Feeding behaviour, productivity and welfare of sows

Abstract Text: Feeding of the sow poses major production and welfare challenges because of the contrast between situations where appetite is far in excess of the feed provided in gestation, but limits the ability to maintain homeostasis in lactation. During gestation, chronic hunger of restrict- fed sows constitutes a major welfare issue, which is reflected in stereotypy development in confined housing and increased aggression in group housing. Behavioural approaches to enhance short term satiation at the time of feeding, through modifying appetitive or consummatory behaviour, have been less effective than nutritional approaches to increase gut fill. Enhancement of longer term satiety involves nutritional modification of post absorptive metabolic processes by the selection of appropriate fermentable dietary fibres, which may also have benefits for reproductive function. Such approaches are currently only partially successful in controlling appetite, and the ideal management outcome of being able to offer a gestation feed ad libitum is not yet commercially feasible. Housing enrichment to permit the appropriate expression of feeding motivation is therefore necessary to reduce the risk of undesirable behavioural consequences. The challenge of meeting nutrient needs in lactation has been exacerbated by the dramatic increase in prolificacy in recent years. Whilst there have been many studies of voluntary feed intake in lactating sows, feeding behaviour has been relatively less investigated. Developments in commercial technology now permit large scale automated recording of individual feed intake patterns of lactating sows. This offers the potential to extend to this production stage the investigation of the significance of different feeding behaviour phenotypes in feed intake, which has previously been a subject of study in growing pigs.

Keywords: sows