problem until they were eight years old. In a series of experiments funded by Coast Coke, we got to the bottom of the problem. It turns out that children don't rely on simple trial and error learning to know what to do next. It's only when they develop an understanding of functionality that they spontaneously pop the heavy ones into the water to raise the level.
00:29:59:01 - 00:30:18:07
Abigail Acton
Okay, that's fascinating. And that's despite the motivations. So clearly, no matter what the motive, obviously it wasn't like wax worms for the kids, whatever the motivation was, it's however desirable, the motivation, they couldn't make that leap until the age of eight. And it wasn't a question of concentration because they weren't very interested in what you were offering.
00:30:18:09 - 00:30:42:16
Nicola Clayton
You raise a lovely point. The motivation for the children was a little sticker that we had to have something that floats, otherwise the whole thing doesn't work. And the sticker was a tiny little sticker that they could then exchange for a big sticker that said Clayton's comparative cognition lab at the top and the bottom. It said, I'm as clever as a crow.
00:30:42:18 - 00:30:53:22
Nicola Clayton
Now, you might wonder at this point, why didn't we use stickers for the jays. The problem with using stickers for the jays is they fly off and catch them and then I can't get them back.
00:30:54:00 - 00:31:14:15
Abigail Acton
That's wonderful. That's excellent. Because the stickers themselves become a prize, but they escape with absolutely brilliant animals. Absolutely wonderful. Thank you. I'm thinking about cognition here. I'm thinking about sentience, and I'm wondering whether there was any work that you've done on delayed gratification and impulse control, because that's got to overlap with these these concepts.
00:31:14:17 - 00:31:45:12
Nicola Clayton
that's a lovely example. Yes, we have. We've done self-control both with the jays and with cuttlefish. The central pulse, the cousins of the octopus, Jonathan was talking about. So there's something called the marshmallow test, and it's been done a lot with children. It's got various of the names on the Smarties test, but basically the principle is this you can have one yummy item right now, or if you wait a little while, you can have several yummy items.
00:31:45:18 - 00:32:12:01
Nicola Clayton
But in order to get several yummy items, you can't type one yummy item right now. So that might be one versus five one versus three. You have to not ,you have to resist. You have to turn around before with whatever it is that helps you resist the temptation in order to get them later. And both the cuttlefish and the jays are actually surprisingly good at those tasks.
00:32:12:03 - 00:32:30:20
Nicola Clayton
We were especially surprise at the cuttlefish. You see with the jays they hide food for living, so I thought they'd be quite good at it. Because if you think about what you have to do when you catch fried food for a living is you have to ignore what you want right now and put your position what you will want later.
00:32:30:22 - 00:32:52:06
Nicola Clayton
So the fact that the jays were brilliant at this didn't really surprised me. I thought it's probably related to the fact They're so good at hiding food, but the cuttlefish don't hide food. They might hide themselves. It's called deceptive dynamic camouflage. Well, they don't normally hide food, but they have no problem doing this with either.
00:32:52:08 - 00:33:22:06
Abigail Acton
that's fantastic. That's fascinating. Is that so? Yes, that's what I sort of kicked off this whole program with the notion of being surprised. Yes. We never. Yeah, we never really have a true handle on it. Okay, great. Thank you. I just want to ask you something else as well. We've been talking about causal cognition and the way it reveals about how an animal perceives the world, but the ability to recognize something or be surprised by something, presumably their indicators as well, with regards to how an animal perceives the world around it.
00:33:22:08 - 00:33:34:20
Abigail Acton
So to trigger those responses in Corvids, I believe that you're also interested in how humans and jays interpret or react to magic tricks. What hypothesis were you testing there and how so?
00:33:34:20 - 00:34:03:04
Nicola Clayton
The idea behind Magic Insects is that what a magician does to his or her audience is to violate an expectation. So in terms of causal understanding, the idea is that you have some understanding of it's in this hand, in left hand, and then all of a sudden the magicians done something unbeknownst to you, which leads to a violation of the expectation.
00:34:03:06 - 00:34:31:23
Nicola Clayton
In other words, you're surprised because it's not what you thought it would be. And we thought that this would be a very interesting technique to look at in animals as well as people, because a lot of the effects don't rely on words. You know, when a magician is doing a performing magic to his human audience or her audience, they may well use words to create a story around the effect.
00:34:32:03 - 00:35:01:14
Nicola Clayton
But the Surprise is what you see and not what you haven't see. So we thought we could have a go at seeing if we could look at how Chase respond to magic effects and found that jay is surprised by some magic effects and not others. Essentially, if the magician is using the hands to block your view, it'll be in something called a fast pass, for example, or a hand in a way behaves like a wing.
00:35:01:14 - 00:35:40:19
Nicola Clayton
It just obscures your view, the jays have the same expectations as we do. The magician has violated that expectation, and the jays are surprised their chest goes up. They start looking really avidly, but it's very clear that it's surprise if you use other effects with hands that require you to use your fingers and thumbs in the way we do because we have opposable thumbs so we can pinch, for example, the jay is not surprised because they don't have an expectation about how fingers and thumbs work.
00:35:40:21 - 00:36:09:21
Nicola Clayton
We therefore naturally being zoologists, psychologists looked at monkeys because you have various different kinds of monkeys that have different fingers and thumbs. Marmosets have a thumb that works like a finger. So in a way they have five fingers, rather than four fingers and a thumb. They behave like jays. Whereas capuchin Monkeys that have opposable thumbs behaved like human beings.
00:36:09:23 - 00:36:16:10
Nicola Clayton
So if you yourself have an opposable thumbs, you're surprised by it. If you don't, you're not.
00:36:16:12 - 00:36:26:11
Abigail Acton
So in a way, what we can come away with, I guess me if I'm wrong, but I guess it's when you recognize something as abnormal, if you yourself can do it and if you can't do it, you don't see that it's abnormal if it doesn't happen.
00:36:26:13 - 00:36:40:08
Nicola Clayton
Exactly. I mean, you could think of it as a form of embodied cognition that denote the way your body works, informs the assumptions you make about social cognition, about how things work.
00:36:40:14 - 00:36:47:15
Abigail Acton
I love this, obviously. I think this is absolutely fascinating. It's a lot of fun and it's very, very interesting. But tell me, Niki, why does it matter?
00:36:47:17 - 00:37:20:08
Nicola Clayton
Well, it matters because of the assumptions we make about how we see the world. You know, we tend to think that we're all consuming an extremely intelligent creatures and we don't make mistakes. I hate to get political on you, but I think there is a switch of events that's happened over the past couple of years. It's made us realize that there are all kinds of cognitive constraints, blind spots in our ability to see roadblocks, in our ability to think.
00:37:20:10 - 00:37:58:06
Nicola Clayton
What's interesting is why and how these have evolved and to what extent do we share some of these abilities with other animals and why we see biological basis to this? Or is it entirely cultural? We wouldn't be talking about this if we switch. It was entirely cultural and there was no biological basis. But these comparisons between all these different species and these different approaches to cognition, wealth and 70, it's a crucial, you know, out of respect for the other animals with whom we share the planet.
