Advances in veterinary pain management have dramatically improved welfare for companion and farm animals, though significant gaps remain in farm animal practice.
The history of veterinary pain management reflects how underestimated animal pain was for most of the 20th century. Many procedures including castration, dehorning, tail docking, and surgery were routinely performed without analgesia on the assumption that animals did not experience pain meaningfully. Decades of research have overturned this assumption, and pain management is now standard in companion animal medicine. Farm animal pain management lags significantly behind, partly due to cost constraints, regulatory limitations on veterinary drug use, and cultural norms in production agriculture that minimize animal pain.