Cattle are stoic animals that mask pain effectively, making behavioral pain assessment challenging. Understanding cattle pain indicators enables earlier identification and treatment of painful conditions.
The challenge of cattle pain assessment is that the most reliable pain indicators are subtle and require trained observation of individual animals - difficult on farms where a single stockperson may oversee hundreds of cows. Automation of pain detection through computer vision, accelerometers, and other sensing technologies is therefore particularly valuable for cattle welfare. In the interim, training stockpeople in cattle pain recognition using validated tools is the most impactful intervention. A stockperson who can reliably identify the subtle ear position changes and altered facial expression of a cow in pain will treat that animal earlier and with better outcomes than one relying only on obvious clinical signs. Pain recognition training is among the highest-return welfare investments in cattle farming.