Weaning is one of the most stressful experiences in a commercial pig's life, combining maternal separation, dietary change, and social mixing, with management interventions significantly reducing welfare impacts.
Early weaning stress in pigs is multidimensional: piglets simultaneously lose their mother, their familiar social environment, their milk diet, and are mixed with unfamiliar animals from other litters. Each of these stressors is significant alone; combined, they create a welfare crisis that is largely normalized in commercial production. Management strategies that extend lactation, introduce solid feed pre-weaning, stabilize social groups, and provide enrichment at weaning meaningfully reduce the welfare cost of this unavoidable transition.