Weaning can be a difficult time for early-weaned piglets. During the first 3 to 4 days post weaning they lose weight and may not consume enough water to meet their physiological needs. This is not surprising as weaning is an abrupt change for piglets. Up to weaning piglets have lived with the sow and their littermates and acquired their nourishment through nursing. Following weaning, piglets must learn to drink from a nipple drinker, eat a solid diet and feed individually, without the benefit of nursing grunts to signal feeding times. The result of this is a growth check, which is a welfare and economic concern. In this research project we asked the question: How does weaning weight affect the piglet\u2019s ability to negotiate the growth check? The result of this experiment showed that the heavier piglets from a litter lost more weight over a longer period and had lower percentage ADG than their lighter littermates. These heavier piglets may have more difficulty in the immediate post-weaning period because they have less experience with creep feed and water. Increased fighting among these heavier piglets probably exacerbates this. Producers may want to pay more attention to these larger piglets as they may look better on casual inspection but may actually be at more risk during the first week post weaning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Weaning can be a difficult time for early-weaned piglets. During the first 3 to 4 days post weaning they lose weight and may not consume enough water to meet their physiological needs. This is not surprising as weaning is an abrupt change for piglets. Up to weaning piglets have lived with the sow and their […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[930],"tags":[8882,10033,5660,9265,7840,577,25122,6904,46,108,20007,158,20792,5381,818,1978,15637,14,126,89,16262,17743,13636,2365,20201,14980,104,20911,6053,69,3790,6244,15383,3325,77,12903,17832,3857,1301,27281],"class_list":["post-4139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-production","tag-al","tag-arc","tag-consume","tag-creep","tag-creep-feed","tag-diet","tag-eet","tag-fee","tag-feed","tag-feeding","tag-gh","tag-growth","tag-influence","tag-light","tag-litter","tag-loss","tag-nipple","tag-pig","tag-piglet","tag-piglets","tag-pl","tag-prod","tag-project","tag-risk","tag-runt","tag-search","tag-sow","tag-t","tag-use","tag-water","tag-weaned","tag-weaned-pig","tag-weaned-piglet","tag-weaned-piglets","tag-weaning","tag-weaning-pig","tag-weaning-piglets","tag-weaning-weight","tag-weight","tag-welfare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4139"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4139\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}