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. 2015 Apr 16;1:2. doi: 10.1186/2055-5660-1-2

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© Valros and Heinonen; licensee BioMed Central. 2015

This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

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Theoretical illustration of the result of a 100% vs a 0% tail docking policy. Tail docking causes some pain to 100% of the pigs, and reduces the risk of tail biting (approximately 2-fold, based on available abattoir data). Even though the risk for tail biting might be higher if tails are not docked, and the pain caused by biting more intense than the pain caused by docking, the non-bitten pigs are fully spared the pain due to tail docking in a 0% docking scenario. Pigs that are both docked and bitten suffer the most pain. In addition to this, undocked pigs will likely be kept on better management level.