00:37:58:12 - 00:38:05:02
Abigail Acton
Thank you. Excellent. Does anyone have any questions to pose Nicky or any observations to make on her work? Yes Jonathan.
00:38:05:04 - 00:38:17:16
Jonathan Birch
So Nicky, how do you think the birds were solving the water level task? Was was it spontaneous insights or was it trial and error over many attempts?
00:38:17:18 - 00:38:46:13
Nicola Clayton
Well, it certainly wasn't trial and error over many attempts because they learned pretty quickly whether it's just that eureka moment or whether they're very sensitive to the idea that when you plup a heavy stone into water, the water level goes up and the wind comes closer is another matter. And in fact, we did a series of experiments to try to tease these things apart.
00:38:46:15 - 00:39:01:08
Nicola Clayton
And the short answer to the question is it looks like it's a mixture of the two. There are some things which appear to spontaneously get, but there certainly is a level of learning involved, rapid learning.
00:39:01:10 - 00:39:03:13
Abigail Acton
Nikki Did they learn from each other?
00:39:03:15 - 00:39:06:18
Nicola Clayton
We didn't give them that opportunity, so I don't know.
00:39:06:22 - 00:39:15:08
Abigail Acton
That would have been interesting whether they could acquire, you know, knowledge if such a word works from each other, whether they teach each other observationally.
00:39:15:10 - 00:39:32:11
Nicola Clayton
Certainly there's been some beautiful work done at the University of Birmingham by Sarah Beck with children, and the children are very good at learning Individually But if they can watch another learn, they solve it really quickly. It definitely applies to children.
00:39:32:14 - 00:39:38:01
Abigail Acton
Yeah. Be interesting to see if there were some parallels. Any other observations or comments? Yes. Thomas, please.
00:39:38:06 - 00:40:11:22
Tomas Norton
I think it's very interesting about these it so it seems so intelligent to corvids, but I'm wondering if you have any experience or opinions on poultry I am just gotten interested in animal production. I'm wondering because over many years now we have bred our poultry in a certain direction to, improve our efficiency of production. And now we've been very fast growing birds, but at the expense of other welfare issues.
00:40:12:03 - 00:40:25:05
Tomas Norton
For instance, they are not so strong on their legs anymore, but as it affected their own intelligence, I wonder, have you own your opinions on the effect of breeding on an animal's intelligence?
00:40:25:07 - 00:40:48:22
Nicola Clayton
gosh, what an interesting question. I don't know. I know there's been quite a lot of work done on cognition, in chicks, in chickens, and particularly the work of George, Felodigara for example. But I've no idea about effects of breeding but you would imagine that it would have some kind of.
00:40:48:24 - 00:40:49:05
Nicola Clayton
An.
00:40:49:11 - 00:41:16:13
Nicola Clayton
Implication in I mean, I'm a dancer as well as a scientist, so I'm certainly very well aware of how important for me it is to know how to move my arms and how to move my legs. And, you know, you can't you can't learn how to do OJT or run. There's just fun watching someone else. You you have to do it and then either have someone correct you or watch yourself.
00:41:16:15 - 00:41:38:04
Nicola Clayton
And you get people that there are people that very good observational learning. So they're very good at seeing how they move in a mirror and correcting themselves. I'm rubbish, I'm a kinesthetic learner. So for me you have to put me in position and let me feel it and want to felt it. I know how to do it. So, you know, if you raise me as one of those chicken.
00:41:38:05 - 00:41:41:01
Nicola Clayton
So then I have really wobbly rubbish dance.
00:41:41:05 - 00:42:10:02
Tomas Norton
Yeah that’s a very good point because you know, there's a movement nowadays of growing chickens that are slow growing and in effect we go back to the genetics, 30 years ago. But it's there's a remarkable difference when you go to a poultry house with where these are, where these slow growing birds are and they are so engaging with the spectrum, then they're engaging with each other.
00:42:10:02 - 00:42:33:12
Tomas Norton
You see that they're spar, they're fighting with each other, they're running and jumping. They're exploring the enrichment. There's a total opposite scenario when you go into the house with fast growing birds, it's like, okay, they have decided not to do any of this anymore because it's too much effort and forget about it. And probably they won't explore. Or maybe they they have.
00:42:33:18 - 00:42:42:06
Tomas Norton
Yeah, their their interest has dwindled as a result of this focus on just laying down tissue. Yeah.
00:42:42:08 - 00:42:45:04
Abigail Acton
That's fascinating. Thomas. Jonathan, what you want to add?
00:42:45:09 - 00:43:16:05
Jonathan Birch
Well, I'm reflecting now on this story from Thomas. I mean, that's what good welfare looks like, isn't it? The first case you describing when you go in and you see the animals expressing their cognitive abilities? That's what good welfare looks like. And the other the other scenario is, and I would really love to see more work generally on the cognition of chickens because they don't have the reputation Corvids have Corvids have this reputation for being so incredibly clever.
00:43:16:07 - 00:43:43:06
Jonathan Birch
But it's not that people have systematically studied the intelligence of chickens and found good reasons for thinking they're less intelligent than corvids. It's rather the whole topic has been neglected. So I'd love to see people doing experiments like Nikki's on the memory abilities and planning abilities, social cognition, and seeing whether chickens can do them as well. And I think there's a decent chance chickens would have a lot of these same abilities.
00:43:43:08 - 00:43:53:11
Nicola Clayton
I think it's really interesting, isn't it? And there's an important point to be made here. that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Right.
00:43:53:13 - 00:44:18:22
Abigail Acton
That's a very good point. And neither is this an excuse for cutting corners. Well, I'm going to wind the star now. And I want to thank you sincerely for a fascinating episode. I'm very, very grateful to all of you for having found the time. I know you're all very busy people. This program leaves us with a lot to consider about how we interact with the creatures around us and whether we're taking certain things for granted or perhaps preferring just not to look at all.
00:44:18:24 - 00:44:21:23
Abigail Acton
So thank you very much indeed for that.
00:44:22:00 - 00:44:24:08
ALL
Thank you very much Abigail.
00:44:27:15 - 00:44:29:17
Abigail Acton
My great pleasure. Take care.
00:44:29:19 - 00:44:30:23
Nicola Clayton
Bye bye.
00:44:33:20 - 00:44:58:02
Abigail Acton
are you interested in what other EU funded projects are doing in the area of animal sentience, non linguistic expressions of intelligence and animal welfare? The Cordis website will give you an insight into the results of projects funded by the Horizon 2020 program that are working in this area. The website has articles and interviews that explore the results of research being conducted in a very broad range of domains and subjects from platypuses to Plato.
