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.

In: 675

25 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

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.

Anonymous 0 Comments

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

Anonymous 0 Comments

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.

Anonymous 0 Comments

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?

Anonymous 0 Comments

[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.