This article is part of the supplement: The role of the veterinarian in animal welfare. Animal welfare: too much or too little? The 21st Symposium of the Nordic Committee for Veterinary Scientific Cooperation (NKVet)

Oral presentation

Loose housing of sows – is this good welfare?

Birgitte I Damm

Department of Large Animal Sciences, Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

corresponding author email

from The role of the veterinarian in animal welfare. Animal welfare: too much or too little? The 21st Symposium of the Nordic Committee for Veterinary Scientific Cooperation (NKVet)
Værløse, Denmark. 24–25 September 2007

Acta Veterinaria Scandinavica 2008, 50(Suppl 1):S9doi:10.1186/1751-0147-50-S1-S9

Published:	19 August 2008

First paragraph (this article has no abstract)

In Denmark we have about 1.2 million sows that produce about 21 million pigs per year for slaughter or export. While the number of pigs produced for slaughter per sow year when Denmark entered the EU in 1972 was 11–12 it is now more than doubled [1]. Behind this development lie highly focussed efforts within breeding, housing and management. The goals have been achieved with particular attention to two factors – the reduction of space used per pig and increase in production per man hour [1]. To illustrate this, a gestating sow in tethers – a much used housing system in the 1980'ies, but now phased out due to legislative demands – took only 52 min per year to care for, i.e. an average of only 9 seconds per day [2]. The incentive of using as little space and as little time as possible, have lead to a number of welfare problems for sows, either directly or indirectly. One example is the use of mechanical slurry systems and extensive use of slatted floors that are difficult to combine with straw or other kinds of bedding and/or rooting materials, and that pigs do not like to walk or lie on.