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

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(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.

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Aside from the other issues mentioned, carbon monoxide is also flammable, so that’s an additional big reason not to have it uncontained as well as the other hazards of toxicity etc.

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