Boars kept for breeding face specific welfare challenges from isolation housing, limited exercise, and the pain of tusk management.
Breeding boar welfare is frequently overlooked in the focus on sow and piglet welfare. Solitary housed boars are deprived of social contact they are strongly motivated to seek. Limited exercise in individual stalls causes lameness and deterioration of reproductive performance. Tusk cutting without anaesthesia causes acute pain. Housing systems that allow social contact through solid partitions, larger exercise areas, and anaesthetised tusk management represent significant welfare improvements.