The UK experience of group housing gestating sows has provided an important resource of management information. It is well recognized that certain systems, which have facilities for individual feeding, for example, cubicles, feeders and electronic sow feeders (ESF), provide both commercial and welfare advantages. When designing group-housing systems it is important to consider all elements of the pen facilities and management; for example, feeding, lying, dunging, socializing, water provision and previous experience. Each point of contact between sows will reinforce the social hierarchy, whether they are housed in small groups or are members of a subgroup within a large, dynamic group housing systems. In any group size there will always be individual animals that seek isolation, safety and their own company; this is particularly the case in small group sizes. A trial was designed at Harper Adams University College to test whether providing a choice of lying space is beneficial to small groups of sows. Eighty-two, parity two to four PIC Camborough 15 sows ((LRxD)xLW) were housed in groups ranging from five to eight in gestation pens consisting of a bedded lying area, a scraped dunging passage and a set of sow operated feeders. The sows were allocated to one of two treatments: Restricted access to feeding stalls, only at feeding time and free access to the sow operated feeding stalls at all times. The sows were fed once a day and the feeding stalls had a sow operated back gate that provided complete security from other group members. The hierarchy of each group was determined late in gestation and sows were categorized as either dominant or submissive. As a measure of the level of aggression, lesion scores on the skin of the sows were measured throughout gestation. In this study the overall time spent lying down was not affected by the access to the feeding stalls and ranged between 82% and 86% of behaviour observations. However, where sows had free access to the feeder both dominant and submissive sows chose to use this space as a lying area. Indeed one sow would never lie in the bedded lying area. When the lying area was restricted the sows that might have preferred to lie in the feeders were obliged to lie either in the dunging passage or with more intimidating pen mates. The overall levels of lesions were not considered to be particularly high in either situation. This indicated that the pen size and management system was sufficient to minimize aggression, yet, as might have been expected there was a significant difference between the dominant and submissive animals. Finally, even though the overall performance was good there was a significant effect on number born that can be attributed to the greater choice given to the sows with free access to the feeders. Our observations so far would lead us to conclude that at high levels of performance competition for lying space is an important consideration in pen design. In relatively high welfare systems, where sows are given a choice of lying area in gestation, there can be an increase in sow productivity. Also the welfare of low-ranking animals may be compromised if they are obliged to share the same space as their high-ranking contemporaries.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The UK experience of group housing gestating sows has provided an important resource of management information. It is well recognized that certain systems, which have facilities for individual feeding, for example, cubicles, feeders and electronic sow feeders (ESF), provide both commercial and welfare advantages. When designing group-housing systems it is important to consider all elements […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[928],"tags":[8855,4685,88,8882,640,10033,13816,3550,12251,19127,3551,9628,19644,12670,17731,7922,17442,4598,4593,6935,2826,3552,6904,46,1293,4178,108,7864,8108,102,19933,20007,109,21766,3553,2788,3554,47,9053,121,3555,8410,48,15459,2494,8254,115,63,22808,16262,17743,1498,12671,396,1533,3556,104,20391,23779,14203,96,51,4599,3283,1059,20911,4874,1579,14923,14909,52,6053,20757,69,27281],"class_list":["post-5200","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-welfare","tag-feeding-stalls","tag-access","tag-aggression","tag-al","tag-animal","tag-arc","tag-ass","tag-barn-design","tag-born","tag-camborough","tag-competition","tag-contact","tag-dd","tag-down","tag-dunging-passage","tag-dynamic-group","tag-dynamic-group-housing","tag-electronic","tag-electronic-sow-feeder","tag-electronic-sow-feeders","tag-esf","tag-facility","tag-fee","tag-feed","tag-feeder","tag-feeders","tag-feeding","tag-free-access","tag-gestating-sow","tag-gestation","tag-gestation-pens","tag-gh","tag-group-housing","tag-group-housing-systems","tag-group-living","tag-group-size","tag-hierarchy","tag-housing","tag-leg","tag-lesions","tag-lying","tag-lying-area","tag-management","tag-ped","tag-pen","tag-pen-design","tag-pen-size","tag-performance","tag-pic","tag-pl","tag-prod","tag-productivity","tag-provis","tag-safety","tag-size","tag-small","tag-sow","tag-sow-feeder","tag-sow-feeders","tag-sow-groups","tag-sows","tag-space","tag-stall","tag-stalls","tag-system","tag-t","tag-tan","tag-test","tag-the-welfare","tag-the-welfare-of","tag-treatment","tag-use","tag-vision","tag-water","tag-welfare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5200","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=5200"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5200\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}