Like-minded pigs shouldn’t be penned together, says a Prairie Swine Centre veterinarian.
Grouping pigs by character type produces worse results than leaving them in naturally jumbled groups of curious and incurious, gregarious and shy, aggressive and cowardly.
“A mixture seems to be the most favourable way of doing it,” said Harold Gonyou in an interview during the swine centre’s annual conference in Winnipeg March 9.
“All of our research indicates that if the pigs are all about the same age, you do a random assignment and it’s the best situation.”
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Negative results
Most hog producers do not separate pigs into groups according to personality type.
But Gonyou decided to research whether doing so would affect pig productivity. He found it did, but not in a good way.
Pigs that were naturally more curious did worse in segregated groups, where every pig was a curious pig, than did pigs in unmixed groups. And shy pigs kept with only shy pigs did worse as well, although some of the wallflowers became more curious and gregarious in the absence of more aggressive pigs, Gonyou said.
For some reason, in the pig world it takes all types of personality to make a productive society.
Gonyou said he decided to study this because producers now commonly stream hogs by other factors, such as size and weight.
“We wanted to extend it one step further to personality,” said Gonyou.
“What we learned is don’t try to outthink the pigs.”
