http://jobs.inra.fr/en/Career-opportunities/Portraits/Celine-Tallet
Céline Tallet is an ethologist with INRA’s Joint Research Unit for the Physiology, Environment, and Genetics of Animals and Livestock Systems (PEGASE), located in Rennes. More specifically, she is part of the SysPorc (1) research group; her work focuses on understanding the interactions between humans and pigs, with the goal of improving livestock living conditions and well-being while simultaneously facilitating the work of farmers.
Céline Tallet is an ethologist with INRA’s Joint Research Unit for the Physiology, Environment, and Genetics of Animals and Livestock Systems (PEGASE), located in Rennes. More specifically, she is part of the SysPorc (1) research group; her work focuses on understanding the interactions between humans and pigs, with the goal of improving livestock living conditions and well-being while simultaneously facilitating the work of farmers.
Using ethology to improve conditions for livestock
Even
when she was in high school, Tallet knew that she wanted to study
ethology, the science of animal behavior. Indeed, she changed
universities several times to pursue her goal. In 2000, as she was doing
an internship at INRA as part of her undergraduate degree in Biology,
Tallet realized that ethology was “a science that could clearly play a
role in improving conditions for livestock.” She did research that
showed that a chick’s sense of smell was crucial to its growth, which
highlighted the need for feed manufacturers to create attractive foods.
During her PhD, she discovered that sheep become attached to farmers
when they are bottle fed not only because they need human contact, but
also because they are attracted to the food. In 2007, she did a post-doc
at the Institute of Animal Science in Prague to “switch research topics
and become more independent.”
Pigs reveal their emotions via vocalizations
“I
have studied how piglets communicate using sounds, such as grunts or
cries, to see if we can pick up on an animal’s emotional state from
their vocalizations,” explains Tallet. She continues, “I have also
examined whether humans can correctly evaluate the sounds produced by
piglets placed in positive versus negative situations.” If farmers
listen carefully to their pigs, they can, even from a distance,
determine if one of them is scared, feeling bad, or, quite the opposite,
feeling good.
Accounting for a pig’s natural need to interact with humans
Since
2009, Tallet has been working at the INRA center located in
Saint-Gilles, near Rennes. Her focus is the relationship between humans
and pigs; her goal is develop ways of raising livestock that promote
animal welfare, while also facilitating the work of farmers. In
particular, she has been working on an alternative to castration. She
says, “Because uncastrated male pigs are said to be more aggressive, we
compared their behavior with that of castrated males. We found that
uncastrated males are more active and interact more with others, but not
necessarily in a negative way, and they are not more aggressive towards
people. However, they do have a need to interact more with farmers,
which is tricky to manage because uncastrated males can weigh up to 100
kg!” At present, Tallet is studying the vocal communication that farmers
use with pigs. It appears that a pig can become accustomed to a human
voice in utero and, once born, can be calmed by hearing that same voice.
It is also important to talk to pigs as part of the taming process.
Tallet is additionally interested in determining whether taming one
member of a pig herd can serve to tame the others in the group via
behavioral contagion.
(1) The Pig in Livestock Systems
