Pig Nursery Management: Welfare in the Post-Weaning Period

The nursery phase after weaning is the highest-risk welfare period for piglets, requiring specific management to reduce stress and support transition.

Key Facts

Post-weaning piglets face simultaneous dietary, social, environmental, and immunological challenges.
Post-weaning diarrhoea is the leading cause of piglet mortality and morbidity in the nursery phase.
Temperature management is critical: newly weaned piglets at 21 days require environmental temperatures of 28 to 30 degrees Celsius.
Wet and dry feed access during transition reduces the feed avoidance that causes weight loss post-weaning.
Mixing of unfamiliar litters in nursery pens causes fighting that compounds existing weaning stress.
Providing familiar enrichment objects from the farrowing pen eases the environmental transition for piglets.
Antibiotic use in nursery management is declining through welfare improvement and management change investment.

Welfare Considerations

The nursery phase concentrates multiple welfare challenges into a brief critical period. Piglets simultaneously cope with maternal separation, diet change from sow milk to solid feed, social disruption from litter mixing, and environmental novelty. Each of these stressors alone would be significant; combined they create the conditions for the post-weaning syndrome that causes high morbidity and mortality. Management improvements that address each stress component individually provide compounding welfare benefit. Later weaning age reduces immunological vulnerability; litter integrity during nursery placement reduces social disruption; familiar enrichment eases environmental transition; appropriate temperature management supports thermoregulation in animals no longer huddling with the sow.

What You Can Do

Support producers implementing later weaning ages and litter integrity preservation through nursery placement.
Advocate for nursery temperature standards that meet weaned piglet thermoregulatory needs.
Donate to organisations developing antibiotic-alternative welfare management strategies for nursery piglets.
Engage retailers about nursery welfare standards in their pork supply chain requirements.
Choose pork from producers with documented nursery management protocols prioritising stress reduction.