Dehorning and disbudding of cattle is one of the most common painful procedures in dairy and beef production, with pain management and genetic alternatives both available but inconsistently adopted.
Dehorning and disbudding welfare represents a solvable problem: pain management exists, works, and costs relatively little. The persistence of painful procedures without analgesia reflects habit and regulatory inadequacy rather than economic necessity. The longer-term solution — polled genetics — eliminates the procedure entirely. The welfare argument for accelerating polled breed adoption is compelling: it prevents pain for millions of calves annually without requiring ongoing compliance with pain management protocols whose implementation is difficult to verify.