Farmscape for May 2, 2017

A researcher with the Prairie Swine Centre reports providing piglets pain control at castration provides a number of benefits including, in some instances, reduced mortality.
As part of Canada's revised Code of Practice for the Care and Handling of Pigs pork producers are now required to provide pain control to treat post procedural pain when tail docking or castrating piglets.
Dr. Jenifer Brown, a Research Scientist Ethology with the Prairie Swine Centre, notes an analgesic is required for procedures carried out from zero to ten days of age and an analgesic and an anesthetic are required after ten days of age.

Clip-Dr. Jenifer Brown-Prairie Swine Centre:
At this point we haven't seen a lot of benefits from providing pain control in terms of long term benefits on growth but we do see some short term benefits in terms of reducing the stress on piglets following castration.
Some researchers saw reduced huddling and shivering and isolation and those sort of behaviors that would be indicators of pain.
We have also seen, in some studies, smaller piglets and piglets that were born from higher parity sows had reduced mortality when they received pain control at castration.
Clearly there are some benefits for the piglet but mostly around that time of castration.
As a researcher I'm also interested in finding out any additional benefits of this practice but clearly the welfare of the piglet at castration is the main benefit.

Dr. Brown acknowledges a young pig doesn't have a lot of varied behaviors.
She says they're either lying down or nursing from the sow whether they've been castrated with pain control or without pain control so observing the benefits of pain control, from a behavioral point of view, can be challenging.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

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