THEMATIC REPORT: Best Practices Pigs with undocked tails

Brief literature overview

The literature review for Work Package 3: Pigs with undocked tails was written specifically with the challenges in mind, as a support for decision making for the Thematic Group experts with their task of ranking the collected Good Practices. The review starts with a short introduction to what tail biting is and what is believed to be the root cause for it based on scientific literature. The challenges recognized by the Regional Networks form the main part of the literature review. Scientific studies, reviews, books, national animal welfare compensation agreements, and relevant EU Commission recommendations as well as EFSA opinions were used as references for the literature review. Further, also so called “grey literature”, for example online guides as well as pig industry news, were used together with the scientific literature to give a background and maybe even some insights on how to best overcome the challenges at hand. The literature review ends with a conclusion aiming to help the assessment of the Good Practices.

Challenges

Challenges were collected by the Regional Networks. For rearing pigs with undocked tails the seven most frequently mentioned challenges were the following (listed here highest to lowest in number of Regional Networks mentioning the challenge):

• Minimizing secondary problems caused by tail biting including infections, mortality and carcass condemnations
  • Rearing undocked pigs can increase the risk for tail biting, and tail biting increases the risk for injuries. Injuries can lead to infections, mortality, and carcass condemnations at slaughter, also when occurring before the finishing stage. How can this increased risk for secondary problems, if tail biting occurs, be minimized?
• Workload and labour
  • Rearing undocked pigs can cause increased workload due to the need for more inspection, intervention and treatment, as well as for addition of enrichment materials. Additional labour is costly and difficult to find.
• Appropriate enrichment
  • It can be problematic and costly to get a hold of suitable enrichment materials. Biosecurity issues and slurry management can cause further challenges when it comes to using functional enrichment. Solid toys are not a good solution for reducing the risk for tail biting. Thus, innovative methods for safe, affordable, and easy enrichment use are still necessary.
• Space allowance
  • To reduce the risk for tail biting in undocked pigs, it is important to reduce competition for resources, and to provide enough space – more than current minimums. Mixing of pigs should be avoided: thus, the use of space cannot be always optimized.
• Premium to cover costs lacking
  • Rearing undocked pigs successfully often needs improvements in the farm management or even in housing. How can the costs of these be compensated for? Premium prices, subsidies, etc.?
• Climate monitoring and control
  • To rear undocked pigs successfully, it is very important to optimize climatic features in the farm. Adjustment and monitoring of ventilation and other technology can, however, be challenging, and there is only limited technology available for monitoring climatic conditions on farms (e.g., noxious gases).
• Training
  • Rearing undocked pigs needs additional knowledge and a keen ‘pig eye’. How can staff be trained and motivated to prevent and intervene efficiently? And how can one avoid the risk of staff well-being suffering, if tail biting increases a lot?

Scoring methodology

Collected Good Practices were scored by the individual expert members of the Thematic Group. In order to assess how effectively each Good Practice addresses the theme of growing pigs with undocked tails and the related challenges specifically mentioned in the literature review, the experts scored each practice based on its excellence/technical quality (especially: challenges addressed, scientific evidence, efficacy, ongoing development, innovation), impact (especially: benefits for the pig sector, economic impact, knowledge exchange), and exploitation/ probability of success (especially: Feasibility, transferability, scalability, exploitation speed) by assigning each criterion a score on a scale from 0-5 (0=ineligible – 5=excellent).

Process of selection and discussion

In order to select the TOP5 of Good Practices, the Thematic Group experts met with the Work Package leader after individually scoring of Good Practices to discuss the selection of Best Practices. For this the final accumulated mean total scores and rankings were presented to provide the Thematic Group experts with an overview of the Good Practices after the scoring phase. During the meeting the discussion focused on the eight highest ranking Good Practices, which all had a mean score of over 3 points, as well as one Good Practice with a lower ranking that was brought to the discussion by one of the Thematic Group experts. Good Practices voted into the TOP5 were discussed to be quite different approaches: one very practical (more and changing rooting material – a measure to stop tail biting), one offering the farmer a starting point for prevention of tail biting (risk assessment tool helps to recognize and monitor risk factors), describing two full systems for raising pigs with undocked tails where one was implemented on a renovated farm with conveying an understanding of the nature of the pig as an animal (never docked a pig tail and never will) and the other described a deep bedding system that takes the multifactorial nature of tail biting into account (happy tail), and another practical tool to help tracking and recognizing tail biters (observing and isolating biters) especially for inexperienced observers, as removing an animal from the pen has shown to bring results fast.