ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Ethol.
Sec. Applied Ethology and Sentience
Volume 4 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fetho.2025.1607722
This article is part of the Research TopicFarm Animal EthologyView all articles
RUNNING HEAD: Sow behavior after piglet processing
Provisionally accepted
- Iowa State University, Ames, United States
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Commercially housed pigs face multiple welfare challenges such as painful husbandry procedures or lack of environmental enrichment. We evaluated sow behavior in response to piglets experiencing tail-docking and castration. Our second objective was to assess the effects of environmental enrichment for piglets on sow teat and skin lesions. Shortly before farrowing, three commercially available piglet toys and a jute bag were installed in 12 farrowing stalls. Eleven farrowing stalls were not equipped with any enrichment. Sows were provided ad libitum access to water and they were hand-fed to appetite two times daily (7 a.m. and 3 p.m.) in 0.90 kg increments. All piglets were tail-docked and males surgically castrated at 7 days of age. Sow behavior was recorded by cameras mounted on the ceiling from 5-7 p.m. a day before processing as well as on the processing day. Videos were watched continuously by two observers in BORIS. The differences in pre-and post-processing sow behaviors were tested by paired t-test. All sows were inspected for teat inflamed, scabs, wounds, splits, and missing teat tips before farrowing as well as at the end of lactation. Data was analyzed using SAS GENMOD procedure with Poisson distribution. Sows were inspected for skin lesions using Welfare Quality ® Assessment protocol 6, 14, and 19 d post-farrowing and analyzed using SAS GLIMMIX procedure with multinomial distribution. All sows decreased feeding (P = 0.001) and standing (P = 0.045) after piglets had been tail-docked and/or castrated. Sows whose piglets did not have enrichments also decreased nosing stall structure (P = 0.01) and posture change (P = 0.04). No other sow behaviors changed in relation to piglet processing (P > 0.05). Similarly, enrichments for piglets had no significant effect on sow teat or skin lesions. In conclusion, this is the first study reporting that tail-docking and surgical castration may have negative effects on sow behavior. Additionally, these findings contribute to the growing body of literature that from an animal welfare perspective, tail-docking as well as surgical castration should be refined or avoided.
Keywords: environmental enrichment, swine welfare, Painful husbandry procedures, Neonatal Piglet, sow teat lesions
Received: 08 Apr 2025; Accepted: 18 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Bučková, Newgard, Tomko, Arnold and Johnson. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Katarína Bučková, Iowa State University, Ames, United States
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