section_path: Impact of pig husbandry/On animal welfare
section_name: On animal welfare
paragraph_text: On animal welfare
  
  Intensive pig production involves practices such as castration, earmarking, tattooing for litter identification, tail docking, which are often done without the use of anesthetic. Painful teeth clipping of piglets is also done to curtail cannibalism, behavioural instability and aggression, and tail biting, which are induced by the cramped environment. In English indoor farming, young pigs (less than 110kg in weight) are allowed to be kept with less than one square meter of space per pig.
  
  Pigs often begin life in a farrowing or gestation crate, which is a small pen with a central cage, designed to allow the piglets to feed from their mother while preventing her from attacking or crushing them. The crates are so small that the mother sows cannot turn around. While wild piglets remain with their mothers for around 12 to 14 weeks, farmed piglets are weaned and removed from their mothers at between two and five weeks old. Of the piglets born alive, 10% to 18% will not reach weaning age, instead succumbing to disease, starvation, dehydration, or accidental crushing by their mothers. Unusually small runt piglets are typically killed immediately by staff through blunt trauma to the head. Further, intensive farming involves sows giving birth to large litter sizes at an unnatural frequency, which increases the rate of stillborn piglets, and causes as many as 25%-50% of sows to die of prolapse.