Pig Welfare: where should we be by 2025?

The question of where pig welfare should be by 2025 is intertwined with the broader question of what does a healthy future for the pig sector look like.

As regards welfare the EU pig sector needs to respond to the recognition by the EU Treaty that animals are “sentient beings” and that “full regard” must be paid to their welfare requirements. Globally, the pig sector should respect the OIE Guiding principles for animal welfare; these stress that “the use of animals carries with it an ethical responsibility to ensure the welfare of such animals to the greatest extent practicable”.

Sow stalls

From this perspective sow stalls (also known as ‘gestation crates’) are unacceptable. EU pig farmers deserve to be congratulated as the vast majority are now in compliance with the EU ban on sow stalls. Moreover, the move away from sow stalls is gathering pace worldwide.

Sow stalls have also been prohibited in nine U.S. States and in New Zealand. The Code of Practice for Canada calls for a phase-out by 2024. The Australian pork industry has committed to voluntarily phasing out sow stalls in favour of group housing by 2017. All major pork processors in Brazil have announced they will phase out the use of sow stalls. The South African Pork Producers organisation has committed to a phase out date of 2020.

In 2007, Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest pig producer, committed to phase out gestation crates by 2017 (although sows are housed individually until confirmed pregnant), and the company announced in 2016 it has moved over 80% of its pregnant sows from crates to group housing.

The International Finance Corporation – which is part of the World Bank Group - has published a Good Practice Note Improving Animal Welfare in Livestock Operations. This points out that “There is an international trend from sow stall use towards group housing systems, with or without limited stall use in the four-week period after mating”.

I would hope that by 2025 the use of sow stalls will have come to an end worldwide.

Despite the EU ban on stalls, many EU sows continue to be confined in sow stalls and farrowing crates for over 20 weeks of the year. Regrettably, the EU ban permits the use of sow stalls during the first four weeks after service. This exception to the ban was granted due to concerns that mixing sows in early gestation may be detrimental to embryo development and survival. However, a number of studies have found that with good system design and skilled management mixing in the early stages of pregnancy need have no adverse effects on reproductive performance. The first four weeks’ exception to the ban should be brought to an end.

Farrowing crates

By 2025, the use of farrowing crates should have been replaced by free farrowing systems. A number of such systems are available and research shows that piglet mortalities in loose farrowing systems can as low as, or lower than, in crates. Loose farrowing systems that have been developed include the Solari Pen, the 360º Freedom Farrower, the Danish SWAP pen and the free farrowing system developed in the UK by Scotland’s Rural College and the Newcastle University (known as PigSAFE).

Castration

Well before 2025 surgical castration should have ended. In 2011 stakeholders from throughout the European pork chain agreed to voluntarily end surgical castration by 2018. Progress, however, has been slow. Effective alternatives already exist. In some countries, including here in Ireland, male pigs are reared entire. If reared beyond the age of sexual maturity, entire males carry a higher risk of boar taint than castrates, but methods of detecting boar taint on the slaughter line are increasingly being developed and used.

The simplest option is immunocastration: boar taint vaccine. By stimulating the pig’s immune system to temporarily delay puberty, the vaccine reduces not only boar taint, but also aggression and sexual behavior that can cause stress and injuries. It is unacceptable to put pigs through the pain of castration when a viable alternative is available. Fears of consumer rejection are holding back uptake of immunocastration. It is the responsibility of the industry and retailers to explain to consumers that this is not a hormone and that the meat is safe to eat. A substantial proportion of male pigs are immunocastrated in Australia and Brazil so it is clearly possible to achieve consumer acceptance.

Environmental enrichment and tail docking

The importance of activity for pigs has been established for many years. In the 1980s Stobla and Wood-Gush reported that in semi-natural conditions pigs spend 75% of their daylight hours in activity – rooting, grazing, exploring their world. Recognising this, EU law has since 2003 required pigs to be given “permanent access to a sufficient quantity of material to enable proper investigation and manipulation activities, such as straw, hay, wood, sawdust, mushroom compost, peat”.

The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has concluded that enrichment materials should be complex, changeable and destructible and that chains, plastic chewing sticks and balls are not effective enrichment materials. Regrettably, most EU pig farmers ignore this law providing either no enrichment or just metal chains.

A Technical Report prepared for EFSA states that an “appropriate enrichment material can be defined as a material which stimulates exploratory behaviour for an extended length of time, preferably comparable to the level of occupation provided by straw.” The Report adds that “all new data reinforce the importance of providing suitable enrichment materials to allow expression of species relevant behaviours and reduce risk of injurious biting”.

