Perhaps the greatest controversies in terms of animal welfare exist around the gestation and farrowing practices. Conventional practices focus their care on the individual animals and try to limit the number of problems possible around such difficult times. Conventional practices are often criticized for containing sows into a gestation crate initially and then the farrowing crate. Each limiting the sow to an approximately 4 ft X 7 ft area with an overhead restraining mechanism. The idea behind this treatment is to first limit the group dynamics of the herd housing. This allows for individual monitoring of the animals and does not compromise the individual care because of the herd confusion of animal’s identities. Next the housing eliminates the need for large areas for individuals, because it separates the elimination areas from the animal, while supplying easily accessible feed and water sources. With respect to the farrowing crates, the limited mobility of the animals significantly lowers the chances of injury to the piglets and ensures the same principles necessary for healthy life of the sow outlined above – identical to the gestation crate.
The alternative housing, while requiring more area and potentially more materials – making it more expensive have the ability to plan out the gestation and farrowing area to drastically reduce the need for such limiting devices or completely eliminate them. Partial confinement or no confinement systems exist at current time. The former allows the gestation/farrowing confinement to end sooner by “opening” the restraint into a triangular area thus allowing the piglets the area to escape, and the sow some space for expanded movement, but not limiting the sow into exceedingly tight space. The latter relies on the planning of the farrowing area. After birth the sow can remain in an individual stall, which has a pre-designed areas for elimination, food, and rest. Piglets, further have areas they can escape from the sow’s crushing; which are separated by bars. This system greatly expands the sow’s area and can allow the sow to remain there longer without any trauma. All of the systems also rely on the bars separating the resting areas for piglets from the sow as well as additional heat lamps or alternative sources of heat so the need to remain in near proximity to the sow are eliminated. Besides the drawbacks of the alternative gestation and farrowing housing mentioned above, it can be significantly more resource intensive to monitor all the animals housed in these expanded and redesigned areas. The sight-lines are not as convenient, and the access to these pens are also limited. Furthermore, in very large facilities where hundreds of sows farrow in close time intervals the numbers of piglets and sows can be nearly unmanageable, and since these systems do not heavily restrict the sow’s motion – piglets do still run a risk of injury by sow larger than in fully restricted conventional systems.