Summary of Lecture 16: Painful Procedures in Farm Animals
Key Painful Procedures and Mitigation Efforts
Castration
Purpose: Reduces aggressive behavior and prevents boar taint in pigs.
Pain and Behavioral Impacts: Causes severe pain and stress; animals exhibit reduced activity, tremors, and signs of distress.
Mitigation: Immunocastration and post-procedure analgesics. In some regions, castration must include analgesia if performed beyond certain ages.
Tail Docking
Purpose: Prevents tail biting and associated infections among pigs.
Pain and Behavioral Impacts: Acute pain at the time of docking and chronic pain from neuroma formation.
Mitigation: Analgesics are required in some areas; monitoring is essential to identify stressors that may encourage tail biting.
Teeth Clipping in Piglets
Purpose: Reduces facial injuries among piglets and damage to the sow’s udder.
Pain and Health Risks: Exposes sensitive dentin, risking oral infections and systemic health issues.
Mitigation: Clipping should be avoided if possible; improving sow and litter management can reduce the necessity for this procedure.
Dehorning and Disbudding (Cattle)
Purpose: Prevents injuries from horned animals and improves safety.
Pain and Behavioral Impacts: Extremely painful, with clear behavioral changes such as pessimistic bias post-disbudding.
Mitigation: Performed early in life, combining hot iron methods with analgesics, or utilizing naturally polled (hornless) genetic lines.
Beak Trimming in Poultry
Purpose: Minimizes cannibalism and pecking injuries in densely housed chickens.
Pain and Health Concerns: Causes long-lasting sensitivity, neuroma formation, and prolonged pain affecting feeding behavior.
Mitigation: Environmental enrichment and selective breeding for lower pecking tendencies may reduce the need for beak trimming.
Branding and Ear Notching (Cattle and Pigs)
Purpose: Traditional identification methods.
Pain and Complications: Hot iron branding and ear notching lead to immediate pain and potential long-term complications such as infection.
Mitigation: Alternatives such as tattoos, tags, or injectable transponders are encouraged, and analgesics are advised where these methods remain necessary.
Mulesing (Sheep)
Purpose: Prevents flystrike (myiasis) by removing wrinkled skin around the breech in Merino sheep.
Pain and Health Risks: A highly painful procedure often done without anesthesia.
Mitigation: Research into selective breeding for flystrike resistance and non-surgical alternatives.
Spaying (Cattle)
Purpose: Prevents unwanted pregnancy and reduces hormonal aggression.
Pain and Health Risks: The procedure is painful, often performed without anesthesia, with limited research into effective pain management.
Mitigation: Immunocastration is an alternative but is currently unapproved for cattle in some regions.
1. Gestation Unit
Welfare Issues:
Chronic hunger due to restricted feeding in gestation crates.
Sows need to remain "fit" in order to have more successful farrowing events.
Stereotypic behaviors resulting from lack of environmental control and restricted movement.
Kept in crates where they don't have freedom of movement or the ability to socialize
Improvement Strategies:
Increased dietary fiber reduces hunger and stereotypies, allowing more rest.
Working alongside a nutritionist you could offer an ad. libitum diet while trying to manage weight gain.
2. Farrowing Unit
Traditional Farrowing Crates:
Restrict maternal behaviors (nesting behaviour), causing stress.
Studies show high cortisol levels in sows in farrowing crates
stress is linked to longer farrowing duration, piglet hypoxia, and increased stillbirth, increased cannibalism
Compromised physical comfort (in an attempt to keep piglets from being crushed)
BUT, they have the lowest weaning mortality
Alternatives:
Outdoor systems, indoor group systems, and designed individual pens offer greater welfare but vary in practicality and outcomes.
Hinged crates provide a balance by offering temporary restraint, still have low weaning mortality but offer better welfare after the critical period when lay-on’s happen
Also observed more time exploring, interacting with piglets, less time idle, and fewer teat injuries
3. Transitioning process
Current status: Canadian government required the removal of all farrowing crates by July 2024, but deemed this a difficult task and pushed the deadline to 2029.
Need to account for financial planning and what the area is conducive to:
How many pens? how will they be divided?
Need a resting, defecation and feeding and drinking area?
What will the feeding system look like? food on the floor? electronic feeder? linear feeder? minibox?
Need a hospital area for sows that would be targets
Sows cannot regulate their temperature through sweating, how will you provide thermal comfort control? ventilation?
Things to consider:
Group housing:
Pros: Opportunity for movement and social interactions
Cons: increased risk of pregnancy loss (sows can be in a stall for upto 28 days to mitigate this), increased fighting, increased variation in body condition, lameness
What kind of group housing?
Static: same group is always together
Dynamic: group is changing
Not easy, need expert consultation, and the handling needs to be done correctly every single day (need to make sure each sow is eating, need to watch for injury/lameness/reading the sow/bullying)
3. Painful Procedures in Piglets
Common Practices:
Teeth clipping, tail docking, ear notching, and castration are performed to reduce injuries and boar taint but cause pain.
Guidelines:
Pain management is mandatory, and alternatives like immunocastration and environmental enrichment to reduce tail biting are encouraged.
Castration after 10 days needs to be done with anesthetic and analgesics must be given with no exception at all ages. Ear notching needs to be done less than 14 days of age.
4. Weaning Unit
Stress Factors:
Separation from the sow disrupts maternal bonds, causing vocalizations and reduced feed intake.
Transportation and social stress from regrouping exacerbate weaning difficulties and increase injuries. Exposure to other liters lead to bullying and hierarchy establishment.
Nutritional (milk to solid feed) and environmental changes (temp changes, feed/water deprivation, new pathogens) lead to health issues like diarrhea.
This can be mitigated by feeding creed (solid food type) earlier on in the farrowing crates to offer exposure to solid foods before fully transitioning them to a solid diet.
Can also be mitigated by exposing to other litres before fully transitioning so the larger group isn't as unfamiliar .
5. Rearing Unit
Welfare Issues:
Overcrowding leads to heat stress, disease, and increased tail-biting.
Space Requirements:
Code of practices defines optimal space allowances, with adjustments allowed under strict monitoring during short-tem end of production phases:
Nursery pigs: 15% or up to 20% if not impacting welfare
Grower/finisher pigs: 10% up to 15% if not impacting welfare
K-value = floor space allowance per pig (calculated by multiplying the pigs BW by 0.667 kg to get the floor SA in meters squared.)