Routine painful procedures in farm animals — castration, dehorning, tail docking — are often performed without analgesia despite clear evidence of pain and widely available treatment options.
The gap between what is known about farm animal pain and what is practiced on farms represents one of the most remediable welfare failures in agriculture. Procedures like dehorning and castration cause acute pain measurable through behavior, cortisol elevation, and brain activity. Effective analgesics are inexpensive, widely available, and easily administered. The barrier is not cost or availability but attitudes and training. Every year, hundreds of millions of farm animals undergo painful procedures without pain relief — a welfare failure with a straightforward solution.