IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/plo/pone00/0250556.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

An estimation of the financial consequences of reducing pig aggression

Author

Listed:
  • Rachel S E Peden
  • Simon P Turner
  • Irene Camerlink
  • Faical Akaichi

Abstract

Animal welfare scientists have accumulated knowledge and developed interventions to improve livestock welfare, but these are poorly adopted in commercial practice. Animal welfare interventions are rarely tested for economic viability and this limits their uptake. This study employs Stochastic Partial Budgeting (SPB) to determine the viability of animal welfare improvements. Aggression between pigs is used as an example because there is a large literature base from which to draw interventions, and the problem has persisted for decades without resolution. Costs and benefits of three interventions to control aggression (pre-weaning socialisation, synthetic maternal pheromones and large social groups) were estimated by reviewing the academic and industry literature and by conducting a survey of sixteen pig farmers. The net effects were compared to farmers’ willingness to pay (WTP) for interventions to reduce aggression as identified by recent research. Results are consistent with prior research which indicates that improving animal welfare generally comes at a cost to producers. Nevertheless, pre-weaning socialisation resulted in a neutral or positive net effect 38% of the time and should be central to campaigns promoting the control of aggression in the industry. Exposing pigs to synthetic maternal pheromones did not improve profitability but the net costs were small and within the realms of WTP for a sub-group of farmers with animal welfare goals. The net costs of converting existing buildings in order to house pigs in large social groups were beyond the realms of farmers’ WTP. The approach adopted in this study, of combining SPB with WTP from the sector, should be extended to other animal welfare issues.

Suggested Citation

  • Rachel S E Peden & Simon P Turner & Irene Camerlink & Faical Akaichi, 2021. "An estimation of the financial consequences of reducing pig aggression," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 16(5), pages 1-19, May.
  • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0250556
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0250556
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0250556
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0250556&type=printable
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1371/journal.pone.0250556?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0250556. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: plosone (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.