Sheep are stoic prey animals that hide pain effectively, making pain recognition challenging. Advances in sheep pain assessment tools are improving welfare by enabling earlier detection and treatment.
Sheep pain welfare improvement requires addressing a cultural gap as much as a knowledge gap. The traditional view of sheep as stoic animals that tolerate pain without distress has been definitively overturned by behavioral and physiological research - sheep suffer from pain as much as other mammals, they simply communicate it differently and more subtly. The validated grimace scale provides a practical tool for pain detection that does not rely on recognizing dramatic suffering signs. The cultural shift needed is treating sheep pain management as a default expectation rather than an optional welfare enhancement. This requires both education for farmers and regulatory requirements that make pain relief mandatory for procedures where it is available and effective.