sow housing behaviors - meat institute
TRANSCRIPT
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October 15, 2015Thomas D. Parsons, V.M.D., Ph.D.
North American Meat Institute
Animal Care and Handling Conference
All rights reserved
Do not duplicate without explicit written permission
Sow Housing Behaviors
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Sow Housing Behaviors
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Future of Sow Housing
• Gestation Stall
– European Union
• Banned
– Canada
• Defacto ban
– US
• Banned in 9 US States
• 70 Food company committed to remove stalls from
supply chain
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Future of Sow Housing
Top 4 Packers In US
• >70% of shackle space
• All moving their own
sows out of stalls
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•“Penn” Gestation
•Penn Vet Swine Teaching
and Research Center
•Opened Jan 2001
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• Developed an alternative to the gestation stall for North America swine industry
• Electronic Sow Feeding (ESF)
• Implemented across US– ~65 farms in US and Canada
– Farm range in size• 100 to 10,000 sow
– 150,000 sows
“Penn” Gestation
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Pig’s Eye View
• How an understanding of sow behavior
impact the success of sow housing
transitions
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Managing Gestating Sows
• Current husbandry practices evolved to:
– Optimize productivity
– Maximize economic sustainability
– Meet societal expectations
• May not be always be in harmony with the
behavioral instincts of the animals
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Managing Gestating Sows
• Understanding the basic behavioral drivers
of the pig is of increasing importance as
we move towards loose housing systems
• Can we gain new insight from examining
the behavioral needs of the sow
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Sows left to their own devices
• Swine in more natural setting
– Opportunity to understand endogenous or
instinctual behaviors
• Swine in the wild
– Wild boar
– Feral or semi-feral
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Relevance?
• Not advocating for extensive production
systems
• Asking how domestication has changed
pigs• Morphology/Carcass traits
• Fecundity
• What about other instinctual/survival behaviors?
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Relevance?
• Edinburgh Pig Park
– Domesticated swine rapidly revert back to behavioral activities of wild swine when housed in semi-natural conditions
• David Wood-Gush and colleagues
• Certain behaviors or at least drive to perform these behaviors remain hard wired
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Pigs
• Today’s sows are result of years of
selective breeding
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Domestication of swine
dates back as far as
9000 years
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Homer’s Odyssey
- Muse Circe
1st written reference to
swine husbandry is over
3000 years old
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Pig like animals first
roamed the face of the
earth 50 million years ago
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50 million years of Natural Selection
versus
9000 years of Selective Breeding
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What can we learn from the
natural history of the pig?
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Social Animals
• Structure
– Sounders
• 2 to 4 adult females and immature offspring
• Adults usually related
• Sounder size related to availability of resources
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Social Animals
• Structure
– Hierarchy
• Always present with in sounder
• Based on size and age of animals
– Basically generational
• Animals move up as opportunity present
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Social Animals
• Foraging
– Spend 6 to 8 hours a day
• Rooting, grazing, exploration
• Home range
– 125 – 250 acres
• Vary on resource availability
• Social Facilitation• Sows often synchronize their behaviors
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Aggression
• Rare in the wild
• Avoidance is the
preferred method of
resolution
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Managing Aggression in ESF Pens
Dr. Meghann
PierdonEnough
space to
establish
social
hierarch
with
minimal
fighting
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Pig’s-Eye vs People’s-Eye View
Small(6-12 sows)
Big(60-80 sows)
Really Big(200-300
sows)
SowWorse
Better
PeopleEasier
Harder
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People’s-Eye View
• “Its not about the X’s and O’s
but the Jimmy’s and Joe’s”
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People’s-Eye View
• It’s not about the pen designs and flows,
but the Kimmie’s and Billy Joe’s
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People are important
• Experience from starting up >60 farms
– Most with very similar physical plants
– A spectrum of results
– People are the variable
» Good people can make anything work
» Best designed barn can not make up for
poor or inadequate staff
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People are important
• People
– Need to get the right people
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People are important
• Right People
– Change is hard
• Experience can be a bad thing
– Must be able to adapt to change
• Need to think harder about who is the right person
to staff these barns
– Like animals will like ESF
– Pro-technology
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People are important
• People
– Need to get the right people
– Need to get these people the right training
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Training People
Need to “think like a pig”
Stockmanship?
Train employees to better understand
pig behavior
Increased behavioral repertoire in pens
More can be learned from the animals via
observation
Early lameness detection etc
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Training People
• Need a vision for success
– Critical staff visit/work on successful ESF farms
– Need to preempt the belief crisis
• More ways to make it not work than to work
– Identify and track key performance indicators
(KPI) of ESF
Images lifted from following
companies websites
CVFF, ISF, M-BF
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Concluding Thoughts
• The Pig’s Eye View– Better understanding of sow behavioral needs
promises to:• Improve design of facilities
• Improve management of animals
• Reduce stressors to increase productivity and welfare
– More research is needed to:• Identify how sow prioritizes its different behavioral
needs
• Determine if animals at different places in the social hierarchy have different needs
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Concluding Thoughts
• People’s-Eye View
– Optimal pen design for pigs and people may
differ
– People have a critical role in success
• Need to get right people
• Provide appropriate training for the right people
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Concluding Thoughts
• Challenges
– Operational Definitions
• Crate-free pork?
– Current popular pen gestation systems still have
sows in a farrowing or gestation crate for nearly
50% of the time
– Alternatives exist that reduce confinement to
25% of the time
– Or need to change the marketing claims
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Concluding Thoughts
• Challenges
– Time lines
• Many food companies have aggressive deadlines
• More to learn about making the transitions
• Farmers resistance to transition in part based on
lack of knowledge
• Transitions need to be successful for all
stakeholders