(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
[https://watchdominion.org/](https://watchdominion.org/)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQRAfJyEsko&t=4711s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQRAfJyEsko&t=4711s)
here is the documentary.
Watch it and tell me if there is a humane way to kill a living sentient beeing that doesnt want to die.
What’s wrong with punching a hole in the creatures head and destroying it that way? Why do we need to introduce dangerous chemicals under the guise of “humane” killing?
Unpopular opinion alert: “kill” & “humanely” should not exist in the same sentence.
Hopefully one day earth becomes a meatless society full of impossible burgers etc.
worker safety, and taste, and by taste mostly I mean speed
even when CO2 is used that is usually only to stun, same as bolt guns or electostun production lines, then you bleed the animal to finish it off and preserve the quality of the meat
you need to do this quickly and you need to do it incrementally, you cant gas a whole pen of hogs then spend the next hour or two hoisting them. the ones at the end of the line would taste bad.
you cannot easily use CO incrementally because it is not heavier than air and it is not easily detectable by the workers so it would have to be done in an enclosed chamber, you would also have to expose them much longer both of which would lead to more waste or lower quality meat die to the time involved.
nitrogen has a similar problem
butchering livestock is one thing, but deliberately spoiling the result is an entirely different dimension of waste
When you think about how many humane ways we have available to kill livestock, it’s amazing to me that we choose horrifying and painful ways to kill convicts who are sentenced to death.
nitrogen would work better than CO, especially for the health of the worker as you handle N2 poisoning by going outside for 5 minutes and handle CO poisoning by high flow oxygen for like 5 hours.
Or.. we could not kill animals. That would be a very humane way to go about things. No need for any types of poisoning gasses or gas chambers for creatures that are as smart as children.
All the reason exposed are right but it can all be managed by a proper design, security measures and a work candency that actually allows to take time to do it.
Yet the meat industry don’t do that.
So the actual reason why we don’t kill humanely is because IT IS EXPENSIVE.
Carbon monoxide isn’t actually painless, and it’s hard to handle safely, too.
Nitrogen would be a better choice, except that you’d need an airtight room, and sooner or later, some of your employees are going to die. See, if you breathe in too much CO2, your body notices and you feel like you’re out of breath, so you can get out of danger. If you breathe in too much N2, you feel fine right up until you drop dead.
By “too much CO2” and “too much N2” I mean “and not enough oxygen,” because that’s what really kills you, not the CO2 or N2. Your body is built to react to too much CO2 or CO, but it doesn’t have a way to notice too much N2.
Last time I was in a slaughterhouse, they were using something that was essentially a bang stick, but with a retractable spike instead of a shotgun shell.
Cows never knew what hit them.
This was many years ago.
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