So here's a radical idea...

...castration hurts. A lot.

While that may seem obvious to, well, pretty much everyone, there are no state or federal laws regarding the use of painkillers when castrating livestock. To get an idea of why that's so incredibly uncool, let's take a look at some of the different castration methods commonly used in the US (grossness warning)...

1. banding: you can use an elastrator (left) to place what is an incredibly tight rubber around the entire scrotum, and then wait two or three weeks for the flesh to atrophy, rot, and eventually fall off- yum!

2. bloodless: you can use a tool called a emasculator (right), which basically crushes the blood vessels running to the testicles and simultaneously cuts the spermatic cord

3. surgical: this involves cutting off the bottom third of the scrotum, pulling the testicles out and severing them, and then sewing the rest of the scrotum back up (this is the only method I've ever witnessed in my extremely limited castrating experience, and the procedure I saw involved a lot of painkillers)

So, in conclusion: ouch.

It is, of course, possible to use anesthetics, and a lot of producers do. Even for producers who don't have the time or money to use painkillers, there are a lot of effective ways to manage pain and stress, such as castrating when the animals are young, before the tissue that's going to be removed is fully developed. The thing is, though, it's perfectly legal to castrate even fully grown animals without painkillers if that's what you want to do. So what are we going to do about that?

Well, one day I showed up at work on the campus farm only to discover that Lucy, our fistulated dairy cow, had had her forehead shaved. Upon further investigation, I discovered that researchers here at Maryland are using her as a test subject in a project that uses electroencephalographs (EEGs) to record how her brain activity changes in response to various stimuli. Their goal is to quantify the ways in which animals feel pain, and to use this information to build an irrefutable argument about why it's wrong to perform procedures like castration and de-horning on adult livestock without painkillers. While the conclusion might seem obvious (I don't think anyone actually thinks that cows don't feel physical pain in the same way humans do), the researchers hope that approaching the argument from a scientific perspective will help create momentum to pass legislation regulating castration techniques. Honestly, this stuff isn't a big priority in Annapolis right now, but I certainly wish them the best of luck.