Pain recognition in pigs is improving rapidly but remains inadequate in commercial settings. Better pain assessment and management tools can significantly reduce suffering in pig production.
Pig pain management represents one of the most straightforward opportunities to reduce suffering in commercial agriculture. The evidence that pigs experience pain is overwhelming — their neuroanatomy, behavioral responses, stress biomarkers, and facial expressions during painful procedures all confirm subjective pain experience. Yet routine procedures including castration, tail docking, and teeth clipping are performed on hundreds of millions of pigs annually without analgesic provision in most commercial systems. The barriers are largely economic and cultural rather than technical: effective analgesics are inexpensive and available, but their use requires additional time and training. Welfare standards that mandate analgesic use for painful procedures, combined with training programs that normalize pain management as standard practice, can achieve widespread adoption.