Research demonstrates that pigs experience positive emotional states including play, anticipation, and satisfaction. Designing farming systems that promote positive emotions is a frontier of welfare science.
The emerging science of positive pig welfare represents a paradigm shift from welfare as merely the absence of suffering toward welfare as genuine flourishing. The evidence that pigs experience positive states, including the joy of play, the satisfaction of rooting, and the positive anticipation of reward, has profound implications for how we design and evaluate farming systems. A system that keeps pigs free of disease and injury but provides no opportunity for positive experience fails the full welfare standard these animals deserve. Promoting positive emotions requires providing the conditions that enable natural behaviour: space to run and play, substrate to root, social groups that allow play interactions, and varied, interesting environments. These provisions are not luxuries but welfare requirements evidenced by science and increasingly incorporated into progressive welfare standards.