Dehorning of dairy and beef cattle — removing horn tissue to prevent injury in intensive housing — is routinely performed without adequate pain relief, causing preventable suffering that can be eliminated through polled genetics or proper analgesia.
Dehorning without pain relief is one of the most widespread and preventable sources of acute pain in farmed animal production. Calves subjected to hot iron disbudding without local anesthetic show acute pain behaviors during the procedure and elevated pain biomarkers for days afterward. The procedure is performed on millions of calves annually in countries with no pain relief requirements. The solution is straightforward and inexpensive: local anesthetic plus NSAIDs reduces pain to near-negligible levels. Alternatively, breeding polled cattle eliminates the need for dehorning entirely. The persistence of dehorning without pain relief in the face of simple, cheap solutions represents a failure of regulatory will rather than a technical or economic barrier.