Eli5: Why isn’t carbon monoxide used in slaughterhouses to kill humanely?

1.04K views

(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

25 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

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.

You are viewing 1 out of 25 answers, click here to view all answers.