Abstract
Social interactions of farm animals affect their performance, health and welfare. The recent advances in AI-automated monitoring technologies offer digital phenotypes, at low-cost, that record the animals in real-time. This proof-of-concept study addresses, for the first time, the hypothesis that applying social network analysis (SNA) on automated data could potentially facilitate the analysis of social structures of farm animals. Data was collected using automated recording systems that captured 2D camera images and videos of pigs in six pens (16–19 animals each) on a PIC breeding company farm (USA). The system provided real-time data, including ear-tag readings, elapsed time, posture (standing, lying, sitting), and XY coordinates of the shoulder and rump for each pig. Weighted SNA was performed, based on the proximity of “standing” animals, for two 3-day periods: the early growing period (first month after mixing) and the later period (60 days post-mixing). Group level degree, betweenness, and closeness centralization showed a significant increase from the early growing period to the later one (p<0.02), highlighting the pigś social dynamics over time. Largest clique size remained unchanged (p=0.28), but the number of maximal cliques significantly decreased from the early to late growing period (p=0.007). Individual SNA traits were stable over these periods, except for closeness centrality and clustering coefficient which significantly increased (p<0.00001). This study demonstrates that combining AI-assisted monitoring technologies with SNA offers an efficient, real-time approach to gain novel insights into animal social interactions. This approach can optimize on-farm management or breeding practices, leading to improved animal performance, health, and welfare.
Highlights
Social network analysis (SNA) applied to automated monitoring data provides novel insight into social interactions of pigs.
Group level SNA centralization traits highlighted pigs ‘social dynamics over time.
The stability of key individual SNA traits can be leveraged for breeding purposes.
AI-assisted monitoring combined with SNA help optimizing management practices on commercial farms.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.