Moving beyond the absence of suffering to measuring positive welfare in pigs, including play, exploration, and positive emotional states.
Conventional farm welfare assessment has focused primarily on reducing negative experiences — pain, fear, hunger, and disease. Positive welfare science extends this by asking what good welfare actually looks like for pigs and how we can measure it. Pigs in positive welfare states show play behavior, exploratory activity, social affiliative interactions, and relaxed body postures. These behaviors require enriched environments with rooting substrate, space, and social opportunity. Measuring positive welfare provides a higher bar for production systems and gives producers a richer understanding of what their animals actually experience.