Removing horns from cattle without pain relief is still common globally, despite the availability of effective anaesthetic and analgesic protocols that make the procedure far more humane.
Disbudding and dehorning without pain relief cause acute, documented suffering in cattle. The fact that effective, low-cost pain management is available makes this one of the clearest cases of preventable farm animal suffering. Local anaesthetic and NSAID protocols add modest cost per animal but eliminate the majority of observable pain. The longer-term solution — breeding polled cattle to eliminate the need for disbudding — is advancing but adoption is slow in high-production dairy breeds. Mandatory pain relief requirements during dehorning, as exist in several European countries, are the most direct path to eliminating this category of farm animal suffering globally.