The attitude of the stockperson towards animals, and the quality of their husbandry skills are both known to be major determinants of animal behaviour, welfare and productivity. ‘Aversive’ handling such as that associated with the infliction of pain has been found to have a detrimental effect on the performance of growing pigs, whereas ‘pleasant’ handling in the early life environment can influence an animal’s subsequent behavioural development. Such handling can reduce an animal’s fear of human. At the same time barren environments have been implicated in the development of adverse behaviours but provision of environmental enrichment can increase the expression of exploratory behaviour and reduce the animal’s fear of both novel objects and humans. The aim of the current study was to determine the interactive effects of handling and environmental enrichment on the behaviour, performance and welfare of the pigs. In this study groups of finishing pigs were exposed to either minimal or pleasant handling, whilst concurrently being housed in either barren pen or a pen enriched with, either chopped straw, a chain, or a novel and nutritious toy. One group of pigs were handled pleasantly (pleasant group) for a period of 5 minutes per day while the other group received as little stockperson-pig contact as possible (minimal group) for a 10-week period. The stockperson did not enter the minimal group unless it was absolutely necessary. There is some indication that pleasant handling improved the food intake of pigs during week 1 to 5, although it did not increase the daily live weight gain or food conversion ratio. It was found that the effects of handling were, on the whole, not affected by the existence or type of environmental enrichment. Overall, the results of this study suggest that pleasant handling may benefit animal performance in the growing period. Pleasant handling did, however, make groups of animals more difficult to handle during routinely husbandry tasks such as weighing upon testing on week 6 and 10, may be due to that fact that the handling protocol used in this study have imposed too large a degree of human-animal interaction. Further work should be conducted to determine the degree of handling which, improves animal performance but maintains the ease of handling.