Epsilon Archive for Student Projects

Abstract

Pigs are omnivorous animals and their natural food sources are spread over a large home range area. Under natural conditions pigs spend a large part of the daylight period foraging and exploring their surroundings. In today’s intense farming systems pigs that have access to straw spend about 20% of their active time to straw manipulation. Pigs with access to straw are more active than pigs kept on a fully slatted floor, and pigs with access to straw also perform less adverse pen-matedirected behaviors, like tail biting.
The aim of this study was to investigate how fattening pig’s activity levels change within the daylight period. This study also investigated if the level of activity was affected by the amount of straw the pigs that were provided with and where the pigs aim their exploratory behavior, i.e. towards the straw or other pigs.
This study was performed over a five-day period on a conventional pig farm and the activity levels and the behavior of the pigs were recorded on 80 fattening pigs. They were divided in to two groups (8x 10 pigs per pen), 40 pigs in each group, one of the groups were given twice as much straw as the other group. The group’s behaviors were recorded at 7 occasion’s over the daylight period with instantaneous scan sampling.
The average activity levels increased significantly in the group of pigs that had access to more straw. The control group had a more evenly distributed activity over the daylight period while the group with more straw hade a more varying activity levels. The group with more straw performed significantly more straw-directed behavior than the control group. Both groups performed evenly distributed strawdirected behavior under the daylight period. The amount of straw did not seem to influence the amount of pen-mate directed behavior in this study. Both groups were most active at 07:00 and 15:00 and both groups exhibited a clear rise in pen-mate directed behavior at 07:00 and 15:00.
Considering the fact that pigs, by nature, are very active and curious animals, I consider that the increase in activity levels and straw-directed behavior in pigs that had access to more straw is a sign of an improved welfare.