Researchers address challenges in livestock pain mitigation
Progress is being made as a research protocol is being established to reliably evaluate efficacy of pain mitigation interventions in nursing male piglets during castration.
November 7, 2019
A pig or a cow can't tell someone when it's injured or in pain, but researchers are identifying ways to measure not only when an animal is in pain, but also what measures can be taken to help alleviate that pain. Abbie Viscardi, a research assistant professor in the anatomy and physiology department at Kansas State University, focuses primarily on validating non-invasive tools for pain assessment and pain alleviation of food animals on-farm to improve animal welfare. She shared her work at the 2019 U.S. Animal Health Association annual meeting, held last week in Providence, R.I.
Pain is defined as an "unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage." Viscardi's emphasis is on the sensory experience of pain, which results in changes to an animal's behavior and physiology. The emotional experience of pain is difficult to measure with present technology.
Sources of pain for animals can include castration, tail docking, dehorning/disbudding or branding. Pain can also be associated with production or natural interaction between animals, including lameness, abrasion, the process of giving birth or infectious diseases.
A number of factors create challenges in terms of pain management for farm animals.
Pain is difficult to recognize and some animals have instinctive mechanisms that inhibit their ability to exhibit pain
Time delay between drug administration and onset of activity would slow down processing procedures or lead to inadequate analgesia at the time of a painful procedure
Drug administration (routes and frequency) can be difficult on-farm
Cost of drugs can be prohibitive
Meat and milk withholding periods are often necessary
Only one analgesic is approved for use by the Food and Drug Administration in the United States to alleviate pain
The last factor is particularly important because at the present time, just one analgesic is approved for pain, and it is labeled to address pain associated with foot rot in cattle. The FDA states, "We [FDA] recommend that this indication be based on the control of clinical signs of pain associated with a disease. We encourage the use of validated methods of pain assessment in the target species."