The first week of life is the highest-risk period for piglet welfare and survival, with routine management procedures including teeth clipping and iron injections performed without pain relief in most commercial operations.
Neonatal piglet welfare is concentrated in a brief window where multiple routine management procedures occur simultaneously without the analgesia that equivalent procedures would receive in any other veterinary context. Iron injection, ear notching, and castration all cause acute pain that is currently unmanaged in most commercial operations globally. Teeth clipping causes dental pain that affects nursing behavior. The scale of these welfare harms — billions of piglets processed annually through these procedures — represents one of the largest concentrations of preventable acute pain in global animal production. Regulatory frameworks requiring analgesia for neonatal procedures would immediately improve the welfare of billions of animals annually. The technical and economic barriers to providing analgesia for these routine procedures are manageable and not proportionate to the scale of welfare benefit.