Cats are expert at concealing pain, making recognition and management of feline pain one of the most important challenges in companion animal welfare. New tools are improving our ability to detect suffering.
Feline pain recognition is a welfare-critical skill for both veterinarians and owners. The Feline Grimace Scale provides a validated, accessible tool for assessing acute pain that any cat owner can learn to use at home. Chronic pain is a more insidious challenge — cats with osteoarthritis may show only subtle behavioural changes that owners attribute to ageing rather than pain. The consequence of missed chronic pain is years of unnecessary suffering in animals whose quality of life could be significantly improved with treatment. Veterinary education about feline pain recognition and management has advanced substantially, but owner education remains the bottleneck — most people simply do not know that their elderly cat who moves more slowly and jumps less is likely in chronic pain rather than simply ageing.