00:44:58:02 - 00:45:16:03
Abigail Acton
There's something there for you. Maybe you're involved in a project or would like to apply for funding. Take a look at what others are doing in your domain. So come and check out the research that's revealing what makes our world tick. We're always happy to hear from you. Drop us a line Editorial at cordis dot Europa dot EU until next time.
00:00:10:05 - 00:00:16:03
Abigail Acton
This is CORDIScovery.
00:00:16:05 - 00:00:38:10
Abigail Acton
Hello. Welcome to this episode of CORDIScovery With me, Abigail Acton. Today we're considering animal welfare and sentience research conducted back in 1995 established that a pigeon can tell a Picasso from a Monet. And by 2017, we knew that sheep can recognize faces from photographs. Surprised? So what else don't we know about the way in which animals experience the world around them?
00:00:38:13 - 00:00:59:05
Abigail Acton
Is there ignorance leading us to act in ways we wouldn't if we did know more? The animals that feed us, clothe us, entertain us? What is the nature of their intelligence and how sentient are they? Today we're asking Do we focus too much on spoken language and manual dexterity as markers of intelligence? If something doesn't have opposable thumbs and can't speak, does it mean that it isn't sentient?
00:00:59:11 - 00:01:21:12
Abigail Acton
What does sentience mean? And does it exist where we might not expect to find it? If we're more aware of the levels of awareness in the animals around us? What are we doing about our relationship with them? What developments are coming down the line to support animal welfare on farms, for example? Good job. We have three guests from EU supported Horizon 2020 projects to walk us through the maze.
00:01:21:14 - 00:01:39:16
Abigail Acton
Jonathan Birch is an associate professor at the London School of Economics Center for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science. In 2021, the review he led into the sentence of invertebrate animals resulted into the amendment of the UK government's animal welfare bill to include octopuses, crabs and lobsters. Welcome, Jonathan.
00:01:39:18 - 00:01:40:09
Jonathan Birch
Hello.
00:01:40:11 - 00:02:09:05
Abigail Acton
Associate Professor at the University of Leuven's Animal and Human Health Engineering Unit, Thomas Naughton leads research on sustainable precision livestock farming, covering animal health, welfare and productivity. Hi Thomas. Nicola Clayton is a Fellow of the Royal Society and Professor of Comparative Cognition in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge. She's particularly interested in the processes of thinking with and without words, comparing the cognitive capacities of corvids, self-reports and children.
00:02:09:06 - 00:02:33:12
Abigail Acton
Welcome, Nicky. Hello, Jonathan. I'm going to start with you. You were involved with the ASENT Project, which aimed to develop a richer picture of the links between sentience, welfare and the ethical status of Animals. The project set out to give an account the basic functional capacities involved in sentience. Can you explain what sentience means and what capacities or in what contexts could be considered as indicating sentience?
00:02:33:14 - 00:03:02:08
Jonathan Birch
Well, sentience is just a fancy way of talking about feeling. It's about the subjective feelings of animals experiences with a positive or negative quality. We can think of many examples of feelings from our own lives like pain, pleasure, anxiety, joy, contentment, boredom, frustration. And from thinking about those particular feelings, we can abstract this broader idea of the capacity to have feelings.
00:03:02:14 - 00:03:22:03
Jonathan Birch
Sentience may well be that lots of other animals don't have the same feelings. We have, but nonetheless, they may well be having subjective feelings and we need methods for studying that scientifically. On my foundations of animal sentience project is about trying to develop better methods for doing that.
00:03:22:05 - 00:03:36:04
Abigail Acton
Can I ask you then how can we measure it? So, for example, we know our dogs rejoice in a friend, stoic and a purring cat we assume as a contented cat. Are these examples of subjective awareness and how do we establish the capacity of subjective awareness in animals?
00:03:36:06 - 00:03:57:12
Jonathan Birch
I think we have to start by recognizing that this is a very, very difficult problem. So philosophers sometimes call the problem of other minds, and I think we to some extent need to get beyond the idea that it's just obvious what an animal is feeling. When we're interacting with our own pets. We often think it's obvious. We often think we know what a dog or a cat is feeling.
00:03:57:14 - 00:04:18:10
Jonathan Birch
But in fact, I think this is something we can't just observe and that we have to settle carefully with scientific evidence. My project has been particularly interested in invertebrates animals like octopuses, where people don't have that same reaction. So unlike with dogs and cats, they don't just look at an octopus and think, of course I know what it's feeling.
00:04:18:12 - 00:04:34:21
Jonathan Birch
In fact, the inscrutability is very, very clear when it comes to octopuses, and I think that gets us thinking in the right way because we immediately start thinking we need scientific evidence to actually help us make some progress on these questions and can't always rely on what we intuitively think.
00:04:34:23 - 00:04:44:11
Abigail Acton
When we talk about scientific progress. And I mean, what sort of experiments are conducted to quantify or assess sentience? How can we actually get that data?
00:04:44:13 - 00:05:05:07
Jonathan Birch
It's again, very difficult and there's no single line of evidence that is a smoking gun and that immediately tells you that an animal is sentience and that tells you what it's feeling. What we've got to do is develop multiple different lines of evidence. That is partly about looking at the brain and brain mechanisms, partly about looking at behavior and cognitive abilities.
00:05:05:13 - 00:05:36:01
Jonathan Birch
And when it comes to invertebrates, behavior and cognitive abilities have this special significance because their brains are completely differently organized from our own. So researchers around the world have been doing really interesting work lately, exploring sentience in octopuses and crabs and lobsters, using experimental designs that were previously used in mammals. Well, my own project has a strand that is about trying to develop new experimental setups for investigating sentience or the possibility of it in bees.
00:05:36:03 - 00:05:41:17
Abigail Acton
And tell us more about that. I mean, what how is that set up? What sort of experiments are you doing for that or your researches?
00:05:41:19 - 00:06:10:15
Jonathan Birch
So I can give one example of an experiment that one of my post-docs, Andrew Crump, worked on, and it was recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, PNAS. It's an experiment that draws inspiration from a kind of experiment that is used to assess pain in rats, where the thought is that one of the functions of experiences like pleasure and pain is to provide a common currency for decision making.
00:06:10:17 - 00:06:31:02
Jonathan Birch
They help you weigh up how bad something is. So, for example, if you're out running and you get a tiny little niggling pain in the tip of your toe, you might just think, I can run through that. That's really tiny. But if it's a very severe pain of a broken leg or something like that, you immediately realize you can't run through it and you have to stop and nurse the injury.
00:06:31:04 - 00:06:54:06
Jonathan Birch
So pleasure and pain help us make flexible decisions. And in rats, this was explored with an experiment where the rats had to go through a cold tunnel to access a sweet reward at the end. And the question was, will they trade off the sweetness of the reward they can access against the temperature they have to withstand to get it?
00:06:54:08 - 00:07:17:03
Jonathan Birch
And the fact that they do this trade off tells you something about how bad the cold is from their point of view. This is how good the the sweetness is of the reward at the end. And so this research experiment was doing a very similar thing. But with bees, where again, we vary the sweetness of the sugar solution that the bees can access at different platforms.
