Introduction
Pain is an important animal welfare problem, not least in cattle(Huxley and Whay, 2006; Hewson et al., 2007; Kielland et al., 2009;Laven et al., 2009; Thomsen et al., 2010; Fajt et al., 2011). Veterin-arians are expected to be able to diagnose, grade and treat pain in cattle. Large differences in analgesic treatment practices are related to age and gender of the veterinarian but also attributed to cost and availability of analgesics (Huxley and Whay, 2006). One rea-son for the in consistence of pain relief for cattle is the inadequate ability to assess pain (Flecknell, 2008). Pain assessment based on∗