Group housing for pigs, when properly designed and managed, provides welfare benefits that go beyond preventing the harms of individual confinement to enabling genuinely positive experiences.
Group housing positive welfare science brings together the behavioral, cognitive, and physiological evidence that pigs in appropriate social environments experience genuine positive welfare states - not merely the absence of the suffering caused by gestation crate confinement. The research on judgment bias is particularly compelling: pigs trained to expect positive or negative outcomes at different locations respond to ambiguous stimuli in ways that reveal their general affective state, with enriched group-housed pigs showing the 'optimistic' bias characteristic of positive welfare. This moves pig welfare science beyond harm avoidance toward a genuine positive welfare framework that aspires to create conditions where pigs can flourish.