Can Ambient Sound Reduce Distress in Piglets During Weaning and Restraint?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Music or other background sounds are often played in barns as environmental enrichment for animals on farms or to mask sudden disruptive noises. However, previous studies looking at the effects of this practice on nonhuman animal well-being and productivity have found contradictory results. This study monitored the vocal responses of piglets, as indicators of well-being, to evaluate the effect of various sounds played during 2 simulations of stressful farm procedures: (a) the 5 min the animals were held as if for castration and (b) the first 20 hr after weaning. The sound treatments included pink noise, music, vocalizations made by other piglets during actual castrations or the first hours after weaning, and silence (control). The study presented pink noise and music both with and without a binaural beat in the delta-theta frequency range. In both the handling and weaning situations, none of the sound treatments reduced the piglets' call rate below that heard during the control. Piglets vocalized most during playback of pink noise and least during silence and playback of calls from other pigs. These results suggest that playing music or other sounds provides no improvement in conditions for piglets during handling and weaning.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".