Options for housing the sow and litter

Following on from the previous paper, this paper could be subtitled 'The welfare of the sow, her litter, the stockperson, the farmer and the bank manager'. There are many different considerations involved in assessing a farrowing system and, in some cases, these can lead to conflicting conclusions.As reviewed in the previous paper, the animals have a set of requirements for optimal welfare. For the sow, these include the ability to exhibit certain hormonally regulated behaviour patterns including pre-farrowing ambulation and nest building. For the piglet, although longer term issues of behavioural development exist, the immediate welfare challenge is to stay alive and healthy in a situation fraught with dangers (Fraser, 1990). This requires environmental measures which reduce the likelihood of crushing, hypothermia, starvation and infection. Increasingly, as sow prolificacy has become a goal of genetic selection, it is also dependant on inputs of skilled stockpeople (English, 1993).