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Hanover (dpa / lni) - The so-called curling tail premium for pig farmers in Lower Saxony will be continued in the coming year.
The owners are rewarded with the bonus if they refrain from shortening the pig tails.
There is 16.50 euros per pig and 5 euros per piglet.
For sows that are not kept in the crate - a narrow pen in the barn - there is also 150 euros per animal and year.
According to the Ministry of Agriculture in Hanover, 354 applications were approved for the coming funding period from December 2020 to November 2021, seven fewer than in the previous year.
The program is meeting with brisk demand from pig farmers: while in the funding period 2015/16 there were still just under one million euros for around 60,000 pigs, three years later it was already more than four million euros for around 170,000 fattening pigs, 190,000 piglets and 4000 sows.
For the period that is now ending, the Ministry of Agriculture even expects 8.6 million euros, and around eight million euros for the next.
The routine cutting of pig tails has been banned in the EU for years.
In order to avoid injuries from tail biting in the animal groups, the practice is tolerated by the authorities.
According to animal rights activists, the danger that pigs will eat each other's tails only arose through industrial animal husbandry.
The reason is that the pigs lived in a confined space and had no suitable occupation.