Research overview: opioid use in big cat anesthesia

Potent opioids, including butorphanol and ultra-potent agents in some protocols, are incorporated into big-cat anesthesia to enhance analgesia and immobilization, often combined with dissociatives and alpha-2 agonists in balanced protocols. Opioid inclusion can reduce doses of other drugs and improve analgesia for painful procedures, while requiring vigilance for respiratory depression. This overview synthesizes the anesthesia literature rather than one source, describing how opioids contribute to multimodal immobilization in tigers and other large felids, why balanced protocols aim to optimize analgesia and stability, and the availability of opioid antagonists for reversal. It matters because adequate analgesia is both a welfare imperative and a practical aid to safe handling, and opioids expand the toolkit for tailoring anesthesia to the procedure and the individual big cat.