How to Tell if Your Cat is in Pain - Top 25 Behaviour Signs

How to Tell if Your Cat is in Pain - Top 25 Behavior Signs

Detecting signs that your cat is in pain can be very important as early diagnosis of potential disease, ailment or injuries. It can help prevent major problems developing and undue suffering. Unfortunately, cats are renowned for not showing that they are in pain. The more that owners can identify the signals and subtle signs for pain, then the sooner the pain can be treated and alleviated. Even the most attentive owner can find it difficult to detect pain, even when they are familiar with your cat's behavior and demeanor. There may be many false alarms as many of the common signals are not specific to pain and may have other causes.

Many owners look for a single key sign such as a hunched-up posture, refusing food, difficulty in jumping, or the cat hiding or avoiding of bright lights. The diagnosis would be more reliable if owners could use a suite of signs that are generally indicative of pain. What is needed is a list of reliable signs of pain in cats so that the diagnosis by owners could be based on multiple trustworthy and proven pain symptoms, or signs, rather than single ones. Such a list would help cat owners and veterinary practitioners separate fact from fiction and eliminate myths that can cause false diagnosis and unnecessary trips to the vet. Similarly reliable diagnosis will reduce the time the cat suffers before being treated.

But how can the reliable behavioral signs of pain identified when there are so many myths and theories among owners and even veterinary practitioners?

A recent research project was based on an extensive survey of hundreds of veterinary experts in feline medicine to identify key pain symptoms and signs that usually occur when cats are in pain. Identifying the top 20 reliable behaviour signs would provide a much more reliable tool owners could use for detecting when cats are in pain. Seeing two or more of these signs would increase the reliability of the diagnosis. The other aim of the survey was to list symptoms which are generally poor indicators that cats are in pain. This eliminates the myths and fiction about pain in cats.