(marked this as engineering because I’m not sure what it would fall under, biology maybe?)
I’ve seen in a documentary where they would put pigs in cages and lower them into a pit of CO2, but it doesn’t kill quickly and the pig would thrash around violently as it was slowly poisoned. Why not just use CO? it would kill humanely, and from what I understand, a lot of packaged meat is packaged in containers with CO to prevent spoiling, so there must be no safety issue with the meat.
In: 675
I’m sure they could but gassing lowers the quality of the meat due to the meat not being properly bled. Meat that hasn’t been bled properly takes minerally and more gamey. Suffocation stops the heart leaving the blood in the animal and very difficult to remove. Most slaughterhouses use the captive bolt pistol these days. It destroys enough of the brain to instantly make the animal “dead”. The animal doesn’t feel much and the more primitive part of the brain that controls the heart continues beating. The throat is cut and the blood is expelled from the body.
One of the major reasons would be that CO is slightly lighter than air. This means you can’t have a pit full of CO as it wouldn’t stay put. Handling of gasses is fairly difficult in an industrial setting where leaks could be dangerous or fatal to staff, and CO makes that even worse.
Another major issue is that CO exposure builds up. If a worker gets a whiff of CO2 then it is easy enough to fix, they just move away and breathe normally for a bit and the higher concentration of CO2 in their body will clear naturally. CO though binds to red blood cells more strongly than O2 and cannot be cleared as normal. ~~A red blood cell saturated with CO is basically rendered useless until it can be replaced. A worker getting a whiff of CO then will need to wait until their blood cells can be replaced and any given blood cell lives between 4 and 6 weeks!~~ Edit: After some research I need to correct myself! Carboxyhemoglobin (CO bound to hemoglobin) can actually be reversed but it is still quite slow, around a half life of 300 minutes. So you don’t need to wait until the red blood cells are replaced but exposure can still build up as I said.
Overall CO2 is much safer to work around than CO, so unless there is an overriding need to use CO it should probably be avoided.
CO₂ is not immediately dangerous in terms of toxicity.
C0 poses a lot of risks – if there’s a leak, it can kill every human in the factory. Just an example of the dangers of lots of poisonous gas:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster
C0 has to be produced in a pure form, if there’s impurities there might be toxic residues.
Carbon monoxide can also cause serious discoloring: https://www.google.com/search?q=carbon+monoxide+skin+&tbm=isch
The existing method, the captive bolt pistol, shooting a spike into the cattle’s forehead, works quite well, ends consciousness immediately, is cheap and easy.
Actually, pure nitrogen gas is a superior killing agent and is rapidly lethal with no adverse effects (except death of course).
The thing that makes death by CO2 so agonizing is that the feeling of being suffocated and struggling for breath is *not* the lack of oxygen but rather the increase of CO2 in the body. Nitrogen simply displaces oxygen but allows CO2 to be exhaled as usual, so no struggle for breath.
I use nitrogen gas to euthanize rodents caught in live traps. They don’t struggle; they just keep doing little ratty things for about thirty seconds, and then they just…stop.
And nitrogen, which is about 70% of earth’s air, is not dangerous at all unless you’re inside a sealed container with pure nitrogen.
[See this](https://www.documentarytube.com/videos/how-to-kill-a-human-being-2); The relevant bit is from about 36:50.
Think about it for a second, you basically want to put an animal in a room devoid of O2, so they are basically drowning.
What part of downing to death is humane?
>a lot of packaged meat is packaged in containers with CO to prevent spoiling
As far as I am aware food is never packaged in CO because of the dangers of it, it is often packaged in CO2.
I’m sure there are lots of scientific reasons. But the practical reason is that slaughterhouses have no incentive, desire, or interest in humane practices. They do whatever is cheapest and fastest in every instance. That means that a high percentage of livestock are boiled alive, skinned alive, even dismembered alive. If it slows down the line by one second it isn’t worth it to those managing the operation.
What makes you think slaughterhouses care about killing humanely?
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