Recognizing and treating pain in farm animals is fundamental to welfare. Advances in pain assessment tools are improving the ability of farmers and vets to identify and respond to animal suffering.
Pain recognition failure in farm animals results from a combination of evolved stoicism, inadequate training, economic disincentives, and insufficient regulatory pressure. Farm animals in pain frequently continue to eat and move — particularly early in disease — making visual observation unreliable. The development of validated grimace scales and behavior-based pain indicators has significantly improved the scientific tools available, but uptake in commercial practice remains limited. Even when pain is recognized, treatment is often withheld due to cost or habit. The welfare cost of untreated farm animal pain is enormous given the numbers of animals affected — mastitis, lameness, respiratory disease, and traumatic injury affect hundreds of millions of animals annually with highly variable analgesic provision.