Understanding the Behaviour and Improving the Welfare of Pigs

With growing concern from consumers and regulatory agencies about the welfare of farmed animals such as pigs, the livestock sector must assess how animal welfare can be improved whilst ensuring livestock production remains economically and environmentally sustainable.

Understanding the behaviour and improving the welfare of pigs is a comprehensive review of key research in this important area. This collection reviews genetic and developmental factors affecting pig behaviour and current welfare issues at different production stages, as well as specific issues such as tail biting and castration. The book concludes with an assessment of ways to measure welfare, including techniques to monitor pig behaviour.

With its distinguished editor and international team of expert authors, Understanding the behaviour and improving the welfare of pigs will be a standard text for university researchers in pig/swine and veterinary science as well as ethology. It will also be a key reference for government and other agencies involved in regulating and monitoring farm animal welfare, as well as farmers and companies involved in pig production.

This collection reviews the genetic and developmental factors that affect pig behaviour and assesses ways of optimising pig welfare at different stages of production, from breeding to slaughter.

Dr Sandra Edwards is Emerita Professor in the School of Natural and Environmental Sciences at Newcastle University, UK. Professor Edwards is widely regarded as one of the world's leading experts on pig welfare with over 200 publications in the field. She has won numerous awards, including from organisations such as UFAW, EAAP, RSPCA and BSAS. She is a former President of the British Society of Animal Science, a Fellow of the Royal Agricultural Society of England, as well as a former member of the UK Farm Animal Welfare Council and the Animal Health and Welfare Panel of the European Food Safety Agency.

Yolande Seddon is an assistant professor of swine behaviour and welfare at the University of Saskatchewan, and the NSERC Industrial Research Chair in Swine Welfare. Dr. Seddon's research focuses on the behaviour and welfare of farmed pigs and explores the interactions between management, pig behaviour, welfare and productivity, with a strong multidisciplinary and applied research approach. The ultimate goal of Dr. Seddon's research is to contribute to the development of lasting solutions to animal welfare challenges, and help to advance sustainable farming practices.
My research focuses on how animals express affective states (emotions, moods) in their behaviour. This includes bioacoustics analyses, but also studies on the interactions of affect, physiology and cognition. I started my career studying biology at the University of Bielefeld, Germany, specialising in ethology and ecology. For my diploma thesis, I investigated the acoustic communication of the wild guinea pig (Cavia magna) in the Trillmich lab, and continued my bioacoustic work for my doctoral thesis at the Leibniz Institute for Farm Animal Biology (FBN), switching to domestic pigs as the study species. Since then, I have broadened my area of expertise from bioacoustics (ranging from the neurobiological bases of sound production and the communicative function of calls to the use of bioacoustic indicators of internal states of the animal) to the assessment of affective states in the context of animal welfare. My main study species is the domestic pig.