00:07:17:05 - 00:07:48:00
Jonathan Birch
And we also vary the temperature of those feeding platforms that the bee has to stand on. So we're looking for temperature ranges that a mildly aversive to the bee. We're not trying to seriously enter the bee, but temperatures of around 40 degrees that are experienced as aversive. And then the question is, will the bee trade off the sweetness of the reward it can access against the discomfort of having to withstand a certain temperature to get it, and the pattern of results for the bees looks broadly similar to the pattern for rats.
00:07:48:00 - 00:08:13:23
Jonathan Birch
So they do indeed make this tradeoff. So they're making these flexible decisions in a common currency. And for us, that's one line of evidence. It's not conclusive evidence that they're feeling discomfort when they stand on those heat pads, but it is suggestive of centralized integrative processing of that information. And we think that raises the probability of some experiencing feelings when they're making these decisions.
00:08:14:04 - 00:08:34:24
Abigail Acton
And it's very interesting that, as you say, they register these feelings or at least that the reactions mimic from bee to rat not the result, but the reaction is the same. The motivation is the same as well. That's interesting. No. Okay, excellent. What do you hope the impact of of this research could have in the future, and how are your findings feeding into policymaking now?
00:08:35:00 - 00:09:09:14
Jonathan Birch
We've already been involved in a in a substantial review of the evidence that is relevant to sentience in octopuses, crabs and lobsters that led to us advising the UK government to recognize the sentiments of these animals in law and take potential welfare impacts on them into account in future policymaking. So it was heartening for me at least, to see policymakers in the UK taking that issue seriously at all, because I think the welfare of animals is often neglected and the welfare of invertebrates is often even more neglected.
00:09:09:16 - 00:09:38:14
Jonathan Birch
And so it's great to just see people discussing this issue. We wanted our report to start a wider conversation about this topic, and we think that conversation should be broad enough to include insects as well. We think there's growing interest in insect farming, a lot of talk of insect farming and hope that this might be part of the answer of meeting the world's protein needs sustainably, but a total lack of welfare guidelines, regulations.
00:09:38:16 - 00:09:53:01
Jonathan Birch
No one knows what a humane slaughter is for an insect, for example, or what high welfare farming looks like. So we want to start a discussion of that issue as well and just broaden people's horizons. I think when it comes to talking and thinking about animal welfare, it's.
00:09:53:01 - 00:10:25:00
Abigail Acton
True that if it's an animal that we're not used to being around, and if it's an animal that really doesn't look anything like us, we tend to classify it as being something that probably doesn't have much in the way of feelings or isn't particularly sentient. So yeah, that's an interesting one. I like the argument or the concept that you put forward about the fact that the octopuses don't look like our dogs but says an unfamiliar territory and causes us to rethink what our interpretation actually is and that maybe we should come to looking at our dogs and cats with a clean slate as well and rethinking that too.
00:10:25:01 - 00:10:31:16
Abigail Acton
Yeah, very interesting. Thank you very much, Jonathan. Does anyone have any questions or observations to make to to Jonathan? Yeah.
00:10:32:19 - 00:10:56:22
Nicola Clayton
I was just going to say that I think one of the critical arguments here in this area of science and in my own is this whole idea of converging evidence to bear on a problem that no single one experiment is going to prove a point. But actually, if all roads lead to Rome, then you've got to Rome.
00:10:56:24 - 00:11:04:03
Nicola Clayton
And I think that's exactly the approach that you're taking, Jonathan. And a lot of the work that you're doing.
00:11:04:05 - 00:11:14:23
Abigail Acton
Like a jigsaw puzzle really, I suppose you're putting in pieces and overall, bit by bit, after the passage of a bit of time, a larger picture becomes apparent, I guess, yes, Tomas.
00:11:15:00 - 00:11:40:10
Tomas Norton
I'd like to ask a question because I think particularly from the work we do, we learn more and more about the animal and their response and how they react in different situations. We get a stronger understanding of the personality, but how far should we go with that? Because particularly when you talk about farm animals, we see more and more that they are quite intelligent.
00:11:40:12 - 00:11:56:08
Tomas Norton
But do we should we, Jonathan, go into that territory where we try and demonstrate the intelligence of these animals? Is it a case that it harms the animal production? Yeah. What is your perception of that?
00:11:56:10 - 00:12:19:00
Jonathan Birch
I think we shouldn't be afraid of knowledge in this area. I think we have to know we have to try and understand the welfare needs of animals as best we can. We have to try not to overestimate their sentience and intelligence, but we have to try not to underestimate it either. And we have to be thinking about how we can give them suitably enriched environments that are properly enriched for their actual cognitive abilities.
00:12:19:02 - 00:12:41:10
Jonathan Birch
I think with octopuses, for example, it's incredibly hard to imagine how they could really be properly farmed with high welfare. And that's a concern because some companies are trying to set up octopus farming operations. I think in general, with all farm animals, we have to think about how we can give them good lives, how we can give them environments in which they can express their full range of cognitive abilities.
00:12:41:13 - 00:13:05:16
Abigail Acton
Excellent. Thank you very, very much. Thomas, I'm going to turn to you actually, AutoPlayPig or to give your project, its full title “Automatic Detection of Play Behavior in Young Pigs as a measure of positive affective states” was set up to meet the need for a more effective way to monitor farm animal welfare. So your project brought together advances in artificial intelligence with an interest in how playfulness in pigs indicates well-being.
00:13:05:18 - 00:13:09:06
Abigail Acton
What caused you to think of applying AI deep learning to pick farming?
00:13:09:20 - 00:13:28:19
Tomas Norton
Well, thanks for the question. I've got to be honest. I've been reared in the agricultural family, come from an agricultural community, so for me, this is a kind of an interesting topic for a long time. I'm also an engineer and I did my Ph.D. in a field called Computational Fluid Dynamics, but I applied it to car housing.
00:13:28:19 - 00:13:52:01
Tomas Norton
So that's you can you can see already the link added. I tried to set it for a long time now and actually, to be honest, I think that farmers do a really good job when it comes in general to finding the animals. They are custodians of the land and the countryside, but also animal welfare and a lot of them have a lot of respect for the animals they produce.
00:13:52:03 - 00:14:19:07
Tomas Norton
And therefore for me it's important to help them to quantify this actually, how well are they are farming? And I'm talking about the good farmers, the people who respect their animals, and that is more and more challenging for them. Why? Because we can see that even though the number of farms are decreasing on average throughout Europe, the pig farmers, for instance, have halved in the last 20 years.
00:14:19:09 - 00:14:52:16
Tomas Norton
The number of animals have doubled. So it is very difficult for them to follow individual animals. And what we would like to do is bring them the tools to enable them to quantify health and welfare. Welfare is an important aspect that we're interested in, and that's what this project is about. It's not about quantifying the negative aspects of welfare, but indeed looking at the positive aspects to playing, for instance, between young pigs individual playing and also the interaction with enrichment of birds.
