Articles

Enrichment of pig’s living environment

Céline Tallet
Published : 7 March 2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.20870/Revue-NOVAE.2025.9245

Abstract

Enriching environment stimulates pigs’ natural behaviors and cognition. To ensure that enrichment is adapted to the species, we need to know its behavioral needs and lifestyle. Pigs are very good smellers, have excellent hearing, see mainly in 2D and are myopic. They use their snout to explore their environment. They form social bonds with their congeners and may fight in the presence of individuals they don’t know, to establish a hierarchy. Able to learn and memorize over the long term, they are highly efficient cognitively. Often, our breeding situations are poor or offer unsuitable enrichment. In this article, we show that there are many ways of enriching pigs’ environment, and that certain modalities (auditory, olfactory) have been little taken into account when enriching. Social and cognitive enrichment are also still little considered, even if some possibilities do exist. Finally, there is still a great deal to be developed, and the examples from our experimental farms will have to be generalized.

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Authors

Céline Tallet

celine.tallet@inrae.fr

Affiliation : UMR PEGASE, INRAE, Institut Agro Rennes Angers, 35590 Saint-Gilles

Country : France

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