Analgesia for Sheep in Commercial Production: Where to Next?

Alison Small,Caroline Lee,Andrew David Fisher,Ian Colditz

doi:10.3390/ani11041127

Abstract

Simple SummaryIncreasing societal and customer pressure to provide animals with ‘a life worth living’ continues to apply pressure on industry to alleviate pain associated with husbandry practices, injury and illness. Although a number of analgesic solutions are now available for sheep, providing some amelioration of the acute pain responses, this review has highlighted a number of potential areas for further research.Increasing societal and customer pressure to provide animals with ‘a life worth living’ continues to apply pressure on livestock production industries to alleviate pain associated with husbandry practices, injury and illness. Over the past 15–20 years, there has been considerable research effort to understand and develop mitigation strategies for painful husbandry procedures in sheep, leading to the successful launch of analgesic approaches specific to sheep in a number of countries. However, even with multi-modal approaches to analgesia, using both local anaesthetic and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAID), pain is not obliterated, and the challenge of pain mitigation and phasing out of painful husbandry practices remains. It is timely to review and reflect on progress to date in order to strategically focus on the most important challenges, and the avenues which offer the greatest potential to be incorporated into industry practice in a process of continuous improvement. A structured, systematic literature search was carried out, incorporating peer-reviewed scientific literature in the period 2000–2019. An enormous volume of research is underway, testament to the fact that we have not solved the pain and analgesia challenge for any species, including our own. This review has highlighted a number of potential areas for further research.

Highlights

Increasing societal and customer pressure to provide animals with ‘a life worth living’continues to apply pressure on industry to alleviate pain associated with husbandry practices, injury and illness
A substantial body of research into the impacts of sheep husbandry procedures such as castration, tail docking and mulesing has highlighted the need for analgesic strategies or alternative management approaches, and in recent years non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) and local anaesthetic formulations registered and delivery methodologies designed for sheep have become available in a number of countries
Where the initial search generated a very large number of articles related to detailed investigation of the physiological minutiae of a particular pharmacological approach, a subset of papers relating to use in livestock were retained, and the remaining articles excluded from this review

Summary

Introduction

Continues to apply pressure on industry to alleviate pain associated with husbandry practices, injury and illness. Even with multi-modal approaches to analgesia, using both local anaesthetic and NSAIDs, pain is not obliterated, and the challenge of pain mitigation remains. It is timely to review and reflect on progress to date in order to strategically focus on the most important challenges, and the avenues which offer the greatest potential to be incorporated into industry practice in a process of continuous improvement. This review aimed to provide a stocktake of recently published (in the years 2000–2019) research into pain mitigation for livestock and other research into pain and analgesia whose findings are potentially relevant to the Australian sheep industry

Objectives

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Conclusion