I wanted to check whether the answers were alright so I sought the guy in charge of the pigs and talked with him about the poster. He thought the question was a bit too simplistic.
He pointed out that pigs will not have to stand only on concrete in the UK (In a fairly old booklet from 2003 but it won't have changed much) it says 'To enable proper investigation and manipulation activities, all pigs must have permanent access to a sufficient quantity of material such as straw, hay, wood, sawdust, mushroom compost, peat or a mixture of such...'.
Also, he warned that images are capable of making things look worse than they are. He pointed out in the picture on the right that there was some space for pigs to get off of the concrete and onto the hay.
He said that he would not want to keep pigs without really good rooting space, however.
So I came back with a different question with which to make a collective viewpoint. 'How would you grade, or categorise, environments on how well they satisfy pig’s behavioural and psychological needs to root and play?', which he agreed was more like it. With this question, we can show people a way of looking at pig floor that is better and worse for them. I would like to get comments to improve it on google docs: Here.
The floor they provide at the City Farm will also stand out as being quite a bit better than the lower end flooring.
The answer can lay out a range, or a scale, for pig floor that people can use to decide which farms they are prepared to support. People can also start imagining what sort of floors would be even better for pigs and would come at the top end of the scale.
Here is a link to a description of how people with views are able to make a difference with community answers
