Published in Scientific Papers. Series D. Animal Science, Vol. LXV, Issue 1
Written by Antonia Katharina RUCKLI, Sabine DIPPEL, Juliane HELMERICHS, Carmen HUBBARD, Camilla MUNSTERHJELM, Herman VERMEER, Christine LEEB
Animal health and welfare (AHW) has become an important aspect for sustainable development in livestock farming. Therefore, this paper aims to analyse the AHW performance of 27 breeding-to-finishing pig farms across six European countries and to investigate associations with number of sows in production, number of sows per worker and percentage of family labour. AHW indicators were aggregated to themes, namely “Hunger and thirst”, “Comfort”, “Injuries and disease”, “Pain by management”, “Appropriate behaviour” and “Human-animal relationship”. On a scale from 0 to 100 (worst to best AHW), lowest median theme score was found for “Comfort” (39) and highest for “Human-animal relationship” (78). AHW performance varied considerably between farms, indicating a potential for improvement, especially regarding “Comfort”. Number of sows per farm in production correlated negatively with “Hunger and thirst” (rs = -0.81), “Comfort” (-0.44) and “Appropriate behaviour” (-0.61). Number of sows per worker also correlated negatively with “Hunger and thirst” (-0.56). Family labour did not correlate with any of the themes. We conclude that some aspects of animal welfare especially regarding comfort (e.g., space allowance and enrichment material), require improvement measures across these six European countries. These problems may increase with farm size and number of sows per worker. Therefore, incentives to implement animal welfare improvement measures are needed for all farms to encourage farmers to construct housing systems above the minimum legal requirements.
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