Lambing season involves numerous potentially painful procedures including castration, tail docking, and treatment of dystocia that require adequate pain management to meet welfare standards.
Lambing is an intensive period of animal care that simultaneously involves the highest welfare risks of the farming year. Painful husbandry procedures — castration, tail docking, ear tagging — are concentrated in the first weeks of life. Dystocia in ewes causes significant suffering and risk of death to both ewe and lamb. The welfare standards around these procedures have improved with the availability and affordability of veterinary analgesics — meloxicam administered at the time of rubber ring castration demonstrably reduces pain. But uptake of analgesic use in lamb procedures remains incomplete, partly due to cost and partly due to the time pressure of intensive lambing periods.