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Moreover, since its creation, the 4A-Vet pain score has been used in other publications (Wenger et al. 2005, Sarrau et al. 2007, Rialland et al. 2012). Both the numeric rating scale (NRS) and the 4A-Vet pain score scales used in our study were translated in the investigator’s native language by veterinarian surgeons and a common guideline (translated by the same veterinary surgeons) explaining the use of the visual analogue scale (VAS) was provided. To our knowledge, no other validated pain-scoring system underwent a second validation following translation. Furthermore, the critique suggests that a cut-off limit of pain score to administer rescue analgesia would have been appropriate. We chose to rely on the investigating veterinary surgeons for case-to-case evaluation. The choice of an a priori cut-off value is debatable: e.g. should we use the same value for soft and orthopaedic surgeries? Should we fix a high value at a given time point or a lower one but observed at different successive time points? In similar large-size studies, using the GCMPS-SF, rescue analgesia relied on the veterinarian’s discretion and/or on a cut-off limit of pain (Gruet et al. 2011, 2013, Kondo et al. 2012). Only three animals, all of which belonged to the carprofen group, required rescue anesthesia and, therefore, were excluded from the study. This low number of exclusions did not alter the overall conclusion on the analyses of 240 dogs regarding efficacy. Consequently, no replacement method of the rescued animals’ data was implemented. The method proposed by the critique, also called last observation carried forward (LOCF), can introduce bias and distort mean as well as precision (Siddiqui et al. 2009). Finally, the critique’s understanding of the article as promoting that “NSAIDs alone would be suitable or appropriate as the sole analgesic therapy for these animals”, is erroneous and misguided. Cimicoxib is concluded to be as effective and safe as the reference compound, carprofen used according to its indication. The study was not designed to support the use of NSAIDs in lieu of multi-modal analgesia, and therefore, this conclusion cannot be made. As described in the Guidelines for Recognition, Assessment and Treatment of Pain (Mathews et al. 2014), it is strongly agreed that pain management is a key issue in veterinary medicine and that multi-modal analgesia is the best and effective approach and relies on a wide range of analgesic drugs including the use of NSAIDs like cimicoxib.