The effect of feeding salmon oil during pregnancy on causes of piglet deaths prior to weaning

摘要

Pre-weaning mortality is a major source of economic loss to the pig industry which despite improvements in husbandry and farrowing crate design remains about 10% of piglets borne alive. The causes of death are multi- factorial (Varley, 1995) but a large proportion may be due to low neonatal vigor. Commercial pig diets do not normally contain long chain n-3 fatty acids, a deficiency of which has been implicated in reduced visual and neural development in premature human babies and in experimental animals. The objectives of the present experiment were to quantify the causes of piglet mortality in sows of modern genotype and to determine the effects of salmon oil supplementation of the diet of the sow, providing long-chain n-3 fatty acids, on this mortality.