00:14:52:16 - 00:15:01:09
Tomas Norton
This is a very interesting thing that can indeed help us understand these animals and balance how welfare can be balanced on the farm.
00:15:01:11 - 00:15:14:05
Abigail Acton
Okay. Yeah. Super. And and I guess you were looking at pigs, the young pigs playfulness as a metric to judge whether they're stress free and healthy. That was, I suppose, the benefit of looking at that particular aspect of behavior.
00:15:14:07 - 00:15:48:21
Tomas Norton
Yeah. And I think when you look at the research, like there is some nice research coming out from Canada that shows that yeah, if you enhance the environment and you promote playing activities, there can be a lot of production benefits later on as well. For instance, the robustness of the animal, the immunity can be strengthened and because they become more flexible in our thinking and you can stress them a little bit more later on, or at least are more robust because you offer this an environment where they can interact and play with each other.
00:15:48:21 - 00:16:01:03
Tomas Norton
And actually we will have our aim is to try and enable the welfare of scientists to do a better job in the future, to better design the environment and enrichment conditions.
00:16:01:05 - 00:16:11:08
Abigail Acton
Okay. So that's the goal and that's what you were looking at. Can you tell me a little bit more about the technology behind it? So what tools did you actually use and what information did they capture?
00:16:11:10 - 00:16:40:17
Tomas Norton
Okay, so our interest is the use of computer vision tools. And there we look to visual response of behavioral responses of the animal. And in particular, for this case, we're looking to different types of playing locomotor play, social play, for instance. And we try to capture this information on an individual level, and that's that's really what at the moment, that's what artificial intelligence can enable us to do.
00:16:40:19 - 00:17:04:24
Tomas Norton
We can look to these behaviors that could easily be confused by a person with running, with walking. But now with these tools, we can actually classify them correctly as being events. And then because with camera you can remotely capture this data 24/7 in a perfect world. But of course we have to develop the research and move towards there.
00:17:05:04 - 00:17:10:17
Tomas Norton
It won't be overnight, but there's a lot of really interesting advantages that this technology can bring.
00:17:10:19 - 00:17:26:01
Abigail Acton
I guess it also strips out any notion of subjectivity as well, of course, because I suppose if you have humans monitoring and trying to assess whether their pigs are content and so on, some person's notion of what they're seeing might be different from someone else's or someone might just feel tired and miss something.
00:17:26:02 - 00:17:53:24
Tomas Norton
Indeed. And that's, you know, also that's the starting point of developing these algorithms because you really need good expertise in order to develop a good technique. And the kind of behavior science that goes into that needs to be very strong. For instance, in this project, Mona Larsen, who is my postdoc at the time, she's now associate professor in Orissa University, it took her a considerable amount of time to actually agree.
00:17:54:02 - 00:18:16:16
Tomas Norton
What is locomotor playing? What are these different play about? Because indeed we need consistency and then when you have this level of consistency, you can develop the algorithms, but it just tells you your starting point needs to be very good at the beginning. And of course after you've come past that point, you can reapply it. That's the idea that we can reapply many different paths.
00:18:16:20 - 00:18:26:05
Abigail Acton
Picture Yeah, that becomes replicable. Yeah. So how do you see the role of artificial intelligence and deep learning evolving in the analysis of animal welfare? Could it go beyond farms?
00:18:26:10 - 00:18:47:04
Tomas Norton
You know, I think we have a lot of things to do in the livestock production space. Actually, I think we should begin to look at the farming of animals as a kind of collaboration between the animals and the farm, not just the farmer actions. And the animals are affected by these actions, but more like what are the needs of the animals?
00:18:47:06 - 00:19:11:16
Tomas Norton
How do we respond to these needs as quickly as possible? There are some interest in examples coming in the literature. For instance, in Germany, they've done some work on car feeding of cells where they call in order to reduce the aggression between cells. They called the cells with a particular cell acute that's linked with an individual cell to feed at the feeder.
00:19:11:18 - 00:19:52:03
Tomas Norton
And then they reduced the incidence of this expression between individual cells by beef. And I think this is a step towards this collaborative way of working with animals. And artificial intelligence can really help because we can get more information about these animals build up kind of avatar of what what, how we expect animals to behave in certain situations and use their intelligence, just like Jonathan said, to try and think, would you use this tool to help them to improve their welfare, their conditions, and also have a benefit for the farmer that's a win win.
00:19:52:05 - 00:19:58:12
Abigail Acton
There we go. Perfect. Thank you very much, Thomas. Does anyone have any questions or observations to make on Thomas's work? Yeah. Jonathan.
00:19:58:14 - 00:20:37:19
Jonathan Birch
Yes, thanks. I wanted to ask what you see is the role for human judgment in all this, because what you're describing reminds me a bit of the use of AI in medical imaging where you no longer need a human reader to look at screening images from cancer screening, because I can classify these images just as well. But when you ask patients, do they want that, a very strong message from these patients seems to be they still want some human involvement, they still want their image to pass the eyes of a human reader at some point because it's so important and there's more trust in the judgment of a human.
00:20:37:19 - 00:20:46:00
Jonathan Birch
I wonder if you think some of those points might carry over to the animal welfare case and whether there's still a really crucial role for human expertise in this area as well?
00:20:46:05 - 00:21:07:06
Tomas Norton
I completely agree. I don't ever believe that we should take the expertise out of the hands of farmers. You should always have some level of expertise and knowledge because in the end he's running the farm and he has a lot of many different things to deal with. But the benefit of this technology is not to run things automatically.
00:21:07:11 - 00:21:34:03
Tomas Norton
per se but to give the farmer more information that he can make more informed on better informed decisions because he can be amongst these animals. 24 /7 It's just not possible. So it's really about giving that extra bit of information, giving support in terms of what decisions could be made in this kind of scenario and help him make the right decision.
00:21:34:05 - 00:21:47:21
Tomas Norton
So I believe that there will always be the need of a caretaker of the farmer to ensure the welfare of the animal and the animal system is too complex to just leave it in the hands of computing.
00:21:47:23 - 00:21:49:22
Abigail Acton
Nicky, you had something you wanted to say.
00:21:49:24 - 00:21:51:00
Nicola Clayton
Yeah, I just wanted to.
00:21:51:00 - 00:21:52:02
Nicola Clayton
Question the role of.
00:21:52:02 - 00:22:28:20
Nicola Clayton
All three keys. Obviously, when you were talking about the AI machine, the emphasis, you were saying was visual and you also mentioned acoustic cues. And I was thinking that, you know, for many farm animals, including pigs, olfaction is one of their major sensory worlds, and it's one that we as human beings are not so good at. And I wondered if there was any way of having the AI almost help us human beings, farmers and non farmers who, you know, love animals like the
00:22:29:01 - 00:22:37:12
Nicola Clayton
Three of us be able to attend to cues that perhaps we're not naturally so good at and they are so good at.
