Ear biting in pigs - a welfare challenge

Ear biting is a welfare challenge in commercial pig farming. Pigs sustain injuries at the site of bite paving the way for bacterial infections. Early detection and management of this behaviour is important to enhance animal health and welfare, increase productivity whilst minimising inputs from medication. Pig management using physical observation is not practical due to the scale of modern pig production systems. The same applies to the manual analysis of captured videos from pig houses. Therefore, a method of automated detection is desirable. We introduce an automatic approach based on deep learning for the detection and quantification of ear biting episodes. The datasets described here are from experimental and commercial farms where the farmer previously reported ear biting.