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Dairy production-related factors that affect amount of cows’ treatments with antibacterials for systemic and intramammary use.
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Relationship between pig welfare in the pre-slaughter phase and superficial bruises of their carcasses.
No full textFrequency of tail lesions and risk factors for tail biting in heavy pig production from weaning to 170 kg live weight
No full textTail biting lesions have a negative effect on both the welfare of pigs and on the revenue of the pig farm. Due to the multifactorial nature of this abnormal behaviour and its sporadic onset, an epidemiological approach was adopted to identify the management and housing factors influencing the occurrence of tail biting and the frequency of bitten pigs in the weaning and fattening phases up to 170 kg live weight in heavy pig production. Data were collected from a sample of 67 commercial pig farms via an on-farm visit and a questionnaire to the farmer. Data collected included general farm information, hygiene and herd health, prevention, management, climate control, feeding and production traits. In the weaning phase, the occurrence of tail biting was increased by a factor of 16.64 for tipped vs. short-docked tails, by a factor of 68.09 when the observer detected poor air quality, and by a factor of 14.44 when the feeding time was variable. In fattening pigs, a high stocking density increased the risk of tail biting by a factor of 18.00. The frequency of lesions in weaners was greater in pigs with tipped tails (0.29 vs. 0.03%; P = 0.034), whereas in fatteners the frequency of lesions was greater when drinkers were not present in the lying area (0.71 vs. 0.05%; P = 0.009) and when air turnover was not detected in the barn (0.70 vs. 0.07%; P = 0.005). There was also a trend for increased tail biting when the stocking density was high (1.06 vs. 0.33%; P = 0.057). Many of the risk factors that emerged for heavy pigs in the present study could be easily managed to reduce the risk of tail biting and the frequency of tail lesions through the systematic evaluation and control of stocking density, climate, and feed and water management
Does stocking density modify affective state in pigs as assessed by cognitive bias, behavioural and physiological parameters?
No full textRecent studies suggest that emotional state can affect cognitive abilities of humans andnon-human animals, determining biases in information processing. Negative mental states,such as anxiety or depression, induce pessimistic judgments of ambiguous stimuli. These assumptions may be used to derive indicators of emotional state in captive animals, providing a novel approach to the assessment of animal welfare. This study used a spatial judgement task, in which farmed pigs were trained to expect food inside a bowl in one location and not in another, to determine whether pigs housed in ways that might be expected to result in relatively positive or negative emotional states respond differently to ambiguous stimuli of intermediate spatial locations. Forty growing pigs were housed in groups of 10 at different density for 8 weeks prior to the start of the test. After training, the pigs successfully discriminated between the rewarded and the unrewarded locations asassessed by increased latency to arrive at the unrewarded location, with no rearing treatment difference. Then, pigs were tested on 3 days in which three ambiguous locations, intermediate between the known rewarded and the unrewarded sites, were introduced and latency recorded. In order to compare the novel cognitive bias task with other welfare indicators, during the 8 weeks of the study four behavioural observations, two measurements of skin lesions, two salivary samples for cortisol and -amylase, and six individual weights to assess growth were collected. Considering the mean of the three test days, there was no difference between the treatments in the pigs’ judgement of the three ambiguous locations. However, the latency trend during the testing days led to difference between treatments on the third day (P = 0.026). Pigs housed a higher density seemed to learn faster that the ambiguous stimulus near the unrewarded location was also not reinforced by a reward and showed a higher latencyto approach on day 3 (44 vs 15.6 s). These animals were also observed to have a higher frequency of sitting posture (P = 0.01), and more total skin lesions (P = 0.035) due to aggres-siveness, in particular at the ear location (P = 0.009), but did not differ in other physiological parameters. Although the results showed no immediate effect of stocking density on cognitive bias, differences in latencies to reach the bowl over the three testing days suggest a different learning process between treatments
Undocked Tails, Mycoplasma-like Lesions and Gastric Ulcers in Slaughtering Pigs: What Connection?
Full text linkTail biting is an economical and behavioral problem in the pork production system worldwide and systematic tail docking has been applied for decades to decrease the risk of its onset. However, legal and market-driven requirements are leading pig producers to rear undocked animals. The aim of this work was to monitor tail, pluck (lungs, pleurae, and liver), stomach, carcass, and thigh lesions in slaughtering pigs belonging to either docked or undocked batches. A total of 525 batches were evaluated at slaughter: 442 docked and 83 undocked batches. The presence of tail lesions was only recorded in undocked batches (44.0 ± 0.402 vs. 0.2 ± 0.2% compared to docked ones, p < 0.001), with a prevalence of severe chronic lesions of 27.3% ± 0.032, suggesting that more and alternative wide efforts to manage long-tailed animals are needed. On the contrary, docked animals showed more frequent ear lesions (9.6% ± 0.037 vs. 4.6% ± 0.019; p = 0.0001). Severe lung lesions were found more frequently in undocked animals (9.2% ± 0.043 vs. 6.6% ± 0.011, p = 0.006), as well as gastric ulcers (26.1% ± 0.021 vs. 20.3% ± 0.37, p = 0.006). These lesions might share the same predisposing factors of tail lesions; the latter might be investigated as an iceberg indicator for other pathological conditions in undocked pigs and eventual causal association among lesions in these organs should be explored
A cross-sectional study for predicting tail biting risk in pig farms using classification and regression tree analysis
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