Dehorning of beef cattle is routinely performed without anaesthesia or analgesia in many countries despite clear evidence of pain and available, effective mitigation options.
Cattle dehorning is a procedure performed for human safety and management convenience that inflicts preventable pain on millions of animals annually. The evidence for effective pain mitigation through combined local anaesthesia and NSAIDs is clear and established. The barriers to implementation are primarily habit and perceived cost, not any genuine technical difficulty. Breeding toward polled status represents the long-term solution that eliminates the welfare problem entirely.