Dehorning cattle is performed routinely to prevent injury in herds. The welfare science is clear on pain and the solutions — analgesia and early disbudding — are available and underused.
Cattle dehorning pain management is an area where the science is completely clear and the intervention is low-cost and effective, yet practice lags dramatically behind knowledge. Dehorning without analgesia causes hours of acute pain and days of chronic pain in an animal with confirmed pain processing capacity. The tools for pain prevention — local anesthetic blocks and NSAID anti-inflammatories — are available, inexpensive, and straightforward to administer. The barrier to adoption is cultural and regulatory rather than practical. This is one of the clearest examples in animal agriculture where a welfare improvement that costs very little and requires no fundamental change to the farming system is simply not being done due to industry inertia and inadequate regulatory requirements.