A European Commission Recommendation published in March 2016 provides that enrichment materials should be edible, chewable, investigable and manipulable. In addition the Recommendation states that the materials should be provided in such a way that they are “of sustainable interest, that is to say, they should encourage the exploratory behaviour of pigs and be regularly replaced and replenished”.

Guidance accompanying the Recommendation states that optimal materials include “straw, (from cereals and legumes), green fodder (hay, grass, silage, alfalfa, etc.), miscanthus pressed or chopped, root vegetables (e.g. turnips, fodder beet, swede) when used as bedding”. It adds that chains and hard plastic piping are of marginal interest and “should not be used as essential or single component of pig enrichment materials. They can provide distraction but should not be considered as fulfiling the essential needs of the pigs. Other materials should also be provided.”

A closely related legal provision prohibits routine tail docking. It provides that farmers may only lawfully tail dock if they have first tried to prevent tail biting by “other measures” and in particular have changed “inadequate environmental conditions or management systems” but nonetheless still have a tail biting problem.

Scientific research helps us to understand which conditions are “inadequate” as it has identified the factors that are most likely to cause tail biting. EFSA has concluded that “the largest risk for being tail bitten is the lack of appropriate enrichment”. If there are no enrichment materials or only chains, toys or plastic objects, the farmer has failed to change “inadequate environmental conditions”. Accordingly, the farmer has not fulfilled the conditions that would allow him to lawfully tail dock. Most EU pig farmers ignore this law and routinely tail dock without any attempt to provide meaningful enrichment.

Provision of enrichment is not the only factor needed to prevent biting. Other elements that can trigger tail biting must also be addressed; these include correct balance of nutrients in feed, heat and cold stress, air quality, competition for food and space and poor health.

The Technical Report prepared for EFSA stresses:

“An intact curly tail may well be the single most important animal-based welfare indicator for weaned, growing and finishing pigs .... In addition, it stands for high-quality management and respect for the integrity of the pig.”

Farmers who get their pigs through to slaughter age without either tail biting or docking will be operating a very good system.

EU pig farmers should now comply with the law as a matter of urgency. Worldwide farmers should provide effective enrichment and end routine tail docking well before 2025.

A more ambitious approach is needed as to what is meant by good welfare

Thinking about welfare and welfare science tend to focus on preventing poor welfare rather than on promoting positively good outcomes. This minimalist approach risks giving too narrow an ambit to what constitutes good welfare

Some areas that tend to be overlooked are brought to light by Lyall Watson in The Whole Hog:

“I know of no other animals that are more consistently curious, more willing to explore new experiences, more ready to meet the world with open-mouthed enthusiasm. Pigs are incurable optimists and get a big kick out of just being”.

Fortunately, there is growing recognition of the need to take a less restricted view of what constitutes good welfare. This too will present fresh challenges to the pig sector. The Farm Animal Welfare Committee, an independent body that advises the UK Government, stresses that all farm animals should have ‘a life worth living’ and a growing number should have ‘a good life’. It insists that “each farm animal should have a life that is worth living to the animal itself, and not just to its human keeper”. FAWC continues: “Achievement of a life worth living requires provision of an animal’s needs and certain wants ... Wants are those resources that an animal may not need to survive or to avoid developing abnormal behaviour, but nevertheless improve its quality of life.”

A new paper by Mellor stresses that it is necessary not only to minimise negative experiences but also “to provide the animals with opportunities to have positive experiences”. Such experiences can arise “when animals are kept with congenial others in spacious, stimulus-rich and safe environments which provide opportunities for them to engage in behaviours they find rewarding. These behaviours may include environment-focused exploration and food acquisition activities as well as animal-to-animal interactive activities, all of which can generate various forms of comfort, pleasure, interest, confidence and a sense of control.”

The pig sector needs to adjust to a rapidly changing environment

The pig sector has much to do to respond to these expanded perceptions as to the scope of welfare. Moreover, the pig sector finds itself in a rapidly changing environment. Intensive farming is increasingly seen as contributing to antibiotic resistance, environmental degradation and poor animal welfare. High levels of meat consumption are recognised as unhealthy and as playing a key role in driving the world to dangerous levels of climate change. In the EU the pig industry lurches from one crisis to another. The pig sector will have to embrace fundamental changes if it is to survive.

