Pigs experience pain from various husbandry procedures and disease conditions. Improving on-farm pain recognition and response is one of the highest-impact welfare interventions available to the industry.
Pain recognition in pigs is improving through validated tools like the Pig Grimace Scale, but the gap between research evidence and farm practice remains substantial. Pigs are stoic animals that hide pain - by the time lameness is severe enough to be obvious, the animal has often been suffering for weeks. Training stockpersons to detect early indicators - gait changes, postural abnormalities, reduced activity, facial expression changes - enables earlier intervention. The regulatory permission to perform castration, tail docking and teeth clipping without anaesthesia in certain contexts reflects commercial compromise rather than welfare evidence. Mandatory analgesia for painful procedures would represent a clear welfare improvement.