Managing for Profit

Working toward livestock pain relief

There are currently no approved drugs designed to relieve pain in livestock.  Hans Coetzee, a professor at Iowa State University, is searching for ways to assess degrees of animal pain.  Before any pain relieving compounds are approved for animals by the FDA, there has to be a way to tell how much pain an animal is feeling during those procedures that cause pain.

In addition to the benefits purely from relieving pain in livestock, Coetzee says there is the added benefit of improving the bottom line.  Livestock with less pain, perform better with less illness.  But there is also an increasing demand for livestock raised in an environment with a greater degree of attention paid to reducing or avoiding pain.

AUDIO: Hans Coetzee (3 min. MP3)