(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
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.
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