Tail biting is a serious welfare problem in intensive pig production, causing injury, pain, and death. Evidence-based prevention addresses the environmental and management factors that drive this behaviour.
Tail biting causes severe welfare harm: injuries to bitten pigs cause acute pain, infection risk, and in serious cases, death from septicaemia. The behaviour is a symptom of underlying welfare deficiency; it occurs when pigs are frustrated, understimulated, and competing for insufficient resources. Addressing tail biting therefore requires addressing its causes rather than simply managing its consequences through docking. The most effective approach combines high-quality, varied enrichment that occupies the investigative drive of pigs, appropriate stocking density that reduces competition and aggression, nutritional management that eliminates deficiency-driven oral motivation, and early detection systems that identify emerging outbreaks before they escalate. Farms that successfully eliminate routine tail docking through good management demonstrate that the practice reflects welfare system failures rather than an inevitable feature of pig farming.