Sow Housing |
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| What do we mean by sow housing? | |||||||||||||||||||||
By sow housing, the industry refers
to the method of housing, penning, and caring for breeding, pregnant or
lactating sows. Most often, the "sow housing issue"
refers to how pregnant sows are kept. The sow housing choices
refer to three primary housing system components:
Thus, the sow housing issue contains several sub-issues that include access to the outdoors (or not) access to other sows for social interaction, access to
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| Why is sow housing a contemporary topic? | |||||||||||||||||||||
| The sow housing issue has increased in attention for two
primary reasons. First, Europe passed a law some years ago that
banned the use of tethers for sows during gestation. Recently, the
EU has begun a phase-out of gestation crates (stalls). Stalls are
not be on farms by the year 2013; other requirements are also imposed.
The EU claimed to make this requirement based on the available science
(a view contested by the US pork industry). The EU scientific
report is available at:
http://europa.eu.int/comm/food/fs/sc/oldcomm4/out17_en.html Second, market forces are driving the animal welfare issue in all farm animal species. Activist groups are pressuring fast food and supermarket companies to adopt strict animal welfare requirements, often including not allowing the use of gestation crates. The food retailers and others would like to see consistent animal welfare laws around the world. Thus, some groups would like the EU laws to apply in North America (and elsewhere). What does the EU say about the sow housing issue? The EU would like the following to happen with pregnant (dry) sows. They should have:
The EU general rules for all common farm animal species are found at: http://europa.eu.int/comm/food/fs/aw/index_en.html Specific EU pig requirements are found at: http://europa.eu.int/comm/food/fs/aw/aw_farm_pigs_en.html
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| Recent Sow Housing Writings & Presentations | |||||||||||||||||||||
Link
to recent papers in the scientific literature:
PRESENTATIONS & HISTORICAL DOCUMENTS
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Current Research on Conversion from Crates to Trickle Feeding in Social Groups |
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| A collaborative research project was initiated in May of
2002 between the following parties:
Texas Tech University, Pork Industry Institute USDA-ARS, Livestock Issues Research Unit This project involved remodeling a conventional indoor, crated building to include 4 treatments:
Project pictures can be viewed by clicking here. Press release about the project and its sponsors e-mail research questions to: Dr. John McGlone
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| Searching for Information on Animal Welfare | |||||||||||||||||||||
| If you wish to search the scientific literature to find
information on sow housing or other animal welfare issues, we
maintain over 25,000 citations in the database. The simplest
search, entering the key words "sow" and
"housing" yields over 100 scientific papers.
Broadening the terms and conducting a complete search may yield about
500 papers on the subject of sow housing and animal welfare.
Besides the combined publication files of John McGlone, Julie Morrow and
Lindsay Matthews, papers from the collection of Stan Curtis are being
added with the help of Frank Mitloehner at this time to capture the
older papers most of which are not captured by other electronic
databases.
Original articles have been submitted by the researchers listed below and by others. The literature search is free. To access the database, click on: http://www.liru.asft.ttu.edu/Refman/index.htm Sponsors (past or present) of the database search:
for questions or comments on the scientific data base, please e-mail: |
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More to come |
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| Link back to the
Pork Industry Institute web page
page last updated May 31, 2002 for questions or comments, please e-mail: |
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