Regina Miller, Andrea Grott, Dorian Patzkéwitsch, Dorothea Döring, Nora Abendschön, Pauline Deffner, Judith Reiser, Mathias Ritzmann, Anna M Saller, Paul Schmidt, Steffanie Senf, Julia Werner, Christine Baumgartner, Susanne Zöls, Michael Erhard, Shana Bergmann
Surgical castration of piglets is generally recognized as a painful procedure, but there is currently no gold standard for the assessment of pain behavior in piglets. However, pain assessment is essential for evaluating the effectiveness of local anesthetics. In this study, we investigated the efficacy of four local anesthetics in terms of pain relief during and after surgical castration in three sequential study parts. To do so, we filmed 178 piglets before the applied procedures, after injection of the local anesthetic, and up to 24 h after castration (five observation times in total) in an observation arena and compared their behavior before and after castration and between treatments and control groups...
February 2, 2023: Animals: An Open Access Journal From MDPI