Twenty Five Years of Widespread Use of Copper as an Additive to Diets of Growing Pigs

Abstract

Twenty five years have passed since Barber, Braude, Mitchell and Cassidy (1955) reported that performance of growing pigs was improved by supplementing their diet with copper sulphate, supplying 250 mg Cu/kg diet. A great amount of research endeavour followed throughout the world and established beyond any reasonable doubt that an addition of 200 – 250 mg Cu/kg diet results in increasing the profitability of pig keeping, without having any known adverse effects on the pig or on the consumer of pig meat and meat products (see reviews by Braude, 1965 and 1975; Wallace, 1967; Meyer and Kroger, 1973; UKASTA, 1978; Omole, 1980). A very forthright support for the use of copper in pig feeding has recently been made by Wilson et al. (1979) in a paper on ‘Copper as an inexpensive growth promoter for the pig’. There is very little that one can add to elaborate on the existing evidence, but one can stress the fact that during the last 25 years, in the United Kingdom, at least 200 million pigs received diets supplemented with copper, and, as far as I know, not a single person or animal has suffered from it in any way. It is much more difficult, virtually impossible except as a speculation, to estimate the usage throughout the world, but I would venture a suggestion that at least 2 billion pigs received diets supplemented with copper.