Effective feline pain management requires multimodal approaches that combine different analgesic mechanisms to address complex or refractory pain.
Cats are systematically under-medicated for pain compared to dogs due to their limited behavioral pain expression and metabolic differences that restrict analgesic choices. Effective multimodal analgesia combining agents with different mechanisms achieves better pain control with lower doses of each drug - reducing side effect risk while improving efficacy. Every cat undergoing surgery, diagnosed with a painful condition, or showing behavioral pain indicators deserves a structured, multimodal analgesic plan rather than a single drug at the lowest dose.