Over millions of years, all living organisms have adapted to a very specific way of life in the environment they live in. Some species are adapted to a life in the trees, others in underground tunnels, and still others in the water. And at the finer end of the spectrum, we have, for example, flowers that can only be pollinated by special insects, which in turn are designed to fit the pollination pathways of the flowers. This is the development that has given rise to the diversity of species we have today. And species thrive in the conditions in which they evolved.
Livestock and human impact
But then there are the domestic animals, where we humans have driven development in certain directions to bring out specific characteristics. Do they thrive in the conditions we have placed them in? We often tend to think of farm animals as special species that are so well adapted to a life in barn environments that their original biology no longer needs to be taken into account.
Welfare and biological characteristics
At worst, we even start to judge their welfare by our human standards – how we would feel if we lived the life of a cow or pig. And nothing could be more wrong. Because although domestic animals differ in many ways from their wild ancestors and current relatives, they have not lost their basic biological characteristics. And we must remember to take these into account when assessing their ‘welfare’.
Natural behavior in domestic pigs
Studies of free-range domestic pigs clearly show how natural behavior lies just below the surface, even for pigs that have been kept under very restrictive conditions for millennia.
Among other things, the studies showed that when given the opportunity, the pigs began to build nests as they do in nature. They chose slopes with just the right slope, dug a depression in the ground and then built the nest itself from branches, leaves and other soft materials. A behavior never seen in livestock farming because we never gave them the opportunity to perform it, but which has been latent in pig biology for thousands of years. Read the rest of the post at Kristeligt Dagblad.
