Group housing for pigs during gestation offers significant welfare advantages over individual sow stalls, and is now required across the EU.
The transition from individual gestation stalls to group housing represents one of the most significant welfare improvements achieved in commercial pig farming in recent decades. In stalls, sows cannot turn around, interact socially, or perform any of the behaviors that make their lives meaningful. Group housing reintroduces social opportunity, exercise, and environmental exploration. The challenges of group systems — aggression, competition at feeding — are real but manageable with good system design, and do not approach the welfare costs of permanent individual confinement.