How can veterinarians humanely put down animals regularly but prisons struggle with performing lethal injections reliably?
In: Biology
For one, a veterinarian is a medically trained professional, while lethal injections in prisons are not administered by doctors.
[This](https://youtu.be/0lTczPEG8iI) is actually a pretty good watch that sums up lethal injections.
Believe it or not, I can all but gurantee the humaneness of veterinary euthenasia. The most common euthenasia drug is pentobarbital. That is a anti-seizure medication in low doses. In high doses it supresses brain activity to the point where all body processes shut down. It’s the closest you can get to dying in your sleep.
While government entities have use pentobarbital as an execution drug, they typically use a cocktail of other drugs to ensure death and reduce cost since pentobarbital is expensive. Unfortunately, those other drugs aren’t as humane and can cause immense pain if there isn’t enough pentobarbital to ensure complete anesthesia. On top of that, the pharmaceutical companies are refusing to sell pentobarbital and other drugs which could be used for executions to governments that carry out the death penalty. Though there are ways governments can still aquire it.
TL;DR what your vet uses is absolutely humane when administered by a proffesional, and it’s not exactly what prisons use for executions for various reasons.
The vast majority of doctors refuse to be a part of lethal injections, therefore its often done by people who may be competent technicians, but not fully trained doctors.
Furthermore, the companies that once provided lethal injection chemicals now largely refuse to do so, either on moral grounds, or on economic/legal grounds (many European countries will put sanctions on companies that knowingly provide execution chemicals).
So instead of a doctor injecting a chemical combination specifically formulated by company experts for a specific goal, you end up with a technician saying “hey, if we mix up chemical A and B together, that should kill him, but we can’t let the suppliers know what we’re doing”
Also: if prisons struggle with performing lethal injections reliably, are vets putting down animals humanely on a consistent basis?
The contention with reliable has more to do with the humane aspect. Your vet may very well be subjecting your older animal to a feeling of paralyzed strangling with consciousness of everything around them. The importance of making sure that this is not happening is not as great as it is with a human, in relatively good health that you are killing. [Side note: I am not going to debate the justification for or against the death penalty, since the motivation for ending the suffering of an animal and sentencing a convict is morally vastly different in its own right.]
I used to work in a vet clinic.
We gave the animals a cocktail of pre anesthesia, and then [euthasol ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenytoin/pentobarbital)
If the animal was a stray they became docile with the pre anesthesia, enough to administer the euthanasia.
I preferred to do IC sticks or inter cardiac injection. It was quicker than IV, the animal would pass before I got the plunger all the way down. And it’s easier to find the heart than it is to find the vein. Some folks prefer IV sticks.
It’s probably the most humane way to put the animal down. We only did animals that were non adoptable, like stray/feral cats, injured animals or aggressive dogs.
Euthasol is a controlled drug, and the manufacturers won’t sell it for human use. Like any narcotic it’s dosed by body weight so it would take a significant amount to put a human down.
I worked as an RAHT (Registered Animal Health Technician) for a few years. Trust me, it doesn’t always go well. Some animals have severe reactions to Pentobarbital and die quite horribly. Many vets won’t euthanize an animal with the owner present unless they demand to be there.
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