Mastitis is the most economically significant and welfare-important disease in dairy cattle, affecting millions of cows annually and causing significant pain that is often undertreated.
Mastitis welfare harm is both acute and chronic: clinical mastitis causes intense pain from the inflammatory response — research using lameness scoring models suggests mastitis pain can be more severe than many painful conditions. Many cases go untreated or are treated without analgesia despite analgesics being cheap and effective. Sub-clinical mastitis causes persistent low-grade discomfort across large proportions of dairy herds. The welfare improvement potential from universal pain relief at mastitis treatment and faster detection through somatic cell count monitoring is enormous.