Goats are stoic animals that conceal pain through evolutionary prey animal instincts, making pain recognition particularly challenging for farmers and veterinarians. Developing reliable pain assessment tools for goats is one of the most pressing challenges in small ruminant welfare science.
Goats experiencing chronic pain from CAE arthritis show altered movement patterns, reduced social interaction, and weight loss that owners often attribute to illness rather than pain. Without recognising the pain component, analgesic treatment is not administered, and animals continue suffering unnecessarily. The GPFES facial expression scale enables systematic pain assessment: orbital tightening, ear position changes, and nasal plane changes are reliable pain indicators even when goats appear behavioural normal. Routine analgesia for painful procedures including disbudding, castration, and kidding difficulties would significantly improve goat welfare outcomes. Veterinary training in goat-specific pain assessment is improving but remains less developed than cattle or sheep pain recognition.