Farmers and farm workers who can accurately recognise pain in livestock provide better welfare outcomes. Training in pain assessment is a high-impact welfare intervention.
The ability to recognise pain is the prerequisite for treating it. Research consistently shows that farm workers and even veterinarians underestimate pain intensity in farm animals — a combination of stoicism in prey species, normalisation of conditions that cause pain, and inadequate training. Validated pain assessment tools — facial grimace scales, locomotion scoring, behavioural observation protocols — provide structured frameworks for pain recognition that perform better than intuition alone. Training farm workers in these tools improves the probability that painful conditions are identified and treated. This represents a relatively low-cost intervention with significant welfare benefit.