Pain Detection and Amelioration in Animals on the Farm: Issues and Options

Pain in nonhuman animals is a difficult concept to identify and measure. This article briefly describes the consequences of pain in animals on the farm and explains the rea-sons for the minimal use of analgesics in farmed animals. Pain can have implications for both animal welfare and economics. The reasons for a low use of analgesics in farmed animals include the lack of recognition of animal pain owing to the apparent lack of anthropomorphically identifiable behavioral changes, concern over human food safety, and lack of research efforts to develop safe analgesics for farm use. Treat-ment cost relative to the benefits expected is another hindering factor. Interventions to minimize pain must begin with developing objective and practical measures for pain identification and measurement at the farm level. A suggested use of a combination of different behavioral and physiological indicators would help to identify pain in ani-mals. To facilitate continued usage of the methodologies on the farm it also is neces-sary to evaluate the economic implication of the pain alleviation intervention. Pain detection and amelioration are important components in animal care. Ani-mal pain has been controversial in its definition, as evidenced by the discussion as to whether some species experience pain (Rose, 2002). The simplest defini-tion appears to be that if analgesics improve a situation, it was pain that the ani-mal experienced (Gibson, 1985). The International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP; 1979) defined pain as an unpleasant sensory and emotional experi-ence associated with actual or potential tissue damage or described in terms of such damage.