Castration of beef cattle is practiced routinely to improve meat quality and reduce aggression, but is frequently performed without adequate pain management causing preventable suffering.
Castration without pain relief is one of the most widespread preventable welfare failures in beef production. Banding causes chronic pain lasting weeks as tissue dies from lack of blood supply — a prolonged suffering that is not eliminated by the acute-focused protocols that have replaced surgical castration in some systems. Surgical castration causes acute pain that, without local anesthesia, is intense and stress-inducing. Both methods can be performed with effective pain management at modest cost, yet most US beef cattle receive no analgesia. The normalization of routine surgical pain in cattle represents a failure to apply welfare science to common practice.