Assessing pain in wild animals is methodologically challenging but increasingly important as conservation medicine, wildlife management, and wild animal suffering research develop practical tools.
The difficulty of assessing pain in wild animals has historically been used as a justification for not addressing it — if we cannot know an animal is in pain, we need not act. This reasoning is being challenged on ethical and scientific grounds. The precautionary principle suggests that where an animal has the neurobiological architecture to experience pain, we should assume it does until proven otherwise. Conservation medicine is developing validated pain scales for an expanding range of wildlife species, enabling more informed decisions about analgesia in wildlife casualty care, post-surgical management, and wildlife management procedures. Improving wild animal pain assessment is a frontier that requires investment in both science and training.