Recognising pain in animals is rather like understanding that in small children. There is no set of rules to follow, you just have to work each case out as you go along.

Lemonade, my own fiercely independent young tabby cat, spends much of his life outside inflicting mayhem on the local rodent population. Usually when he does deign to come in for a meal or a warm by the fire he will tolerate no more than a restrained stroke along his back before he spins in a blink and grabs your hand with teeth and two front paws.

When he came up to me for an unsolicited stroke last week and then sat on wife's knee for a cuddle I should have understood more quickly that he was in pain. It was the following morning before I saw that there was something wrong with the end of his tail, and risked my fingers by having a proper look.

Disaster had, I deduced, struck two days earlier when he went out in a gale and sat on the big stone gatepost with his tail hanging down as he watched the world. The gale had caught the heavy gate and banged it shut trapping his tail in the latch. At first there would have been little blood and not much to see under the hair and he would probably have hidden in the barn until he got over the immediate shock of the injury.

Now that I could see the cause of his altered behaviour it all made sense. He was going to need an operation to amputate the last two inches of his tail.

The painkilling injection I gave him seemed to settle him even before his anaesthetic, and then when he was asleep I was able to clip the hair from the end of his tail and see the damage properly. As he woke up with his tail nearly three inches shorter and the end stitched with fine dissolving stitches I faced another dilemma. I needed him to leave the end of his tail alone but I could not see him tolerating either a bandage or an Elizabethan collar. My best chance lay in finding the right combination of pain-killing drugs. The best help came from a long-acting injection lasting 24 hours at a time.

Despite this I observed him several times over the following days chasing the tip of his tail in a vain bid to dull the pain that I could do little more to stop. Two weeks on I believe he is truly pain-free and he is quite his independent biting self, even though his tail will look like a bottle brush until the hair grows again.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.