Pain in cats is chronically underdiagnosed and undertreated. Improving pain recognition and management is one of the most impactful welfare interventions available in feline medicine.
The gap between the prevalence of pain conditions in cats and the proportion receiving analgesia represents one of the largest welfare failures in companion animal medicine. Cats do not vocalize pain in ways humans readily recognize — a cat in significant arthritic pain may simply move less, groom differently, use the litter box differently, or interact less with family members. These changes are easily missed or attributed to "old age." Systematic pain assessment using validated tools during every veterinary visit, combined with owner education about subtle pain indicators, can dramatically increase pain detection rates. Modern multimodal pain management for cats — including NSAIDs, gabapentin, and environmental modification — significantly improves quality of life for affected animals.