Recognising silent acute pain in animals - assorted species grimace scales:
Development of the Horse Grimace Scale (HGS) as a Pain Assessment Tool in Horses Undergoing Routine Castration
The composition and initial evaluation of a grimace scale in ferrets after surgical implantation of a telemetry probe
The Assessment of Facial Expressions in Piglets Undergoing Tail Docking and Castration: Toward the Development of the Piglet Grimace Scale
The Sheep Grimace Scale as an indicator of post-operative distress and pain in laboratory sheep and the Coding and quantification of a facial expression for pain in lambs
Mouse - How to be a pain management advocate for exotic and zoo animals (full text available - includes additional species)
The Rat Grimace Scale: A partially automated method for quantifying pain in the laboratory rat via facial expressions
Evaluation of EMLA Cream for Preventing Pain during Tattooing of Rabbits: Changes in Physiological, Behavioural and Facial Expression Responses
Pain evaluation in dairy cattle
Pain is subtle - we cannot depend on vocalisations or extreme abnormal behaviour to determine if an animal is on pain - animals can cover up pain while going about their daily life. Grimace scales have been found to be reliable indicators of pain (full text available)
Unfortunately, I could not find a clear visual grimace scale for dogs, cats or birds :(
Which is a shame, because perhaps I could have recognised my own dog’s discomfort for the acute pain it was sooner:
(left: dog in pain. See eyes, tension, cheeks, whiskers, ears compared to the multiple species grimace charts above. right: tired but not in pain dog)
Perhaps my new books that arrived today might have some on dogs at least. There’s this visual blog post of a stressed dog at the vet - stress in the absence of a trigger looks very much like pain.
Here is a small comparative cats, with the link going into more detail. Not a scale but better than nothing:
Bonus round - you can get free A3 posters on recognising pain for Rabbits, Mice and Rats from the National Centre for the Replacement, Refinement and Reduction of Animals in Research. My rabbit specialist vet has the rabbit one!
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