Document type: article from the National Hog Farmer website
Authors: Samaneh Azarpajouh, Julia Calderón Díaz, Hossein Taheri
Preview: In recent years consumers have demanded a higher welfare environment for sows and piglets in food production, meaning systems that use little or no confinement for sows during lactation could soon be standard practice.
Therefore, it is essential to protect piglets during that critical period when mortality risk, especially due to crushing, is greatest to maintain high standards of welfare, productivity and output from commercial farms.
Additionally, welfare assessment within all phases of swine production involves pigs at a single stage of their productive life - except in the farrowing environment, where the sow and her piglets are at two very different stages of their lives and have different requirements for their thermal, social and physical environments. Consequently, a system that may be ideal for the welfare needs and requirements of the sow may be far from optimal for her piglets, and vice versa [...].
Therefore, there is currently a growing interest to automate piglet welfare assessment using precision livestock farming. […]
It is important to choose the appropriate technology with correct application to measure animal welfare in order to successfully automate animal health and welfare monitoring (Schon and Meiering, 1987).
Sensors that are commercially available and technically feasible for detecting thermal comfort (e.g., panting, huddling and body surface temperature), absence of injury (e.g., lameness), absence of disease (e.g., coughing, sneezing, pumping or labored breathing) are discussed.
