Genomic selection enables more rapid improvement in pig welfare traits including disease resistance, reproductive efficiency, and pain sensitivity than traditional selective breeding approaches.
Genetic improvement for welfare traits offers cumulative long-term benefit: each generation of pigs can be more disease-resistant, structurally sound, and reproductively efficient than the last. The challenge is ensuring welfare traits receive appropriate weighting in breeding indices alongside productivity traits. Genomic selection amplifies both the benefits of including welfare traits and the risks of excluding them - creating economic arguments for welfare-trait inclusion as well as ethical ones.