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The recognition and assessment of pain in avian species are crucial tools in providing adequate supportive care in clinical, laboratory, zoologic, rehabilitation, and companion animal settings. With birds being a highly diverse class of species, there is still much to be determined regarding how to create specific criteria to recognize and assess pain in these animals. This article provides a clinical review on the physiology of pain in birds, observed behavioral and physiologic alterations with pain, how different sources and degrees of pain can alter behaviors observed, and how this information can be applied in a clinical setting.

The appropriate recognition and assessment of pain in animals is an essential tool that can be used by veterinary professionals, rehabilitators, household caregivers, and others to provide supportive care and analgesia to patients. Although the use of behavioral, postural, and facial changes to recognize pain have been studied in popular domestic species such as dogs (

Avian analgesia is now recognized as a critical component of avian medicine and surgery. The need to recognize pain and to provide pain relief is the first step, and many anecdotal therapeutic doses have been extrapolated from other companion animals. Several published research investigations, using several species of birds, have begun to provide avian analgesia therapeutic information for clinical application. The challenge is to continue pushing this research forward with appreciation that there are approximately 10,000 known species of birds, perhaps 200 species commonly kept as pets, and that each species has a range of behaviors as varied as their species-specific PKs and PDs to each analgesic drug.