Cats hide pain instinctively, making assessment enormously challenging. Validated pain assessment tools have transformed veterinary care and can help owners identify undetected suffering.
Cat pain assessment is a welfare frontier with extraordinary practical importance. The scale of undetected and untreated chronic pain in cats — particularly from arthritis in older animals — represents a massive, invisible welfare problem. The tools now exist to detect this suffering reliably, but they require both veterinary adoption and owner education. A cat that stops jumping on the sofa is not "slowing down with age" — they are likely in pain. Recognizing and treating that pain dramatically improves quality of life in the final years of an animal's life.