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Managing undocked pigs – on-farm prevention of tail biting and attitudes towards tail biting and docking

BACKGROUND: Tail biting is a common and serious welfare problem in pig production, causing large economical losses. Tail docking is performed routinely in most EU countries to reduce the tail biting risk. However, tail docking is painful, and does not prevent tail biting totally. The risk factors be...

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Autores principales: Valros, Anna, Munsterhjelm, Camilla, Hänninen, Laura, Kauppinen, Tiina, Heinonen, Mari
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2016
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5382372/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28405428
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s40813-016-0020-7
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author Valros, Anna
Munsterhjelm, Camilla
Hänninen, Laura
Kauppinen, Tiina
Heinonen, Mari
author_facet Valros, Anna
Munsterhjelm, Camilla
Hänninen, Laura
Kauppinen, Tiina
Heinonen, Mari
author_sort Valros, Anna
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: Tail biting is a common and serious welfare problem in pig production, causing large economical losses. Tail docking is performed routinely in most EU countries to reduce the tail biting risk. However, tail docking is painful, and does not prevent tail biting totally. The risk factors behind tail docking are multifactorial and most analyses are based on studies using biological or epidemiological approaches. There is very little information available on how producers deal with tail biting on-farm. There are also no studies on the attitude of producers towards tail docking and tail biting in systems with long-tailed pigs. We aimed to study how farmers rate the efficiency of different measures for preventing and intervening with tail biting, when tail docking is not allowed. Furthermore, we investigated the attitudes of Finnish farmers to tail docking and tail biting. RESULTS: Respondents scored feeding-related issues to be most important for prevention of tail biting, identifying and removing the biting pig as most important intervention measures, and straw as the most important manipulable material when preventing tail biting. Tail biting was not perceived as a very serious problem by over 70 % of the respondents, even though docking is not allowed, and was reported to occur close to a level which was also considered acceptable by the respondents. Most respondents did not think it is probable they would raise tail docked pigs if it were possible, but about 21 % probably would. CONCLUSIONS: In comparison with other authors’ findings, the ranking of importance of risk factors for tail biting differs between scientists and farmers, and between farmers in different cultures of pig production. In addition, the attitude towards tail biting and tail docking appears to be very different in producers with different experiences of tail docking. These results indicate that a scientist-farmer dialogue, as well as international communication is important when trying to reduce the risk of tail biting, and subsequently the need for tail docking.
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spelling pubmed-53823722017-04-12 Managing undocked pigs – on-farm prevention of tail biting and attitudes towards tail biting and docking Valros, Anna Munsterhjelm, Camilla Hänninen, Laura Kauppinen, Tiina Heinonen, Mari Porcine Health Manag Research BACKGROUND: Tail biting is a common and serious welfare problem in pig production, causing large economical losses. Tail docking is performed routinely in most EU countries to reduce the tail biting risk. However, tail docking is painful, and does not prevent tail biting totally. The risk factors behind tail docking are multifactorial and most analyses are based on studies using biological or epidemiological approaches. There is very little information available on how producers deal with tail biting on-farm. There are also no studies on the attitude of producers towards tail docking and tail biting in systems with long-tailed pigs. We aimed to study how farmers rate the efficiency of different measures for preventing and intervening with tail biting, when tail docking is not allowed. Furthermore, we investigated the attitudes of Finnish farmers to tail docking and tail biting. RESULTS: Respondents scored feeding-related issues to be most important for prevention of tail biting, identifying and removing the biting pig as most important intervention measures, and straw as the most important manipulable material when preventing tail biting. Tail biting was not perceived as a very serious problem by over 70 % of the respondents, even though docking is not allowed, and was reported to occur close to a level which was also considered acceptable by the respondents. Most respondents did not think it is probable they would raise tail docked pigs if it were possible, but about 21 % probably would. CONCLUSIONS: In comparison with other authors’ findings, the ranking of importance of risk factors for tail biting differs between scientists and farmers, and between farmers in different cultures of pig production. In addition, the attitude towards tail biting and tail docking appears to be very different in producers with different experiences of tail docking. These results indicate that a scientist-farmer dialogue, as well as international communication is important when trying to reduce the risk of tail biting, and subsequently the need for tail docking. BioMed Central 2016-02-01 /pmc/articles/PMC5382372/ /pubmed/28405428 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s40813-016-0020-7 Text en © Valros et al. 2016 Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
spellingShingle Research
Valros, Anna
Munsterhjelm, Camilla
Hänninen, Laura
Kauppinen, Tiina
Heinonen, Mari
Managing undocked pigs – on-farm prevention of tail biting and attitudes towards tail biting and docking
title Managing undocked pigs – on-farm prevention of tail biting and attitudes towards tail biting and docking
title_full Managing undocked pigs – on-farm prevention of tail biting and attitudes towards tail biting and docking
title_fullStr Managing undocked pigs – on-farm prevention of tail biting and attitudes towards tail biting and docking
title_full_unstemmed Managing undocked pigs – on-farm prevention of tail biting and attitudes towards tail biting and docking
title_short Managing undocked pigs – on-farm prevention of tail biting and attitudes towards tail biting and docking
title_sort managing undocked pigs – on-farm prevention of tail biting and attitudes towards tail biting and docking
topic Research
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5382372/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28405428
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s40813-016-0020-7
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