The wean-to-finish production phase is a critical welfare period for pigs, with the stressors of weaning, group mixing, and new environments creating vulnerabilities requiring careful management.
The wean-to-finish production period distils the welfare challenges of pig farming into a critical transitional phase: pigs simultaneously lose maternal contact, change diet, move environments, and are mixed with unfamiliar pigs in the space of a few days. Each of these stressors alone would be significant; combined, they create the conditions for the immune suppression, disease susceptibility, and social aggression that make the post-weaning period one of the highest welfare-risk phases in commercial pig production. Management interventions that reduce the cumulative stress burden — later weaning age, pre-weaning creep feed, stable social groupings, adequate enrichment, and wean-to-finish housing that eliminates additional moves — individually and collectively improve welfare outcomes and often production metrics simultaneously.