Day 114 - 04 Apr 95 - Page 33
1 you are rearing animals to give the weaker vessels an
2 opportunity to escape from the more rombustuous and
3 dominating animals.
4
5 MS. STEEL: So that would be a concern of them being in a
6 confined space?
7 A. Always, when you design such systems, you should think
8 about the weaker animals.
9
10 Q. If pigs are kept indoors on concrete or in yards on
11 concrete, but they are provided with straw and they can
12 root around in the straw, do you think that is adequate for
13 the pigs?
14 A. It is a substitute. It depends how much straw it is
15 and what sort of straw. If it is a rather dusty straw, it
16 would probably aggravate the pig's respiratory problems,
17 just as it would with us. I mean, farmers have a complaint
18 called "farmer's lung" just because they get this sort of
19 irritation. It would have to be a thick bed of straw
20 regularly renewed, and the ones I have seen are usually
21 pretty thin.
22
23 Q. Do pigs enjoy rooting around in earth and things like that?
24 A. Yes, a lot of a pig's life is based on its snout. It
25 has an incredibly complicated system for smells. That is
26 one reason why it is employed to seek out truffles and so
27 on. Rooting about, particularly in the right sort of soil,
28 there are certain soils where pigs cannot do very much, but
29 they are very good at turning over the appropriate land,
30 getting it ready for cultivation in some other way, if they
31 are given the chance.
32
33 They have extraordinarily strong bones in the snout and
34 they are able to do this. They seem to enjoy it a great
35 deal. Pig's enjoyment is not only nest building, of
36 course, but doing that sort of thing. Then, in the hot
37 weather, if I go back to your question about sunburn, they
38 like to have the right sort of condition where they can
39 have a wallow. They like to wallow in mud and dust as a
40 form of giving them protection against the sun and cooling
41 them off. Those circumstances would not be achieved, for
42 instance, if they were kept on straw on concrete.
43
44 Q. You mentioned yesterday, although I think Dave went on to
45 something else pretty rapidly, about toys. I mean, how
46 curious and playful or whatever are pigs?
47 A. They are very playful and if they are kept well, they
48 will be almost like puppies. If they are young pigs, they
49 will come up to you and they will pull at your trouser legs
50 and want to be played with. I would think there is a
51 fairly close analogy with a normal sort of dog.
52
53 I have seen a sort of football which has got feed in it so
54 that the pigs kick it and play with it and they get a
55 reward because it yields food as well. It is a well
56 established principle in pig husbandry, particularly in the
57 more extensive ones, if there is not very much else -- when
58 I say "extensive", if they are indoors but there is a fair
59 amount of space -- to give them various devices to play
60 with, and round objects like a football would be a typical
