European regulations require enrichment for farmed pigs, but the gap between legal requirements and meaningful enrichment provision remains wide across most member states.
The enrichment requirements for EU farmed pigs represent a policy framework that frequently fails at implementation. Pigs are highly intelligent, curious animals that need complex, novel material they can root through, chew, and manipulate. Regulatory minimum enrichment — hanging chains or hard plastic — does not satisfy these needs and provides negligible welfare benefit over bare environments. The consequence is pigs in chronic boredom, with abnormal behaviours including bar-biting, aggression, and tail-biting. Meaningful reform requires specifying enrichment quality in legislation — organic, manipulable, deep-rooting material — not just the existence of any object.