The ARC Centre of Excellence for Animal Pain Solutions (CAPS) aims to create world-first solutions to positively impact non-human animal pain and improve animal health and welfare. We seek to answer challenging fundamental questions on how to responsibly measure, prevent, and intervene in pain. CAPS emphasises stakeholder engagement to understand societal values and expectations for pain diagnosis and treatment, and inform how interventions and resilience strategies should be used to improve animal well-being. Outcomes, benefits, and impacts include evidence-based technological and practice transformations to address the significant unmet pain needs in animals, including the $3.2B liability related to pain in Australian animal production.

CAPS will create world-first sensing and imaging tools able to detect pain; take them from labs to paddocks, zoos, and beyond; and use them to unravel the biopsychosocial connections impacting animal pain. The outcomes will allow us to understand pain and develop therapeutic and preventive interventions that are ethical and acceptable to the community. We will achieve this through four interconnected Research Themes:

Pain Physiology: we will study pain and its biological heterogeneity to capture the complex interplay of physiological inputs that form the lived pain experiences in animals, using specialised experimental systems that advance ethical research on pain.

Pain Measurement: we will build new tools based on deep biological knowledge to enable multidimensional measurements and quantification of the cellular and molecular functioning of the biopsychosocial pain nexus via novel sensing and imaging methods.

Pain Values: we will develop a definitive account of community understandings of and expectations about animal pain to inform a robust ethical framework and establish how animal pain should be studied, modelled, managed, and avoided, using philosophical, social, and psychological methods.

Pain Solutions: through measurement-enabled understanding and a robust publicly available evidence base, we will create new interventions and real-world practices that improve long-term animal health and welfare. Replacement technologies and procedures to eliminate painful practices will be identified to promote animal health and welfare and create greater economic and social value for the industries which adopt them.