To confirm suspected pain, analgesic testing is a gold standard method (Weary et al., 2006). If a given specific clinical sign of pain is reduced or eliminated after the analgesic treatment, the animal was most likely to have been experiencing pain before the treatment. This type of analgesic testing has good specificity but poor sensitivity as absence of effect may be caused by inefficiency of the chosen analgesic on certain types of pain, rather than the sign was not caused by pain. In this study, analgesic testing was employed and selected behaviours were scored before and after treatment.Cows were selected on day 1 and behaviour was scored (afternoon)according to selected behavioural parameters. On day 2, the cows were subjected to a clinical examination and then treated with ananalgesic or a placebo. After a resting period, a second behaviour score was performed (afternoon). Post hoc, the cows were divided into a pain group (ClinPain) and a placebo group (ClinPlac) based on the findings of the clinical examination (for an outline of the study,see Fig. 1).