Dehorning and disbudding of cattle are among the most common painful procedures in the livestock industry, performed to reduce injury risk — but both procedures cause significant acute and chronic pain that analgesic protocols can reduce.
Dehorning and disbudding represent preventable welfare harms — preventable both through better pain management of the existing procedure and through long-term genetic selection that eliminates the need for it. The pain management gap is particularly acute for disbudding of young calves, where regulations lag behind adult dehorning requirements despite clear evidence of pain responses. The genetic solution — breeding polled cattle — is the most welfare-positive long-term path but requires breeding programme shifts that take years to implement at scale. In the interim, requiring anaesthesia and analgesia for all disbudding and dehorning procedures is the most immediately tractable welfare improvement available.