Pain negatively affects the health and welfare of animals. "Pain" is defined by the International Association for the Study of Pain as "an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage." Only the animal experiencing the pain can know the pain's quality and intensity, and the degree of suffering. It is harder, if even possible, for an observer to know whether an emotional experience has occurred, especially if the sufferer cannot communicate. Therefore, this concept is often excluded in definitions of pain in animals, such as that provided by Zimmerman: "an aversive sensory experience caused by actual or potential injury that elicits protective motor and vegetative reactions, results in learned avoidance and may modify species-specific behaviour, including social behaviour." Nonhuman animals cannot report their feelings to language-using humans in the same manner as human communication, but observation of their behaviour provides a reasonable indication as to the extent of their pain. Just as with doctors and medics who sometimes share no common language with their patients, the indicators of pain can still be understood.

According to the U.S. National Research Council Committee on Recognition and Alleviation of Pain in Laboratory Animals, pain is experienced by many animal species, including mammals and possibly all vertebrates. Overview of anatomy of the nervous system across animal kingdom indicates that, not only vertebrates, but also most invertebrates have the capacity to feel pain.

Although there are numerous definitions of pain, almost all involve two key components. First, nociception is required. This is the ability to detect noxious stimuli which evoke a reflex response that rapidly moves the entire animal, or the affected part of its body, away from the source of the stimulus. The concept of nociception does not imply any adverse, subjective "feeling" – it is a reflex action. An example in humans would be the rapid withdrawal of a finger that has touched something hot – the withdrawal occurs before any sensation of pain is actually experienced.

The second component is the experience of "pain" itself, or suffering – the internal, emotional interpretation of the nociceptive experience. Again in humans, this is when the withdrawn finger begins to hurt, moments after the withdrawal. Pain is therefore a private, emotional experience. Pain cannot be directly measured in other animals, including other humans; responses to putatively painful stimuli can be measured, but not the experience itself. To address this problem when assessing the capacity of other species to experience pain, argument-by-analogy is used. This is based on the principle that if an animal responds to a stimulus in a similar way to ourselves, it is likely to have had an analogous experience.

The ability to experience pain in an animal, or another human for that matter, cannot be determined directly but it may be inferred through analogous physiological and behavioral reactions. Although many animals share similar mechanisms of pain detection to those of humans, have similar areas of the brain involved in processing pain, and show similar pain behaviours, it is notoriously difficult to assess how animals actually experience pain.

Nociceptive nerves, which preferentially detect (potential) injury-causing stimuli, have been identified in a variety of animals, including invertebrates. The medicinal leech, Hirudo medicinalis, and sea slug are classic model systems for studying nociception. Many other vertebrate and invertebrate animals also show nociceptive reflex responses similar to our own.

Nociception usually involves the transmission of a signal along nerve fibers from the site of a noxious stimulus at the periphery to the spinal cord. Although this signal is also transmitted on to the brain, a reflex response, such as flinching or withdrawal of a limb, is produced by return signals originating in the spinal cord. Thus, both physiological and behavioral responses to nociception can be detected, and no reference need be made to a conscious experience of pain. Based on such criteria, nociception has been observed in all major animal taxa.

Nerve impulses from nociceptors may reach the brain, where information about the stimulus (e.g. quality, location, and intensity), and effect (unpleasantness) are registered. Though the brain activity involved has been studied, the brain processes underlying conscious awareness are not well known.