Enrichment designed to promote positive emotions in pigs goes beyond preventing suffering to actively creating conditions for positive experience.
The emerging positive welfare paradigm recognizes that preventing suffering is necessary but not sufficient. Enrichment that enables pigs to experience curiosity, play, and the satisfaction of foraging creates positive states beyond mere absence of distress. Farms that design enrichment to maximize positive emotion rather than just satisfy regulatory minimums are achieving genuine welfare improvements that are measurable through behavioral and physiological indicators.