Sheep are stoic animals that mask pain effectively, making welfare assessment challenging. Improving pain recognition and management in sheep is an important frontier in farm animal welfare.
Sheep welfare suffers from a double disadvantage: as prey animals they evolved to mask signs of weakness including pain, and as a production species they have historically received less veterinary and welfare research attention than cattle or pigs. The result is widespread underrecognition of chronic painful conditions — footrot, mastitis, lameness — that may affect significant proportions of commercial flocks without triggering adequate treatment responses. The SPFAU, developed at the University of Edinburgh, provides a practical facial expression-based pain assessment tool that does not require blood sampling or behaviour change observation over time. Its adoption into flock health monitoring represents a genuine welfare improvement. The availability of licensed NSAIDs for sheep and their demonstrated efficacy in reducing lameness and treatment response times means that the main barriers to better pain management are knowledge and attitude rather than tool availability.