Chronic pain in cats is systematically underrecognized and undertreated, creating a major welfare gap in companion animal care. New assessment tools and owner education are beginning to close this gap.
Chronic cat pain is arguably the largest unaddressed welfare problem in companion animal medicine. The combination of cats' behavioral masking of pain, owners' normalization of reduced activity as 'just getting older,' and the historical scarcity of cat-appropriate analgesics has created a population of billions of cats in chronic, untreated pain. The development of validated pain scales, species-appropriate NSAIDs, and emerging treatments like monoclonal antibodies targeting feline nerve growth factor represents genuine welfare progress. But the gap between available tools and their application to the majority of cats in pain remains enormous. Owner education about the behavioral signs of chronic pain - not vocalization, but subtle changes in activity, grooming, and social interaction - is the most critical current intervention.