Consumers are demanding welfare improvements. A new European Commission Eurobarometer survey reports that more than nine in ten EU citizens believe it is important to protect the welfare of farmed animals (94%) and 82% believe the welfare of farmed animals should be better protected than it is now.

Intensive pig farming and the intensive production of the grain used as animal feed have led to water pollution29, soil degradation30 and biodiversity loss.

Public disquiet about the high use of antibiotics in intensive farming is growing. The pig sector is seen as contributing to the declining efficacy of certain antibiotics used to treat serious human disease. The Review on Antimicrobial Resistance, established by the UK Government, calls on the EU to reduce farm antibiotic consumption by around twothirds.

The Lancet Infectious Diseases Commission has called for” the development of health-orientated systems for rearing of animals” that are not dependent on regular preventive use of antibiotics. Such systems would build improved health and immunity by reducing stress (e.g. by enabling animals to perform natural behaviours), avoiding overcrowding, minimising mixing and ending early weaning in pigs.

High levels of meat consumption are increasingly being questioned. Studies show that, on a business-as-usual basis, our diets alone - with their high levels of meat consumption - will by 2050 have taken us over the Paris Climate Agreement’s target of limiting rises in global temperatures to well below 2°C.

Our consumption of high levels of red and processed meat - that have been made possible by industrial farming - can lead to obesity, diabetes and heart diseases. Most damaging of all, the pig sector’s products – red and processed meat – have been classified as ‘probably carcinogenic’ and ‘carcinogenic’ respectively by the World Health Organisation. As examination of the tobacco industry will show, any sector whose products are seen as carcinogenic faces an uphill struggle.

In March 2016 the EU agreed a new package of measures to support the struggling pig sector. These include storage schemes, promotion campaigns and a drive to find new export markets. At the heart of the crisis is overproduction. Announcing the new measures the President of the Agriculture Council stressed that “reduction of supply is necessary”.

The pig sector needs to move away from mass production of cheap commodity pigmeat to producing high quality meat but in lower quantities than at present. Moving to less but better meat in EU diets would benefit consumer health and the environment and would help mitigate climate change.

A switch to quality production could see farmers being properly rewarded for their work and skills provided that consumers were willing to pay fair prices for high quality pigmeat. Many consumers may well be willing to pay more if they are informed about the different modes of production and their implications for natural resources and pig welfare. In addition, pigmeat must be labelled as to farming method so that consumers can play a part in supporting a high quality pig sector.

At present industry promotional materials tend to give a misleading impression of the way in which pigs are reared. This is exemplified on the website for this conference which includes a photo of pigs with access to the outdoors which is extremely rare in EU pig farming. Because consumers are misled into thinking all is well they do not realise that there are problems which they can address by helping to drive the market for high welfare pigmeat.

Government too must play its part in helping the industry to restructure. The EU and the Member States must stop using EU funds to support industrial pig farming. At present CAP Pillar 2 funds are being used to subsidise industrial pig production for example by giving financial support for the building of industrial pig operations. Such funding should be stopped with the money that is saved being used to increase support for high quality pig producers. For example, the German state of Lower Saxony pays a premium of 16.50 per pig tail that is not docked or bitten when the pigs arrive at the slaughterhouse.

Conclusion

The current industrial model of pig production cannot survive. The pig industry needs to reinvent itself; it needs to become a producer of high quality meat produced to good environmental and animal welfare standards. Routine preventive use of antibiotics must be replaced by health-orientated systems. The industry needs to understand that meat consumption may decline as studies show that the current thigh levels of consumption are unhealthy, environmentally damaging and make it most unlikely that we can meet the Paris target of limiting the rise in global temperatures to well below 2°C.

From the welfare viewpoint, the industry should rapidly move away from all use of sow stalls and farrowing crates. Routine tail docking must be brought to an end and effective enrichment should be provided. In addition, selection for excessive litter sizes and routine teeth clipping should come to an end. The industry needs to respond to the developing awareness that welfare entails not only preventing negative states but also providing animals with opportunities to have positive experiences including pleasure and positive engagement with other animals and their environment all of which can generate a sense of well-being.

Published in the proceedings of the International Pig Veterinary Society Congress – IPVS2016. For information on the event, past and future editions, check out https://www.theipvs.com/future-congresses/.

Pig Welfare: where should we be by 2025?

Sustainability: reducing the impact of livestock operations

Repro-mate®