Water disapearance from drinkers in piggery can be partitioned into the water consumed by the pigs and water spillage. The percentage of water spillage is usually too high to be ingored particularly if using nipple drinker, so the water disapearance cannot be simply recorded as the water consumption. Is there any method or technology can seperately quantify the water intake and spillage in individually housed pigs (eg: one pig with one nipple drinker)? Thanks.
Dear Fan
You are addressing a very good point. By the way the same is more or less true for feed intake.
My only solution was looking for a design of the water supply that would minimize leaking as well as playing with the nipple etc! So in broiler cages we had commercially obtained small cups, in which water was supplied by some nipple type system. This worked rather well in my belief!
You might try to collect the leaking water by some kind of device, but that might only give you a false hope to get at the right intake amount, as evaporation might be considerable.
A further help might be to give the animals enough other things to play with, in the hope to minimize playing with their water supply and thus causing spillage.
Good luck with your (re)search!
The problem can be partly solved with installation of some sort of tray bellow nipple (metal tube cut in half), to distinguish between consumed and spilled water. The tray should be inclined out of the cage, where you can catch "spilled water".
Hope my answer help...
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