(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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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.
Worker safety.
With CO2, if the human workers get exposed, they *know*. They would have the same violent reaction, and remove themselves immediately from the area.
If you use a gas that kills without the victim even realizing it, then inevitably you’ll get a few humans that die because they didn’t realize where they were standing (or didn’t realize that there was a leak).
CO is used on mink farms. I know a family that runs a mink farm. Their slaughtering method is an airtight container that has the exhaust from a small engine piped into it. A few years ago the old engine went out and they replaced it with a brand new honda engine. The new engine was so efficient that it’s exhaust was no longer deadly. They had to find another old engine to replace it with.
So please explain, how over feeding an animal in an industrial environment to then kill it for mass consumption a humaine process?! Euthanaising a person that make a conscious choice of not wanting to live anymore is humane. Killing an animal that has a natural instinct to survive is not humane.
There is no such this as ‘killing humanely’ when you’re referring to killing an animal which doesn’t want to be killed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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