Advancing swine welfare practices to empower your industry: What the Chair in Swine Welfare is doing for you
Martyna Lagoda, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Saskatchewan working for the NSERC Industrial Research Chair in Swine Welfare under the supervision of Yolande Seddon, gave an update at the 2024 PSC Producer Meetings on the research results and tools developed by the Chair in Swine Welfare for the Canadian swine industry. The Chair program was designed with two overarching objectives, which contained four major research goals:
- Investigate beneficial pathways to support eh pig in fully-slatted systems:
- Goal 1: understand how early-life management contributes to pig robustness, sociability, and welfare in the growing pig;
- Goal 2: identify if promotion of play behaviour can increase physiological and psychological robustness and confer benefits to resilience and productivity of pigs.
- Develop tools to monitor and measure welfare:
- Goal 3: identify and validate biological markers for objective assessment of pig welfare;
- Goal 4: understand the value of carcass assessment to inform on animal welfare on-farm and during pre-slaughter handling.
The NSERC Chair in Swine Welfare provided information and tools that the industry can employ to promote Canada as a leader in pork production and quality, and to elevate Canada’s options and conversations on animal care. Moving forward, the team is now looking to support industry implementation of goals 1, 2 and 4 in commercial production systems this summer.
