Can farmed animals feel pain?
The short answer
Yes. Scientists broadly agree that mammals, birds and fish experience pain. Recent reviews conclude that octopuses, crabs and lobsters very likely do too.
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- Status
- sample
Sample data. The figures and sources on this page are demonstration records showing how evidence will be presented. They are approximate and have not yet been through our review process. Read about how we will verify evidence.
What does the evidence show?
Pain cannot be observed directly in any being other than yourself. Scientists therefore use criteria: whether an animal has receptors for harmful stimuli, whether the signals reach a brain that integrates them, whether painkillers change behaviour, and whether the animal learns to avoid harm and trades off pain against other needs.
Mammals and birds meet all of these criteria. Fish meet most, and the scientific consensus has shifted decisively towards fish pain over the past two decades.
A 2021 review of more than 300 studies for the UK government found strong evidence of sentience in octopuses and crabs, leading to their inclusion in UK animal welfare law.Source 1: Review of the evidence of sentience in cephalopod molluscs and decapod crustaceansSource 2: Defining and assessing animal pain
Why does this happen?
Pain is useful. Animals that feel pain avoid injury and learn from it, so the capacity is expected to have evolved widely, not only in humans.
The brain structures involved differ between groups, which is why earlier scientists doubted fish pain. Later work showed that different structures can perform similar functions.
Bottom line
For the animals people eat most, the question of whether they can suffer is settled enough that policy and law are built on it. The open questions are about how much, not whether.
The strongest counterargument
“Animals react to damage reflexively; that is not the same as feeling pain”
A fish pulling away from a hook could be a reflex, like a person's hand jerking from a hot pan before they feel anything. Reaction is not experience.
What's true about it
- Reflexes do exist, and simple withdrawal alone is not evidence of pain. Serious scientists take this objection seriously.
What may be misleading
- The criteria used in modern reviews are designed specifically to rule out reflexes: they look for learning, trade-offs, and changes in behaviour with painkillers, none of which a reflex can explain.
- The same argument, applied consistently, would cast doubt on pain in human infants, which almost nobody accepts.
What remains uncertain
- How intense animal experiences are, and how to compare them across species, remains genuinely open.
Evidence strength
Why this rating: Multiple independent scientific reviews and expert panels agree for vertebrates; invertebrate evidence is newer but substantial.
Supported by multiple systematic reviews or large, consistent studies using different methods, with few plausible alternative explanations.
What remains uncertain?Open questions the evidence does not yet settle.
- Whether insects feel pain. Evidence is emerging but much thinner.
- How to weigh the experiences of animals with very different nervous systems.
Methodology: how we know thisHow the numbers were produced and what they leave out.
- We rely on criteria-based reviews rather than individual studies, because sentience is inferred from many kinds of evidence together.
- We separate the scientific question (can they feel pain?) from the ethical question (what follows from that?), which is covered elsewhere.
Read our full evidence methodology.
Claims used on this page1 claim, each with its own record, rating and sources.
There is broad scientific agreement that mammals, birds and fish can experience pain, and growing evidence that some invertebrates such as decapod crustaceans can too.
The animals we farm can feel pain. For fish the evidence is strong; for crabs and lobsters it is now considered substantial.
Sources
Each source links to our record of what it found, its limitations and what we used it for, with a link to the original.
- 1Review of the evidence of sentience in cephalopod molluscs and decapod crustaceans
Jonathan Birch, Charlotte Burn, Alexandra Schnell et al. (2021). Report commissioned by the UK Government (Defra).
- 2Defining and assessing animal pain
Lynne Sneddon, Robert Elwood, Shelley Adamo et al. (2014). Animal Behaviour.