Day 113 - 03 Apr 95 - Page 55
1 Now the sow comes into heat at six or eight months old.
2 The gestation period for a sow is 115 days roughly. After
3 she has farrowed she will come back on heat, but she will
4 not ovulate because she is under the control of estrogens
5 rather than progesterones. So she will not ovulate until
6 the heat which is about three or four weeks later. So she
7 suckles the piglets for that period of time, and soon as
8 she is likely to come back into an ovulatory oestrus they
9 are taken away. It may be 21 days, 24 days. The
10 weaning -----
11
12 Q. Can you say as you go through this the same with cattle,
13 what are your welfare concerns at each stage?
14 A. The welfare concerns are that where with the cow has to
15 feed the milk to human consumers, the sow has a dozen or so
16 teats and so she is induced by selective breeding to
17 produce a dozen or so piglets at each farrowing. So she is
18 milked like anything. She is really like a milk bottle at
19 one time. So my concern is not only for the fate of the
20 piglets but also the stress that this in its way puts upon
21 the sow. Again, she has to be like a little furnace, a
22 little dynamo metabolically to be able to produce all this
23 milk and support this farrowing, to support all these
24 piglets. She has to do it in rather adverse conditions,
25 because pigs, first of all, of course, are non-ruminants,
26 you have to understand they work by a different nutritional
27 system, and they are also different from cattle in the
28 sense that they react differently. They are very much
29 livelier. They are a bit like dogs I always think, that
30 they want to mischief, they want interest, and so on. In
31 the modern systems, most of the modern systems, they are
32 barren environments. That I think is a welfare stress that
33 goes on.
34
35 You find this, if I look for markers of this, particularly
36 stereotype behaviour. If the sows are kept in stalls they
37 will constantly be making efforts to make a nest, pawing on
38 the ground, chewing the bars and so on. That is generally
39 taken by animal welfarists as a distinct sign of stress
40 that they want to build a nest, which is quite
41 understandable. They also have very well-developed noses,
42 very strong noses. One of their preoccupations is with
43 using this nose, not only to turn up soil and to ferret
44 about, I mean swine are used to ferret out truffles, for
45 example, because they are so good at this, and if you put
46 them into barren environments they have not got that
47 ability to do it.
48
49 The other point is that this obsession for lean meat, as
50 opposed to fat meat, has meant that the sows (and the other
51 piglets for that matter) have very little fat over the
52 subcutaneous fat. There is a bit of a difference because
53 cattle tend to lay the fat down intramuscularly and other
54 parts, but pigs if they put fat on tend to put it on around
55 the outside. That has another effect one has to consider
56 from the animal welfare point of view, and that is
57 temperature control because pigs are susceptible to changes
58 in temperature; they have not got a very good temperature
59 regulating or temperature controlling mechanism. If you
60 take away their fat they are not well insulated, they are
