Dehorning and disbudding of cattle are among the most common painful management procedures in the industry, but adequate pain relief remains inconsistently applied worldwide.
Dehorning causes acute, measurable pain yet is performed without pain relief in the majority of cases globally — a gap between available welfare knowledge and practice that is difficult to justify. The procedure involves tissue destruction, burning, or horn removal from a neurologically sensitive area. Without anesthesia, calves show immediate behavioral signs of severe acute pain. Without post-procedural analgesia, that pain persists for days. The welfare solution is straightforward: use local anesthetic plus NSAID as standard protocol, or shift to polled genetics to eliminate the procedure entirely. Neither option is impractical — only insufficiently mandated.