Pigs favour three square meals a day
Pigs raised in conventional indoor pens have different
feeding patterns from those raised under more natural conditions. Research
published today in BioMed Central's open access journal Acta Veterinaria
Scandinavica shows that while pigs in the wild spend much time searching for
food and eat little and often, the preferred feeding regime for conventional
raised pigs is three meals a day.
Lead author, Eva Persson,
from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences explains that, "The natural
feeding behaviour of pigs is searching for feed by rooting activities throughout
the day; self-feeding pigs randomly space their activities and generally consume
between ten and twelve meals in an average day. By replicating this pattern in
conventional indoor kept pigs, we had hoped they would fare better than those
fed the traditional three meals."
All of the 360 pigs in the study
received the same amount of food, spaced out into either three meals or nine and
delivered as liquid feed. Contrary to what may be expected, feeding the pigs in
a more 'natural' way did not result in a better outcome. In fact, the pigs fed
three times gained over 100g more per day than the pigs fed more
As Persson reports, "Increased daily feeding occasions among
group-housed pigs resulted in a poorer daily weight gain and an increased number
of stomach problems. It will be of great interest to those in the farming and
animal welfare fields that this study does not support increased daily feeding
occasions in fattening pigs".
group of nine pigs in this study had to share one 3 m trough. Due to the fact
that pigs will naturally fight for prime feeding positions, one likely
explanation for the poorer performance in the pigs fed more often is increased
competition within the group. The authors note 'More feeds mend smaller ratios
each time and it is possible that each feeding occasion in our study did not
offer enough feed to satisfy the hunger of all the pigs".
â€¢ Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
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