Gestation crates for sows have been banned in several countries and are facing phase-out pressure globally, with the transition to group housing raising its own welfare management challenges.
The gestation crate phase-out represents one of the most significant animal welfare policy achievements of the past 30 years, affecting hundreds of millions of individual pigs worldwide. Gestation crates confine pregnant sows in spaces where they cannot turn around or express any normal movement behaviour for periods of up to 16 weeks - an extreme restriction that causes chronic frustration, muscle weakness, and the development of stereotypic behaviours. The welfare case against gestation crates is essentially unarguable from an animal welfare science perspective. However, the transition to group housing systems has revealed that group housing, while enabling movement, creates its own welfare challenges through aggression management. Sow aggression in groups causes injuries, stress, and subordinate sow exclusion from food resources - welfare problems that require careful management through stable group formation, electronic individual feeding systems, and adequate space allowances to allow subordinate animals to evade dominant ones. The management skills required for successful group housing are different from those for crate systems, and producer training is essential to ensure the welfare benefits of crate elimination are not offset by poor group management.