The first days after birth can decide whether a piglet survives. This study asks whether easing a mother’s pain changes that delicate handoff of early nourishment—and finds a more complicated answer. Pain and inflammation after giving birth are an important animal-welfare issue for heavily productive sows in the swine industry today.

The study examined whether ketoprofen changed postpartum disorders, feed intake, early milk production, piglet intake, and mortality during the first three days. The central question was not simply whether the sow felt better. It was whether treatment changed the chain of events reaching the piglets: the mother’s milk, the piglets’ intake, and their chance of surviving.

Ketoprofen has three relevant properties: it relieves pain, lowers fever, and reduces inflammation, making it a medicine used to address all three problems. After a long, exhausting birth, reducing pain may help the sow resume lactation and provide sufficient first milk to her piglets during their first day.

The study’s treatment lasted two days, and ketoprofen controlled postpartum problems as effectively as tolfenamic acid, the treatment routinely used under the herd veterinarian’s recommendation. The sows were randomly divided between two treatments: the usual medicine or ketoprofen, given for two days after birth.

The team monitored the birth process and collected records about the sow and her piglets. They also recorded postpartum health, feed intake, piglet birth weight, early deaths, and how much first milk the piglets and sows produced.

Fever was common during the first three days after birth, but it did not differ between the two treatments: 56.7 percent with ketoprofen and 51.6 percent with the usual treatment. As for unusual vaginal discharge, its incidence did not differ between the ketoprofen and control treatments during the postpartum period.

Regardless of treatment, longer births were associated with more fever, especially on postpartum day two, than normal-length births in this study. Separately, prolonged farrowing was associated with more abnormal vaginal discharge than normal farrowing during the first three days postpartum overall.

The biggest difference was not between the medicines. It was between piglets of different birth weights. Inadequate first-milk intake affected 71.3 percent of low-weight piglets, compared with 22.6 percent of moderate-weight and 5.4 percent of high-weight piglets.

Piglet deaths were also associated with birth weight, but not with treatment. Across the groups, mortality was 24.8 percent for low-weight piglets, 7.2 percent for moderate-weight piglets, and 4.7 percent for high-weight piglets.

For the mothers and their piglets, postpartum ketoprofen produced no clear change: birth numbers, colostrum supply and intake, health problems, and deaths in the first three days were broadly similar to the herd’s usual care. The study could not compare ketoprofen with no anti-inflammatory treatment, because untreated sows might suffer serious illness.

So the evidence compares two forms of care, rather than care with no medicine. The researchers also found that neither early milk quality, sow feed consumption, nor estimated piglet milk consumption differed significantly between the ketoprofen and usual-treatment groups.

The conclusion is that two days of ketoprofen controlled postpartum problems as effectively as tolfenamic acid, with no detected harmful effect on the sow’s early milk, the piglets’ intake, or piglet mortality. For people caring for newborn piglets, the practical lesson is cautious but useful: ketoprofen can be an alternative postpartum treatment.

Ketoprofen worked about as well as the farm’s usual treatment for postpartum problems, without changing early milk intake or piglet deaths. The clearest warning was that smaller piglets struggled most to get enough first milk.