Creating farm environments that actively promote positive emotional states in pigs goes beyond harm prevention to enable animals to experience genuinely good lives.
Positive welfare science challenges the food industry to move beyond minimum suffering standards to actively promote flourishing. For pigs, this means environments where foraging, play, social bonding, and exploration are genuinely possible — not just theoretically permitted. Operationally, this looks like deep straw bedding for rooting, rotating novel enrichment objects, stable social groups without disruptive regrouping, and management that allows pigs to be pigs rather than production units. Farms scoring well on positive welfare indicators simultaneously tend to score well on traditional welfare and production metrics — suggesting that positive welfare investment is both ethically and commercially sound. The evidence base for pig positive welfare is now strong enough to support regulatory requirements.