Swine Innovation Pork has funded research that indicates weaners transported long distances experience slight dehydration and those transported shorter distances suffered more acute stress response.
The differences were not enough to raise concerns about long-distance trucking, the researchers from the University of Guelph and the Prairie Swine Centre concluded.
They conducted their studies during summer and would like to do testing under winter conditions but will need to wait for COVID-19 restrictions to ease before they can recruit students to gather data.
The long-distance trials were more than 30 hours, which would be enough to deliver weaners from Ontario to barns in the United States, and the short-time travel was about 90 minutes.
Dr. Jennifer Brown, an ethology research scientist at the Prairie Swine Centre said more research will yield data that will help agencies such as the Canadian Food Inspection Agency to establish fact-based regulations.
She said more work needs to be done because weaners differ from market hogs on which transportation welfare regulations are based.
