Some EU laws are broken quietly. This one has been broken in plain sight for three decades. In a new analysis, the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) lays out how the bloc's ban on routine tail-docking of piglets — on the books since 1994 — is ignored almost everywhere, and how Brussels keeps paying the farms that ignore it.
The EU's Pig Directive requires farmers to fix the crowded, understimulating conditions that make pigs bite each other's tails, rather than simply cutting the tails off — a painful procedure usually done without anaesthetic. More than thirty years on, CEPS notes, only Finland and Sweden actually comply. Across the rest of the Union roughly 77% of piglets are still routinely docked, with rates of 95% to 100% in big producers such as Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain and Denmark.
The analysis's sharpest point is about consequences, or the absence of them. The European Commission has declined to open infringement proceedings even where it acknowledged the law was not being applied. National enforcement is weaker still: a scathing April 2026 report by Denmark's National Auditors found a system riddled with loopholes, where offending producers could wipe their records simply by changing their corporate registration number. Only 4% of documented breaches were ever referred to police, and — tellingly — not a single producer was excluded from Common Agricultural Policy funding.
CEPS frames the failure as a public-health risk too, not just an ethical one. Poor welfare weakens animals' immune systems and fuels heavy use of antibiotics on farms, feeding the rise of drug-resistant bacteria that are projected to contribute to some 390,000 deaths a year in the EU. A rule ignored on the farm, in other words, shows up later in the hospital.
With the post-2027 CAP reform now taking shape, CEPS wants Brussels to draw the obvious link: stop sending subsidies to producers who break EU law, and impose real sanctions on the national authorities that let them. The deeper question the analysis raises is uncomfortable for the Union. If a clear, long-standing rule can be flouted by 25 of 27 member states with no penalty, what exactly does "EU law" mean when enforcement is left to governments that would rather look away?
