Outdoor pig farming offers significant welfare advantages over indoor systems but introduces different welfare challenges around weather exposure and predation.
Outdoor pig welfare represents a genuine improvement over indoor intensive systems for behavioral expression, but outdoor systems have their own welfare challenges. Extreme weather - heat waves and severe winters - create welfare emergencies that well-managed indoor systems may handle better. Predation of piglets by foxes causes welfare harm both to killed piglets and to distressed sows. Well-designed outdoor systems with appropriate shelter, wallowing facilities, and predator management address most of these challenges while providing behavioral opportunities impossible indoors. Welfare-positive outdoor systems require higher management skill and attention than indoor equivalents, but the welfare outcomes are superior.