Pain evaluation in cattle

Pain in animals is a welfare concern and it is therefore important to minimize the prevalence of pain in our cattle herds. A prerequisite for alleviating pain is the ability to recognize it. In many animal welfare protocols, pain is assessed through measuring conditions that are believed to be related to pain, e.g. wounds or lameness. More direct measures of pain have traditionally relied on physiological parameters. However, recent years of research into pain evaluation, has demonstrated that behaviour is the most reliable measure for evaluating pain in animals. The Cow Pain Scale was developed by investigating potential behavioural signs of pain in dairy cattle, with the aim of constructing a pain scale, useful under production conditions. The pain scale includes six behavioural parameters: ‘attention towards the surroundings’, ‘head position’, ‘ears position’, ‘facial expressions’, ‘response to approach’ and ‘back position’. Evaluating facial expressions of pain is an interesting novel measure for animal pain, because it utilizes the human skill of decoding facial expressions, used whenever humans communicate with one another. Using facial expressions for evaluating pain in a different species, does however take a minimum of training.