00:22:37:14 - 00:22:49:18
Tomas Norton
Yeah. So, Nick, you mean to offer the pigs some different types of enrichments based on what they're actually doing it at a certain moment. That’s what you mean?
00:22:49:23 - 00:23:15:03
Nicola Clayton
Well, that could be one way of doing it. The other would be just finding out if there's something that we're missing about their communication system because we're not nearly as good at smell as them might it be that using AI devices alert us to things that I was going to say. We can't say, but I mean, we can't smell as well as they can, but we can't perceive.
00:23:15:03 - 00:23:34:01
Nicola Clayton
So could we used as a tool to help us understand them better because there may be parts of what they're trying to communicate to other pigs and to us that we can't detect very well because of limits in our sensory and cognitive capacities.
00:23:34:03 - 00:24:20:11
Tomas Norton
Indeed, I think it's a very good point that the thing is, all of this leads against what is available in terms of sensing technology. We need to work more with the people developing novel sensor systems and give some kind of leads on what could be potential. And of course, this often takes a long time and it takes a long time for sensors to be developed because there is a lot of steps in developing robust hardware and that what that has meant is that there is, in terms of what we have available to us, what we could apply on farms and in farming like in violence, are typically camera or typically microphones, accelerometers.
00:24:20:13 - 00:24:37:05
Tomas Norton
But the types of yeah, there's I think there's a plethora of other potential signals that we should character and indeed we need to work out with with the technology developers to do this. There is a lot of unexplored territory.
00:24:37:05 - 00:24:59:23
Abigail Acton
I think it's interesting that you mentioned that, Nicki, because I was just thinking something that Thomas told me earlier about the benefit of AI in this way is that it's noninvasive. And actually, Thomas, if it was possible to develop some sort of sensor that could pick up a chemical signature, for example, you would be able to read off stress may be, I mean, they must be communicating all sorts of things via their senses of smell.
00:24:59:24 - 00:25:24:13
Abigail Acton
Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, that would be really interesting. Very good point, Nikki. That's fascinating. Well, and that brings me to you, Nikki, correctly. Thank you, Thomas. Turning to Nikki now, CAUSCOG your project considered tool use as a way to gain a better understanding of causal cognition in corvids and humans. Nikki Why Corvids and children? It's interesting that you were considering such completely different species in tandem.
00:25:24:15 - 00:26:01:11
Nicola Clayton
Well, when it comes to cognitive abilities, when it comes to thinking skills, the corvids that’s the members of the Crow family that includes the Jays, Ravens, Rooks and Magpies that extremely intelligent. And what's interesting about them is a bit like the octopus that Jonathan was mentioning at the beginning of our conversation today. They have very different brains from mammals, so bird brains are nucleated and mammalian brains are layered.
00:26:01:13 - 00:26:34:18
Nicola Clayton
Now let me give you an example to make that clearer. Imaging a cake. A bird brain is like a fruitcake. It's full of little bits and pieces, all arranged higgledy piggledy and mammalian brain is like an Austrian chocolate cake. It's got six layers of stuff. So it immediately raises interesting questions about how very clever animals, for example, corvids and human beings might be able to problem solve.
00:26:34:20 - 00:27:05:20
Nicola Clayton
And the interesting thing is not whether they're the same or whether they're different, but the complexity, the pattern of similarities and differences, why children rather than adult human beings because of the problem of words. If you look in children and in animals such as crabs or cephalopods or pigs, you transcend the problem of what we do about this thing that someone can talk and use when we can.
00:27:05:20 - 00:27:07:06
Nicola Clayton
Right. Another stop.
00:27:07:08 - 00:27:27:18
Abigail Acton
Right? Absolutely. So So, yes, there's that commonality. And then at the same time, a huge disparity that then that's the matrix or the. Yeah, the interface between the two. That's interesting. And how did you assess cognitive ability and how did it differ between the Jays? I believe you were using JS for your experiments and the children involved. What was the experiment and how did you interpret it?
00:27:27:20 - 00:27:57:01
Nicola Clayton
Well, you know, there's many ways of looking at problem solving, and I just wanted to pick a simple one because that way you can manipulate the various different variables or factors involved and in that way try and get a better understanding of what they can and cannot do. So the task we used was based on an Aesop's Fables, the crow in the picture, and in the original fable.
00:27:57:03 - 00:28:30:11
Nicola Clayton
There's a thirsty crow and he encounters a jug or picture of water and it plops stones into the jug to raise the water level so it can drink. Now, I wouldn't dream of making my corvids thirsty. That would be an unpleasant thing to do. But you can tempt them in another way, a very simple way. All members of the Corbett family that I have had the pleasure to work with, loved worms particularly wax worms, strictly speaking, wax moths.
00:28:30:13 - 00:28:59:23
Nicola Clayton
I am a biologist by training and they love these, they are the Belgian truffles of the corvids world. So you simply block the worms floats on the top of the water, but the water level is too low for the bird to be able to get the worm, And then you give it some objects that can plop into the tube and ask whether it understands that you need to plop items that sink into a tube containing water.
00:29:00:00 - 00:29:27:19
Nicola Clayton
And actually, if the tube contains air or solid like sounds, it's pointless. And the Jays rapidly do this and they pump ones at sinking rather than ones that float. And the interesting thing was we also tested children and I was thinking children be really good at this because most children have had baths with sponges, floating bath soap that sinks.
00:29:27:21 - 00:29:58:24
Nicola Clayton
But the children didn't spontaneously solve the problem until they were eight years old. In a series of experiments funded by Coast Coke, we got to the bottom of the problem. It turns out that children don't rely on simple trial and error learning to know what to do next. It's only when they develop an understanding of functionality that they spontaneously pop the heavy ones into the water to raise the level.
00:29:59:01 - 00:30:18:07
Abigail Acton
Okay, that's fascinating. And that's despite the motivations. So clearly, no matter what the motive, obviously it wasn't like wax worms for the kids, whatever the motivation was, it's however desirable, the motivation, they couldn't make that leap until the age of eight. And it wasn't a question of concentration because they weren't very interested in what you were offering.
00:30:18:09 - 00:30:42:16
Nicola Clayton
You raise a lovely point. The motivation for the children was a little sticker that we had to have something that floats, otherwise the whole thing doesn't work. And the sticker was a tiny little sticker that they could then exchange for a big sticker that said Clayton's comparative cognition lab at the top and the bottom. It said, I'm as clever as a crow.
00:30:42:18 - 00:30:53:22
Nicola Clayton
Now, you might wonder at this point, why didn't we use stickers for the jays. The problem with using stickers for the jays is they fly off and catch them and then I can't get them back.
00:30:54:00 - 00:31:14:15
Abigail Acton
That's wonderful. That's excellent. Because the stickers themselves become a prize, but they escape with absolutely brilliant animals. Absolutely wonderful. Thank you. I'm thinking about cognition here. I'm thinking about sentience, and I'm wondering whether there was any work that you've done on delayed gratification and impulse control, because that's got to overlap with these these concepts.
