Pain management in sheep has historically been neglected, but growing evidence of sheep sentience and better analgesia options are driving improvements in painful procedure management.
Sheep pain management has been one of the most neglected areas of farm animal welfare. Sheep are stoic, their pain expressions are subtle, and they are often kept in large flocks that make individual monitoring difficult. The result has been generations of animals undergoing painful procedures without adequate analgesia, not from cruelty but from ignorance, habit, and lack of appropriate products. The development of validated sheep pain scoring tools, better analgesic options, and growing regulatory requirements for pain relief during procedures represents genuine progress. Normalising analgesic use for all painful sheep procedures — as is now the standard for cattle in many countries — is the next frontier for sheep welfare improvement.