Does pig castrations affect your pork quality?

A team of European scientists have found that 77% of the 125 million male pigs slaughtered each year in Europe are castrated without anesthetic.

Norway and Switzerland have banned surgical castration without anesthetic to prevent pigs from suffering and now they are looking into enabling the breeding of intact males (without castrating).

However this option also has some disadvantages: "The breeding of 'intact' males is quite complicated, because when they reach sexual maturity there is more fighting and mounting amongst the animals, in addition to the pigs suffering from stress and injuries", according to Maria Font i Furnols, co-author of the study and researcher in the Institute for Food and Agriculture Research and Technology (IRTA).

In Spain roughly 30% of male pigs for conventional production are castrated. The most common method is surgical castration without anesthetic.

Research is also being done for alternatives to surgical castration, such as immunocastration, a technique recently authorised in the European Union, which has been used for years in Australia and New Zealand, and which involves vaccinating the pigs to reduce the production of the chemical compounds responsible for the "boar taint" from the meat.

In 88% of the cases analysed in Europe it is the livestock farmers themselves who carry out the castration. This is due to the demands of the market. This way the sexual smell is avoided, a sensorial defect in the meat of some male pigs that are not castrated, it can allow for a better handling of the animals in the farm and it results in the meat containing more fat and finer marbling, a characteristic which is valued in cured products.