The curse of tail-docking: the painful truth about Italy's pigs | Cecilia Ferrara and Catherine Nelson

In the country's two main breeding regions, 98% of farmers rely on the banned, traumatic practice of routinely cutting pigs' tails

On a farm deep in Italy's Lombardy region, scores of contented-looking pigs gambol, play and root about in spacious pens deep in straw. It looks more rural idyll than 1,000-strong breeding farm, but the pigs at this Fumagalli farm are in a lucky minority.

Unlike many of the pigs destined for the country's prestigious prosciutto market - worth 7.98bn euros (7bn) last year - they have not been subjected to the painful practice of tail-docking. A recent EU audit found that across farms in Lombardy and Emilia-Romagna, the country's two main pig breeding regions, 98% of farmers remove their animals' tails, a rate that stands among the highest in Europe.