How animals feel and react to pain has been object of widespread interest by the scientific community over the past few decades, leading to a radical re-interpretation of the whole concept of pain in veterinary medicine: after being considered for long time a mere "unpleasant experience", and, as such, deprived of any interests within the medical field, it is now widely accepted that pain, rather than being just a simple consequence of a disease, is, itself, a pathology. As a consequence, particularly for small domestic animals, recognizing, treating and preventing pain has become a fundamental part of veterinary practice. Different is the situation for food producing animals, which generally receive a much lower attention in detecting and treating painful conditions. After a previous review synthesizing the commonest sources of pain afflicting main farm animal species, in this issue various methods to diagnose the presence of pain in these animals will be described according to 4 evaluation criteria (physiological, behavioural, zootechnic, lesion-related). Each of them will be analyzed in reference to single species, with the final purpose of defining a useful and species-specific algorithm to evaluate whether the observed animal is experiencing pain.
Pain recognition in farm animals
DELLA ROCCA, Giorgia;DI SALVO, Alessandra
2011
Abstract
How animals feel and react to pain has been object of widespread interest by the scientific community over the past few decades, leading to a radical re-interpretation of the whole concept of pain in veterinary medicine: after being considered for long time a mere "unpleasant experience", and, as such, deprived of any interests within the medical field, it is now widely accepted that pain, rather than being just a simple consequence of a disease, is, itself, a pathology. As a consequence, particularly for small domestic animals, recognizing, treating and preventing pain has become a fundamental part of veterinary practice. Different is the situation for food producing animals, which generally receive a much lower attention in detecting and treating painful conditions. After a previous review synthesizing the commonest sources of pain afflicting main farm animal species, in this issue various methods to diagnose the presence of pain in these animals will be described according to 4 evaluation criteria (physiological, behavioural, zootechnic, lesion-related). Each of them will be analyzed in reference to single species, with the final purpose of defining a useful and species-specific algorithm to evaluate whether the observed animal is experiencing pain.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
