Sheep undergo multiple painful procedures including castration, tail docking, mulesing, and shearing injuries, yet pain management remains inconsistently applied across the global sheep industry.
Pain management in sheep suffers from a combination of inadequate veterinary engagement, cost pressures, and regulatory permissiveness. The animals' stoic nature — evolved to conceal pain from predators — means suffering is often invisible to producers who interpret lack of overt distress as lack of pain. Evidence is clear that routine procedures cause significant acute pain and that analgesia reduces both the acute pain response and subsequent behavioural indicators of chronic pain. Best practice requires anaesthetic infiltration for castration and tail docking in older animals, meloxicam or equivalent NSAID coverage for all surgical procedures, and routine lameness scoring with a written treatment protocol. The regulatory minimum in most jurisdictions falls short of this standard, making voluntary adoption and retailer requirements critical.