Accurate pain recognition in pigs is fundamental to welfare — stockpeople who can identify pain and respond appropriately prevent unnecessary suffering in commercial pig herds.
Pain recognition in pigs is simultaneously one of the most important welfare skills and one of the most underdeveloped in commercial production. Stockpeople who interact daily with hundreds or thousands of pigs often become habituated to the background level of abnormal behavior and miss individual animals in pain. Systematic training using validated tools — the Pig Grimace Scale, lameness scoring, body condition assessment — transforms this by providing objective frameworks that do not rely on intuition alone. The business case for pain recognition training is clear: lame or painful pigs have reduced feed conversion, higher mortality, and worse growth performance. But the welfare case stands independently: pigs in pain are suffering, and that suffering can be reduced with available analgesics and management changes if identified promptly.