Tail biting in pigs is a behavior driven by environmental frustration that can be substantially eliminated through enrichment and housing improvements, making docking largely unnecessary.
Tail biting is a welfare problem that its most common solution — docking — worsens rather than resolves. Docking causes acute and sometimes chronic pain while leaving the barren, frustrating environment that drives the behavior intact. Countries like Finland that prohibit docking and require enrichment provision have demonstrated commercially viable tail biting free pig production, proving that the behavior is environmentally caused and environmentally solvable. The welfare path forward is clear: address the root cause through enrichment, stocking density reduction, and environmental complexity rather than perpetuating the painful surgical response to a husbandry failure.