Dehorning and disbudding cattle causes significant pain. Understanding the welfare implications and promoting pain relief and polled genetics helps reduce unnecessary suffering on farms.
Dehorning and disbudding are performed to prevent horn-related injuries to handlers and other cattle — a legitimate welfare and safety concern. However, the procedures themselves cause significant acute pain that is routinely undertreated. Disbudding without local anesthesia and post-procedural analgesia causes hours to days of avoidable suffering. Simple addition of lidocaine nerve block before the procedure and meloxicam (an NSAID) afterward reduces pain duration to a fraction of the untreated case — with minimal cost. The longer-term solution is polled genetics: breeding cattle that never develop horns eliminates the need for the procedure entirely. Polled genetics are increasingly available across dairy and beef breeds, and CRISPR-based polled introgression is advancing as a precision breeding tool for this welfare improvement.