Survey to check if pigs can be happy indoors

Pig farmers are being asked to volunteer their animals for a happiness survey in an attempt to prove that pigs can be just as content indoors as outdoors and with slatted floors rather than straw.
By The Newsroom
Published 5th Mar 2010, 14:51 BST
Updated 5th Mar 2010, 14:51 BST

The British Pig Executive (BPEX), which will run the survey, says three years of trials run by Bristol University have shown that health and contentment can be measured by "welfare outcomes" such as frequency of tailbiting and fighting wounds, lameness and other problems requiring treatment.

And it would be better to check "welfare outcomes" than to try to impose common standards for the environments the pigs are in. The expectation is that the change of emphasis would allow farmers to prove that intensive methods are not necessarily bad as far as the pigs are concerned. Also, welfare measurement is seen as a potentially valuable tool for farm management – making it possible to set standards and watch for warning changes.

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BPEX wants 400 pig farms of all shapes and sizes to take part in the next stage of the experiment.

Meryl Ward, who runs 2,000 sows indoors in North Lincs, was one of 15 participants in the pilot projects. She is a fan of straw but, she said, there were places where straw was hard to get and dispose of and pigs were happy with other forms of "environmental enrichment". The welfare outcomes system would enable different forms of enrichment to be compared. She said: "You cannot altogether get away from the basic requirements of adequate housing and so on, but sometimes a good stockperson is more important than the details and this system allows for a measure of stockmanship."