Recognising pain in pigs is essential for timely intervention and welfare protection. Advances in pain assessment tools have improved the ability of stockpersons and vets to identify and respond to pain.
Pain recognition is the gateway to pain management in farm animal welfare. In pig production, where millions of animals are managed by relatively few stockpersons, the ability to rapidly and accurately identify pain is critical for welfare. The Pig Grimace Scale provides a standardised, validated tool that is increasingly being incorporated into welfare assessment training. The development of automated monitoring systems using cameras and AI offers the prospect of continuous, population-level pain monitoring that human observation alone cannot achieve. Improving pain recognition skills in pig stockpersons is a high-impact, immediately achievable welfare intervention.