Pain management for routine procedures and illness in commercial pig farming remains inadequate in many systems, with economic and practical barriers preventing consistent use of available analgesics.
The gap between available analgesics and their consistent use in pig farming represents a preventable welfare failure. Effective, licensed analgesics exist for the most common painful procedures in pig production — castration, tail docking, and ear notching. The failure to use them routinely is not a technical problem but a cultural and economic one: pain management adds cost and time, and pain in pigs has historically been undervalued. Education programs that improve producer recognition of pig pain, combined with regulatory requirements for analgesia at specific procedures, have demonstrated effectiveness in improving adoption rates. The welfare case is straightforward: if a procedure causes pain and effective analgesia exists, using it is the ethical minimum. The economic case — analgesia-treated pigs have better growth rates and fewer secondary infections — supports the welfare case.