A big and a small piglet nursing.
Cross-fostering vs nurse sow strategies It’s important to define the terms and draw a distinction between “cross-fostering” and “nurse sow” strategies. Cross-fostering: Piglets are selected individually from a litter for a variety of reasons (too many born alive, small piglets, lots of weight variation in the litter, etc.) and then placed onto another sow wherever there is space for them. This sow is often part of the same farrowing batch and has more teats available than piglets. Cross-fostering can occur at any stage throughout lactation, although usually during the first week. A piglet may end up being cross-fostered several times if care isn’t taken to monitor piglet movement. Nurse sow strategies: This is a highly structured method of cross-fostering. In this case piglets are not moved individually to an already established litter; rather, enough piglets are moved to form an entirely new litter, and these are kept to- gether as a group after movement. The nurse sow is not a sow within the same farrowing batch, but one that is further into her lactation (e.g. one week to four weeks). Her own pig- lets are either weaned off, or else moved to another nurse sow which is further again into lactation. Piglets are selected for movement at between 12 and 24 hours of age (after they’ve had colostrum from the mother), then a group of 12– 14 moved simultaneously onto the nurse sow. The nurse sow will then rear the new litter as if it were her own.
The ones that move A few years ago Teagasc carried out some research into nurse sow strategies, led by Dr Océane Schmitt. She carried
30 ▶ PIG PROGRESS | Volume 37, No. 3, 2021
out detailed behaviour observations of what happens after piglets are moved. When 24-hour-old piglets were moved to a nurse sow, there was intense fighting at nursing during the first few days. This was associated with piglets completely missing nursing bouts, until the teat order was formed about one week later. Indeed, it is known that when piglets are moved to a new lit- ter where there are resident piglets, fighting increases and it’s mostly between resident piglets and newly introduced ones. Interestingly, we also found that when seven-day-old piglets are all moved together to a new nurse sow, there was an in- crease in the number of teat changes (when piglets move from one teat to another during nursing). This suggests that
A relatively small litter.
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