Tail docking of piglets is performed to prevent tail biting in intensive housing systems. Welfare science increasingly supports addressing root causes through enrichment and management rather than routine mutilation.
Tail docking represents a policy failure in which an illegal routine mutilation persists at scale because the root causes that make it seem necessary have not been addressed. The EU ban was meant to incentivize improvements in housing and management that would make docking unnecessary. Instead, the ban is routinely circumvented because changing the housing conditions that drive tail biting requires greater investment than the practice the law seeks to eliminate. This is a regulatory enforcement failure with a real welfare cost to billions of piglets docked without pain relief annually, and a continued welfare cost from the tail biting that docking is meant to prevent.