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International Journal of Zoology and Applied Biosciences Research Article
Pain management and self-medication behaviour in non-human animals: A comparative review
Vishad Vinayak Waghmare, Somnath Udgire, Prakash Patil, Anil Nagne
Year : 2026 | Pages: 45-49
Received on: 11/07/2026
Revised on: 24/08/2026
Accepted on: 25/09/2026
Published on: 31/10/2026
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Vishad Vinayak Waghmare, Somnath Udgire, Prakash Patil, Anil Nagne( 2026).
Pain management and self-medication behaviour in non-human animals: A comparative review
. International Journal of Zoology and Applied Biosciences, 11( 5), 45-49.
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Abstract
Pain is a vertebrate universal, yet mechanisms of pain management in field conditions remain poorly understood. While laboratory research emphasizes opioid analgesia, wild animals routinely encounter pharmacological compounds with analgesic properties. This review examines pain management behaviours across animal taxa, explores self-medication patterns with naturally available analgesics, considers evolutionary trade-offs between pain suppression and injury awareness, and discusses how anthropogenic analgesics alter pain mediated or environmentally imposed carries ecological costs: masking injury related behavioural cues essential for healing, social cohesion, and predator avoidance. Understanding these mechanisms is critical for pretending wildlife population responses to pharmaceutical contamination of food chains and water systems.
Keywords
Self-medication, Pain behaviour, Wildlife pharmacology, NSAIDs, Behavioural ecology.
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© The Author(s) 2026. This article is published by International Journal of Zoology and Applied Biosciences under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (creativecommons.org), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