00:31:14:17 - 00:31:45:12
Nicola Clayton
that's a lovely example. Yes, we have. We've done self-control both with the jays and with cuttlefish. The central pulse, the cousins of the octopus, Jonathan was talking about. So there's something called the marshmallow test, and it's been done a lot with children. It's got various of the names on the Smarties test, but basically the principle is this you can have one yummy item right now, or if you wait a little while, you can have several yummy items.
00:31:45:18 - 00:32:12:01
Nicola Clayton
But in order to get several yummy items, you can't type one yummy item right now. So that might be one versus five one versus three. You have to not ,you have to resist. You have to turn around before with whatever it is that helps you resist the temptation in order to get them later. And both the cuttlefish and the jays are actually surprisingly good at those tasks.
00:32:12:03 - 00:32:30:20
Nicola Clayton
We were especially surprise at the cuttlefish. You see with the jays they hide food for living, so I thought they'd be quite good at it. Because if you think about what you have to do when you catch fried food for a living is you have to ignore what you want right now and put your position what you will want later.
00:32:30:22 - 00:32:52:06
Nicola Clayton
So the fact that the jays were brilliant at this didn't really surprised me. I thought it's probably related to the fact They're so good at hiding food, but the cuttlefish don't hide food. They might hide themselves. It's called deceptive dynamic camouflage. Well, they don't normally hide food, but they have no problem doing this with either.
00:32:52:08 - 00:33:22:06
Abigail Acton
that's fantastic. That's fascinating. Is that so? Yes, that's what I sort of kicked off this whole program with the notion of being surprised. Yes. We never. Yeah, we never really have a true handle on it. Okay, great. Thank you. I just want to ask you something else as well. We've been talking about causal cognition and the way it reveals about how an animal perceives the world, but the ability to recognize something or be surprised by something, presumably their indicators as well, with regards to how an animal perceives the world around it.
00:33:22:08 - 00:33:34:20
Abigail Acton
So to trigger those responses in Corvids, I believe that you're also interested in how humans and jays interpret or react to magic tricks. What hypothesis were you testing there and how so?
00:33:34:20 - 00:34:03:04
Nicola Clayton
The idea behind Magic Insects is that what a magician does to his or her audience is to violate an expectation. So in terms of causal understanding, the idea is that you have some understanding of it's in this hand, in left hand, and then all of a sudden the magicians done something unbeknownst to you, which leads to a violation of the expectation.
00:34:03:06 - 00:34:31:23
Nicola Clayton
In other words, you're surprised because it's not what you thought it would be. And we thought that this would be a very interesting technique to look at in animals as well as people, because a lot of the effects don't rely on words. You know, when a magician is doing a performing magic to his human audience or her audience, they may well use words to create a story around the effect.
00:34:32:03 - 00:35:01:14
Nicola Clayton
But the Surprise is what you see and not what you haven't see. So we thought we could have a go at seeing if we could look at how Chase respond to magic effects and found that jay is surprised by some magic effects and not others. Essentially, if the magician is using the hands to block your view, it'll be in something called a fast pass, for example, or a hand in a way behaves like a wing.
00:35:01:14 - 00:35:40:19
Nicola Clayton
It just obscures your view, the jays have the same expectations as we do. The magician has violated that expectation, and the jays are surprised their chest goes up. They start looking really avidly, but it's very clear that it's surprise if you use other effects with hands that require you to use your fingers and thumbs in the way we do because we have opposable thumbs so we can pinch, for example, the jay is not surprised because they don't have an expectation about how fingers and thumbs work.
00:35:40:21 - 00:36:09:21
Nicola Clayton
We therefore naturally being zoologists, psychologists looked at monkeys because you have various different kinds of monkeys that have different fingers and thumbs. Marmosets have a thumb that works like a finger. So in a way they have five fingers, rather than four fingers and a thumb. They behave like jays. Whereas capuchin Monkeys that have opposable thumbs behaved like human beings.
00:36:09:23 - 00:36:16:10
Nicola Clayton
So if you yourself have an opposable thumbs, you're surprised by it. If you don't, you're not.
00:36:16:12 - 00:36:26:11
Abigail Acton
So in a way, what we can come away with, I guess me if I'm wrong, but I guess it's when you recognize something as abnormal, if you yourself can do it and if you can't do it, you don't see that it's abnormal if it doesn't happen.
00:36:26:13 - 00:36:40:08
Nicola Clayton
Exactly. I mean, you could think of it as a form of embodied cognition that denote the way your body works, informs the assumptions you make about social cognition, about how things work.
00:36:40:14 - 00:36:47:15
Abigail Acton
I love this, obviously. I think this is absolutely fascinating. It's a lot of fun and it's very, very interesting. But tell me, Niki, why does it matter?
00:36:47:17 - 00:37:20:08
Nicola Clayton
Well, it matters because of the assumptions we make about how we see the world. You know, we tend to think that we're all consuming an extremely intelligent creatures and we don't make mistakes. I hate to get political on you, but I think there is a switch of events that's happened over the past couple of years. It's made us realize that there are all kinds of cognitive constraints, blind spots in our ability to see roadblocks, in our ability to think.
00:37:20:10 - 00:37:58:06
Nicola Clayton
What's interesting is why and how these have evolved and to what extent do we share some of these abilities with other animals and why we see biological basis to this? Or is it entirely cultural? We wouldn't be talking about this if we switch. It was entirely cultural and there was no biological basis. But these comparisons between all these different species and these different approaches to cognition, wealth and 70, it's a crucial, you know, out of respect for the other animals with whom we share the planet.
00:37:58:12 - 00:38:05:02
Abigail Acton
Thank you. Excellent. Does anyone have any questions to pose Nicky or any observations to make on her work? Yes Jonathan.
00:38:05:04 - 00:38:17:16
Jonathan Birch
So Nicky, how do you think the birds were solving the water level task? Was was it spontaneous insights or was it trial and error over many attempts?
00:38:17:18 - 00:38:46:13
Nicola Clayton
Well, it certainly wasn't trial and error over many attempts because they learned pretty quickly whether it's just that eureka moment or whether they're very sensitive to the idea that when you plup a heavy stone into water, the water level goes up and the wind comes closer is another matter. And in fact, we did a series of experiments to try to tease these things apart.
00:38:46:15 - 00:39:01:08
Nicola Clayton
And the short answer to the question is it looks like it's a mixture of the two. There are some things which appear to spontaneously get, but there certainly is a level of learning involved, rapid learning.
00:39:01:10 - 00:39:03:13
Abigail Acton
Nikki Did they learn from each other?
00:39:03:15 - 00:39:06:18
Nicola Clayton
We didn't give them that opportunity, so I don't know.
