PAMPERED piglets could soon be taking it easy, chilling out on furniture that鈥檚 more at home in a penthouse than a pigsty. Tests have shown that piglets nurtured on heated water beds stand a greatly improved chance of surviving their first few weeks of life.
Piglets must be kept warm in their first few days to discourage them from snuggling up to their mother. That鈥檚 because up to 80 percent of piglet deaths occur during this period, and most of them are due to the sow rolling over and crushing the litter.
In an effort to tackle this, the trend in porcine interior design is away from unhygienic straw and towards underfloor heating or infrared lamps. But these approaches leave piglets with only an uninviting concrete floor to lie on. The hard surface also aggravates the injuries that piglets often suffer while jostling for position at feeding time. They are especially prone to grazing their forelegs, and the scrapes they get can develop into painful lesions.
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To find a solution, Martin Ziron and his colleagues at the Institute of Animal Breeding and Genetics in Giessen, Germany, looked at the behaviour and weight gain of almost 1400 piglets held in pens with a variety of heating schemes. These included plastic plates, foam mats, waterbeds, straw and plain concrete. Sows were kept in smaller pens that allowed the piglets in to feed but which did not let the sow get to the piglets鈥� rest area.
The result? Around 99 per cent of the piglets preferred the warm waterbeds to any of the alternatives, spending well over half the day lounging about on them and only getting up to feed or play. Farmers should be happier about it too. The piglets on the waterbeds developed fewer skin lesions and gained significantly more weight than those kept on concrete.
The waterbeds are made from a tough plastic membrane and can be heated from underneath by an electric mat or from above by infrared lamps.