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Paper short abstract

This paper examines efforts to end routine tail docking in European industrial pig farming through deploying ‘iceberg indicators’ of animal welfare, focusing on the pig’s tail. It traces how pig tail biting becomes a focal problem through which alternative forms of pig husbandry are articulated.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines attempts to end routine tail docking in European industrial pig farming through the deployment of ‘iceberg indicators’ of animal welfare, focusing on the pig’s tail. Iceberg indicators are animal-based measures that render a range of welfare-related conditions legible through a single bodily sign. Based on ethnography with ethologists, veterinarians and regulators in the Netherlands, and analysis of EU and national governance tools, I trace how pig tail biting becomes a focal problem through which alternative forms of pig husbandry are articulated and administered.

I show efforts to coordinate industry actors, from producing a single, standardized notion of an intact tail, to the development and circulation of observational protocols and checklists, and training farmers to see biting not as ‘what pigs do’ but as a preventable welfare issue. This work enacts intact tails as a performance value that can be monitored, benchmarked and improved through roadmaps leading to a ‘curly tail’ future. Consequently, the tail reorganizes care, accountability and responsibility among farmers, advisors and regulators, and pigs themselves.

The effects of this reconfiguration, however, are ambivalent. The indicators that demand curiosity to pigs’ perspective and sociality also help stabilize industrial pig production as an optimizable management system. Iceberg indicators thus emerge as devices that both enact change and secure the continuity of the sector. They invite attention to porcine sentience but may also keep the industry viable under societal critique – even if so far, pigs with intact tails have stubbornly resisted being in-corpo-rated into worlds of production.