Newly weaned piglets face significant gut health challenges that cause pain, diarrhoea, and mortality. Evidence-based nutritional and management approaches improve welfare outcomes.
Weaning diarrhoea causes genuine suffering in piglets: acute pain from gut cramping, dehydration from fluid loss, and lethargy from systemic effects. The condition is partly iatrogenic — the industry has traded later natural weaning for earlier weaning that maximises sow reproduction rate, at the cost of piglet gut health. The welfare response is multi-faceted: later weaning age reduces gut immaturity at the time of transition; transition diets bridge the milk-to-solid feed change; and management practices that minimise social stress at weaning (maintaining litter groups rather than mixing, maintaining familiar environments) reduce the stress-gut axis contribution to PWD.