00:39:06:22 - 00:39:15:08
Abigail Acton
That would have been interesting whether they could acquire, you know, knowledge if such a word works from each other, whether they teach each other observationally.
00:39:15:10 - 00:39:32:11
Nicola Clayton
Certainly there's been some beautiful work done at the University of Birmingham by Sarah Beck with children, and the children are very good at learning Individually But if they can watch another learn, they solve it really quickly. It definitely applies to children.
00:39:32:14 - 00:39:38:01
Abigail Acton
Yeah. Be interesting to see if there were some parallels. Any other observations or comments? Yes. Thomas, please.
00:39:38:06 - 00:40:11:22
Tomas Norton
I think it's very interesting about these it so it seems so intelligent to corvids, but I'm wondering if you have any experience or opinions on poultry I am just gotten interested in animal production. I'm wondering because over many years now we have bred our poultry in a certain direction to, improve our efficiency of production. And now we've been very fast growing birds, but at the expense of other welfare issues.
00:40:12:03 - 00:40:25:05
Tomas Norton
For instance, they are not so strong on their legs anymore, but as it affected their own intelligence, I wonder, have you own your opinions on the effect of breeding on an animal's intelligence?
00:40:25:07 - 00:40:48:22
Nicola Clayton
gosh, what an interesting question. I don't know. I know there's been quite a lot of work done on cognition, in chicks, in chickens, and particularly the work of George, Felodigara for example. But I've no idea about effects of breeding but you would imagine that it would have some kind of.
00:40:48:24 - 00:40:49:05
Nicola Clayton
An.
00:40:49:11 - 00:41:16:13
Nicola Clayton
Implication in I mean, I'm a dancer as well as a scientist, so I'm certainly very well aware of how important for me it is to know how to move my arms and how to move my legs. And, you know, you can't you can't learn how to do OJT or run. There's just fun watching someone else. You you have to do it and then either have someone correct you or watch yourself.
00:41:16:15 - 00:41:38:04
Nicola Clayton
And you get people that there are people that very good observational learning. So they're very good at seeing how they move in a mirror and correcting themselves. I'm rubbish, I'm a kinesthetic learner. So for me you have to put me in position and let me feel it and want to felt it. I know how to do it. So, you know, if you raise me as one of those chicken.
00:41:38:05 - 00:41:41:01
Nicola Clayton
So then I have really wobbly rubbish dance.
00:41:41:05 - 00:42:10:02
Tomas Norton
Yeah that’s a very good point because you know, there's a movement nowadays of growing chickens that are slow growing and in effect we go back to the genetics, 30 years ago. But it's there's a remarkable difference when you go to a poultry house with where these are, where these slow growing birds are and they are so engaging with the spectrum, then they're engaging with each other.
00:42:10:02 - 00:42:33:12
Tomas Norton
You see that they're spar, they're fighting with each other, they're running and jumping. They're exploring the enrichment. There's a total opposite scenario when you go into the house with fast growing birds, it's like, okay, they have decided not to do any of this anymore because it's too much effort and forget about it. And probably they won't explore. Or maybe they they have.
00:42:33:18 - 00:42:42:06
Tomas Norton
Yeah, their their interest has dwindled as a result of this focus on just laying down tissue. Yeah.
00:42:42:08 - 00:42:45:04
Abigail Acton
That's fascinating. Thomas. Jonathan, what you want to add?
00:42:45:09 - 00:43:16:05
Jonathan Birch
Well, I'm reflecting now on this story from Thomas. I mean, that's what good welfare looks like, isn't it? The first case you describing when you go in and you see the animals expressing their cognitive abilities? That's what good welfare looks like. And the other the other scenario is, and I would really love to see more work generally on the cognition of chickens because they don't have the reputation Corvids have Corvids have this reputation for being so incredibly clever.
00:43:16:07 - 00:43:43:06
Jonathan Birch
But it's not that people have systematically studied the intelligence of chickens and found good reasons for thinking they're less intelligent than corvids. It's rather the whole topic has been neglected. So I'd love to see people doing experiments like Nikki's on the memory abilities and planning abilities, social cognition, and seeing whether chickens can do them as well. And I think there's a decent chance chickens would have a lot of these same abilities.
00:43:43:08 - 00:43:53:11
Nicola Clayton
I think it's really interesting, isn't it? And there's an important point to be made here. that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Right.
00:43:53:13 - 00:44:18:22
Abigail Acton
That's a very good point. And neither is this an excuse for cutting corners. Well, I'm going to wind the star now. And I want to thank you sincerely for a fascinating episode. I'm very, very grateful to all of you for having found the time. I know you're all very busy people. This program leaves us with a lot to consider about how we interact with the creatures around us and whether we're taking certain things for granted or perhaps preferring just not to look at all.
00:44:18:24 - 00:44:21:23
Abigail Acton
So thank you very much indeed for that.
00:44:22:00 - 00:44:24:08
ALL
Thank you very much Abigail.
00:44:27:15 - 00:44:29:17
Abigail Acton
My great pleasure. Take care.
00:44:29:19 - 00:44:30:23
Nicola Clayton
Bye bye.
00:44:33:20 - 00:44:58:02
Abigail Acton
are you interested in what other EU funded projects are doing in the area of animal sentience, non linguistic expressions of intelligence and animal welfare? The Cordis website will give you an insight into the results of projects funded by the Horizon 2020 program that are working in this area. The website has articles and interviews that explore the results of research being conducted in a very broad range of domains and subjects from platypuses to Plato.
00:44:58:02 - 00:45:16:03
Abigail Acton
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Insights and ideas
Research conducted back in 1995 established that a pigeon can tell a Picasso from a Monet(opens in new window). Now studies are showing young bumblebees will go out of their way to play with balls for no reward other than what seems to be ‘the fun of it’. Surprised? What else have we yet to discover? As we understand more about animal sentience, what are we doing about our relationship with them – what developments are coming down the line to support animal welfare on farms, for example? Octopus farming is becoming a reality – can we farm atypical species to high welfare standards if we don’t understand how they experience the world? This episode is exploring what we mean by ‘sentience’ and how that needs to be incorporated into the way we act. Jonathan Birch(opens in new window) is an associate professor at the London School of Economics’ Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science(opens in new window). In 2021, the review he led into the sentience of invertebrates resulted in the amendment of the British government’s Animal Welfare Bill to include octopuses, crabs and lobsters. He coordinated the ASENT project. Associate professor at the University of Leuven’s Animal and Human Health Engineering Unit, Tomas Norton(opens in new window) leads research on sustainable precision livestock farming through projects such as AutoPlayPig. He is particularly interested in the interface between animal health, welfare and productivity. Nicola Clayton(opens in new window) is a fellow of the Royal Society and professor of Comparative Cognition in the Department of Psychology(opens in new window) at the University of Cambridge. Coordinator of the CAUSCOG project, Clayton is particularly interested in the processes of thinking with and without words, comparing the cognitive capacities of corvids, cephalopods and children.
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