Pain is usually transitory, lasting only until the noxious stimulus is removed or the underlying damage or pathology has healed (acute pain). Pain can be developed following tissue damage, inflammation and nerve injury.
However, in the context of veterinary treatment of illness or injury, pain may become an unwanted consequence that is generally not useful and compromises the welfare of animals. Pain has a fundamentally important protective role, alerting us to threats and providing an impetus for the preservation of the integrity of the body. This is in contrast to nociception, which is defined as the encoding and processing of noxious stimuli in the nervous system. By this definition, pain is a subjective experience which requires the activity of structures in the brain to be perceived. Pain is defined by the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) as an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with, or resembling that associated with, actual or potential tissue damage. The potential benefits of the NSAIDs treatment in painful health disorders depend upon the type of drug administered, its dosage and administration mode, and the time of administration relative to the painful health disorder. When the relationship between painful disorders and daily activity patterns is studied, factors such as parity, bedding type and severity of disease are important factors to take into consideration. However, lame cows show longer lying times, with a lower number of lying bouts and longer and more variable lying bouts duration, as compared to non-lame cows. For instance, cows with clinical mastitis reduced their time lying and increased the number of lying bouts and stepping due to pain caused by the swollen udder when cows are lying. Divergent outcomes may differ depending upon the painful cause, the severity and the moment, and consequently its interpretation should be properly explained. This entry discusses on how pain due to several health conditions in dairy cows modifies its activity pattern and explores if non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) are capable of restoring it.
The cattle literature reports that deviation from normal daily activity patterns (both increased and/or reduced daily lying time) can be indicative of painful conditions and diseases in cows. The main conditions and diseases considered painful in dairy cows are mastitis, lameness, calving (including dystocia and caesarean section) and metritis.
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