Cattle are stoic animals that conceal pain, making recognition challenging. Advances in pain assessment tools are improving welfare by enabling more effective pain management in farm settings.
The underrecognition and undertreatment of pain in farm cattle represents one of the most significant and tractable welfare problems in animal agriculture. Chronic lameness causes persistent suffering that affects quality of life for months or years. Acute pain from procedures including dehorning, castration, and dystocia is frequently unrelieved despite the availability of effective and inexpensive analgesics. Facial expression scoring and gait analysis tools translate the growing scientific understanding of cattle pain into practical farm-level assessment methods. Regulatory requirements for pain relief during procedures, combined with veterinarian and producer education, have the potential to substantially reduce the burden of untreated pain in cattle populations.