Cats are exceptional at hiding pain due to their evolutionary status as both predator and prey, requiring specific assessment tools and heightened clinical attention to identify and treat feline pain effectively.
The undertreatment of feline pain is one of the most significant welfare failures in companion animal medicine. Cats evolved to conceal signs of weakness — sick or injured animals are vulnerable to predation — making their pain expressions subtle and easily missed. Post-surgical studies have documented that cats routinely receive inadequate analgesia after procedures that clearly cause pain, reflecting both the difficulty of feline pain recognition and historical assumptions about feline analgesic needs. The Feline Grimace Scale and validated behavioral assessment tools now provide objective measures of cat pain that do not depend on overt behavioral distress. Adopting these tools in clinical practice, combined with proactive analgesia protocols that assume pain after painful procedures and provide multimodal pain management, represents the welfare-aligned approach to feline pain management.