Effective pain management for farm animals undergoing painful procedures and managing injury is a critical and still-underdeveloped area of farm animal welfare.
Farm animal pain management is perhaps the most fundamental welfare gap between farm animals and companion animals. A dog undergoing surgery receives pre-operative analgesia, intraoperative anesthesia and post-operative pain relief as standard of care. A calf being dehorned - a procedure causing equivalent or greater acute pain - may receive nothing in many countries. The regulatory gap exists for economic and historical reasons: pain management adds cost, and farm animals were long assumed to experience pain less acutely than companion animals. Evidence consistently refutes this assumption. Regulatory reform mandating analgesia for the most painful farm animal procedures - as already implemented in several progressive countries - is one of the most impactful welfare improvements achievable through policy action.