Many routine and necessary veterinary procedures on farm animals are performed without adequate pain relief, causing preventable suffering across billions of animals annually.
The widespread performance of painful procedures on farm animals without pain management represents one of the most preventable large-scale welfare failures in modern agriculture. The barriers are not primarily economic — effective analgesics cost pennies per animal — but regulatory, cultural, and logistical. Veterinarians, producers, and policymakers all have roles to play in normalizing pain management for routine farm procedures, as has occurred progressively in companion animal medicine.