The research is clear on one point: you are not looking for drama. No crying, no obvious limping, no refusal to eat. You are looking for changes from what your cat normally does. Small ones. The kind that are easy to file under "getting older."
Why cats don't show it
Dogs in pain tell you. They limp, whimper, guard the injury. Cats don't, because evolution didn't reward it. A small predator that is also prey cannot afford to broadcast weakness. That instinct is still running in your living room.
The clinical result is that cats are prescribed pain medication less often than dogs for comparable conditions. Not because they hurt less. Because the pain goes unrecognized.
“"She's just getting old." "She's always been moody." That misreading is exactly the problem.”
What the research identified
In 2016, Isabella Merola and Daniel Mills led the first formal expert consensus on behavioral signs of feline pain. Nineteen feline medicine specialists reviewed the evidence and agreed on twenty-five signs reliable enough to indicate pain. Crucially, no single sign is required — a painful cat might hide, or stop jumping, or bite when touched. Different cats show different signs.
The agreed list includes: difficulty jumping, reluctance to move, playing less, hiding, absence of grooming, reduced appetite, hunched or lowered posture, eyes partially closed, decreased tolerance of handling, licking one specific area, and changes in feeding behavior.
Look at that list. Most of it reads as personality, not pain. "She's been a bit off." "She's just getting old." "She's always been moody." That misreading is exactly the problem.
The jumping question specifically
Feline osteoarthritis is present in the majority of cats over ten — and increasingly, in younger cats too, detected when researchers began imaging apparently healthy animals as a baseline. Unlike dogs, cats with arthritis rarely limp, because the disease is usually bilateral. Both elbows. Both hips. There is nothing to compensate toward. Both sides hurt the same.
So the cat doesn't limp. Instead, she changes strategy. She takes the lower route. She uses the chair as an intermediate step where she used to jump directly. She hesitates at the top of stairs, which put more load on arthritic elbows going down than going up. She stops grooming her lower back because the flexion is uncomfortable, and that section of coat starts to look different from the rest. She plays less, then stops, gradually enough that the owner adjusts their picture of who she is rather than noticing she has changed.
None of it looks like pain. All of it is.
Reading the face
The Feline Grimace Scale, developed and validated by researchers at the Université de Montréal and the University of Calgary in 2019, gives owners a tool for acute pain specifically. It scores five facial indicators: ear position, orbital tightening, muzzle tension, whisker position, and head position.
In plain terms: a cat who is not in pain has ears up and forward, open relaxed eyes, loose whiskers, a soft muzzle, and a level head. A cat in acute pain has ears rotated outward and down, squinted eyes, bunched forward whiskers, a tightened muzzle, and a head that drops toward or below shoulder level.
If your cat's face looks tight, and it doesn't ease after a few quiet minutes, something is wrong. This matters most in the hours after any procedure or injury — a window when cats are routinely sent home and routinely under-medicated.
What to do with this
Build a baseline. Know what your cat's normal looks like in motion — how high she jumps without staging it, whether she stretches her back legs fully when she gets up, how she handles stairs, whether her weight sits evenly when she's at rest. One "she seems fine" means nothing. Patterns over weeks mean something.
When you talk to your vet, be specific. "She used to jump to the top of the bookshelf every day. She hasn't done it in three months" is a clinical observation. "She's slowing down a little" is not. The first sentence opens a conversation about pain. The second closes it.
And push back on the framing that reduced activity is just aging. It may be. It may also be that moving hurts. Those are different problems, and the second one is treatable. Feline pain management has improved significantly in recent years. The cat who gets an accurate description from her owner is far more likely to receive treatment that actually helps.
Sources: the 2016 expert consensus on behavioral signs of pain in cats, PLOS ONE, Merola and Mills; the 2019 Feline Grimace Scale validation study, Scientific Reports, Evangelista et al. This article is general education, not veterinary advice. If you think your cat is in pain, see your vet.
■ Filed under Behavior. Corrections: corrections@proactivepethealth.com