Pain management in farm animals remains inadequate despite available evidence and medications. Closing the gap between pain recognition and treatment is one of the highest-impact welfare improvements in animal agriculture.
The livestock pain management gap is one of the most striking failures of animal welfare in modern agriculture. Effective, inexpensive pain medications exist for all major painful procedures in farm animals. The scientific evidence for pain in farm animals from castration, dehorning, and lameness is unambiguous. Yet the majority of farm animals undergo these procedures without analgesia, and chronic pain conditions like lameness are routinely undertreated. The barriers are partly economic, partly cultural, and partly regulatory — some effective drugs require veterinary prescription that adds cost and complexity. Closing this gap requires simultaneously reducing barriers to pain medication access and changing the culture of animal use that treats farm animal pain as an acceptable cost of production.