Development and validation of pain models in food animals

The project addresses painful procedures such as tail docking, disbudding, castration, dehorning, and footrot in food animals. Specific aims include establishing optimal behavioral and analytic pain biomarkers, evaluating the effect of concurrent biomarker collection, assessing the efficacy of transdermal flunixin meglumine, and characterizing its pharmacokinetics/pharmacodynamics in goats and calves. For swine, the project involves creating a pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic model to describe flunixin meglumine's analgesic efficacy in castration and tail docking, followed by validation of the model's predictions.