Working Toward Pain-Free Farming

The pain-free farming concept aims to eliminate unnecessary pain from livestock production through better practices, analgesia, and breeding advances.

Key Facts

Many routine livestock procedures including dehorning, castration, and tail docking cause significant pain
Pain-free alternatives exist for many of these procedures but are not widely adopted
Breeding programs developing polled cattle eliminate the need for dehorning in future generations
The pain-free farming agenda is supported by welfare science, consumer demand, and some industry leaders

Welfare Considerations

Pain-free farming represents an ambitious but achievable goal for reducing the welfare burden of routine livestock procedures. Many of the most painful interventions in farming — dehorning of calves, castration of piglets and lambs, beak trimming of chicks — are performed to manage problems that arise from intensive production systems. True pain-free farming requires both the use of analgesia where procedures cannot be eliminated, and longer-term system changes that reduce the need for the procedures in the first place. Breeding polled cattle, developing enriched environments that eliminate tail biting without docking, and transitioning to cage-free housing that eliminates beak trimming are examples of system-level approaches to pain elimination.

What You Can Do

Support pain-free farming initiatives and the organizations advocating for them
Choose products from farms committed to analgesia for all painful procedures
Advocate for regulatory requirements for pain relief before any livestock procedure
Encourage breeding programs that eliminate the need for painful management procedures