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

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