In the United States, pet cats outnumber pet dogs, yet our understanding and treatment of pain in cats has lagged behind that in dogs. Veterinarians consider surgical procedures in dogs and cats to be equally painful, but we treat cats perioperativelyfor pain less often than we do dogs. This undertreatment of pain results, in part, from the difficulty in recognizing and assessing pain in cats. Various pain-scoring systems have been used to assess postoperative pain. These systems measure physiologicdata (objective) or evaluate behavior (subjective) or do both. Algometers and pressure platform gait analysis are objective pain measuring tools, whereas the visual analog scale (VAS) is an example of a widely used subjective scoring system. The basic VAS used for assessing pain consists of a continuous line anchored at either end with a description of the scale's limits. For example, "no pain" would be at one end of the scale and "severe pain" would be at the other. The observer places a mark on the line that he or she thinks correlates to the animal's degree of pain. This mark is later converted to a number by measuring the distance of the mark from zero.
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