Accurate pain assessment in pigs is fundamental to welfare-centred farming, yet pigs are stoic animals whose pain signs are often missed, leading to under-treatment of painful conditions.
Pig pain assessment and management lags significantly behind companion animal medicine, despite pigs having comparable nociceptive systems. Routine painful procedures — castration, tail docking, and ear notching — are frequently performed without anaesthesia or analgesia, often justified by economic arguments or tradition. Yet the evidence is clear: meloxicam given before and after castration significantly reduces pain indicators. Lameness, which affects 5-15% of sows in commercial systems, causes chronic pain that is rarely treated with analgesia. Improving pig pain management requires better producer education, accessible and affordable analgesics, and regulatory requirements for analgesia with painful procedures. Validated pain scales give farmers and vets tools to detect what they would otherwise miss.