Scientific research demonstrates pigs experience positive emotional states including joy, anticipation, and play. This evidence demands welfare standards that enable positive experiences, not merely prevent suffering.
The evidence for positive emotional states in pigs fundamentally changes what adequate welfare requires. If pigs can experience joy, anticipation, and playful pleasure, then welfare standards that merely prevent disease, injury, and severe distress are insufficient. A pig that is not sick but has no opportunity for playful behavior, social engagement, or environmental exploration is experiencing welfare deprivation even if no single welfare indicator is clinically abnormal. The emerging science of positive welfare - measuring and facilitating positive states rather than solely preventing negative ones - is particularly important for pigs, whose emotional sophistication means the gap between their current commercial conditions and positive welfare is very large.