# A co-elaborative tool to assess growing pigs welfare

Valérie Courboulay, Marie-Christine Meunier-Salaün, Françoise Pol, Marie Stankowiak

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Valérie Courboulay, Marie-Christine Meunier-Salaün, Françoise Pol, Marie Stankowiak. A co-elaborative tool to assess growing pigs welfare. 7. International conference on the assessment of animal welfare at farm and grip level (Walf), Sep 2017, Ede, Netherlands. Wageningen Academic Publishers, 2017, Proceedings of the 7th international conference on the assessment of animal welfare at farm and group level. hal-01595009

HAL Id: hal-01595009

https://hal.science/hal-01595009

Submitted on 2 Jun 2020

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A co-elaborative tool to assess growing pigs welfare

Valérie Courboulay¹, Marie-Christine Meunier-Salaün², Françoise Pol³ and Marie Stankowiak⁴
¹IFIP, breeding techniques, France, ²INRA, UMR Pegase, France, ³ANSES, Animal Health and Welfare, France, ⁴ISA Lille, Grecat, France; valerie.courboulay@ifip.asso.fr

Animal welfare assessment systems are mainly used by external auditors. Better commitment
could be achieved if farmers could assess the welfare of their pigs themselves and act to improve
it. A project was designed to build an animal welfare assessment tool with farmers from three
different French regions. An exhaustive list of criteria was established at three co-design
workshops involving farmers, their advisers and animal welfare experts. Farmers indicated how
they evaluated whether their animals were doing well, either spontaneously in a brainstorming
discussion, or by answering to questions from a naïve visitor. Then representatives of the
groups gathered, prioritized and selected the criteria according to four dimensions: housing
(cleanliness, moisture, resting posture), behaviour (fear of human, use of enrichment material),
health (diarrhoea, coughing, lameness, severe body/tail lesions, physical appearance) and
feeding (trough/drinker cleanliness, low body weight). They proposed rapid measurement
methods (observation at group level from the corridor and individually in the pen) and stages
to use them: two rooms in the post weaning period (PW) and two rooms in the growing-
finishing period (G). A prototype tool was built on these bases. Farmers and advisers scored
their animals twice, after the training session and six months later (spring 2017). The first series
of evaluation indicated that lameness frequency was lower in PW than in G (0.27 vs 0.41% of
pigs) and ranged from 0 to 1.7% (PW) and 3.6% (G). Exploratory behaviour was scored when
entering the room and 10 minutes later. The percentage of pens with enrichment investigation
was higher after 10 minutes presence, higher in PW period than in G period (34.5 vs 23.1%) and
ranged from 0 to 100% of pens. The feedback of both sessions will allow to assess the feasibility
of this tool in different type of farms, the difficulties encountered in the implementation by the
farmers and to finalize with them a list of relevant measures.