What would a day in a pig’s life be like if it could live as it would like – and according to its natural needs? Let’s start early in the morning:
Pigs like to sleep snuggled together in their nest. In the morning they get up together and do their business at a remote place to defecate and urinate. Pigs spend around 70 percent of the day inquisitively exploring and foraging for food. Fattening pigs that live in intensive farming without litter perform substitute actions in their distress, for example by rummaging around in the contents of the feeding trough or rubbing the snout disc back and forth over the concrete or slatted floor in a stereotypical manner.
Pigs have a keen sense of delicacies and a wide range of food: They eat grass, fruit, nuts, leaves, herbs, mushrooms, roots, tubers, worms, snails, larvae, carrion, small vertebrates, but also larger animals such as fawns. Under intensive husbandry conditions, the pigs are usually given a low-irritant standard feed twice a day, which they usually only consume for about ten minutes.
At midday, pigs like to take a break of several hours or devote themselves to extensive bathing, wallowing and rolling around. In the early evening hours they set up their sleeping nest by bringing fresh material such as grass, leaves and thin twigs into which they nest comfortably. All of these natural needs of domestic pigs must be strongly or completely suppressed in intensive animal husbandry.
Tip: The best way to observe the natural behavior of pigs is on so-called life farms or sanctuaries that keep their animals in a species-appropriate manner and do not slaughter them. Visit one of these farms and see for yourself what a natural pig day looks like.
Pigs spend 70 percent of the day exploring and foraging.