Castration of male livestock is performed routinely for management and meat quality reasons, but the procedure causes acute and chronic pain that is frequently undertreated, representing a major and preventable welfare problem.
Livestock castration is an area where the gap between available pain management tools and their routine use represents a major preventable welfare failure. The analgesics that effectively reduce castration pain are inexpensive, widely available, and easy to administer, yet they are used in a minority of castration procedures in most countries. The barriers are habit, cost perception, and the cultural normalisation of procedural pain in farm animals. Welfare-positive castration practice uses local anaesthesia for surgical procedures, provides post-operative analgesia with validated NSAIDs, and considers alternatives to castration including immunocastration that avoids the surgical procedure entirely.