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For small animals, CO2 is humane. It's widely used for laboratory research animals, and it's generally the least-worst option for them. I don't know how well
by hprotagonist 6y ago
For small animals, CO2 is humane. It's widely used for laboratory research animals, and it's generally the least-worst option for them. I don't know how well it scales up by body mass above roughly a canada goose, so use on pigs doesn't seem immediately sane to me.
Drowning doesn't seem viable.
A bullet to the head (or a bolt gun, or whatever) is probably the fastest way to remove sensation from neural tissue for large farm animals. The shock wave takes milliseconds to turn brains to soup.
- lol768 6y ago> For small animals, CO2 is humane Do you have a citation for this? Everything I've seen would suggest to me it's categorically less humane than using an inert gas like nitrogen or helium in the absence of oxygen.
- hprotagonist 6y agohttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5605172/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5605172/ has a lot of reading. it's so far the least-worst option: we know there are issues, but the alternatives to date so far have been worse, including inert gases.
- AndrewOMartin 6y agoI think the effect of CO2 is very similar to the hypoxia from low air pressure. Here's a video of a TV presenter and ex-member of parliament undergoing the experience. The point of the scene is that you lose any faculties long before any unpleasantness or damage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiEJKvbpOF0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiEJKvbpOF0 If I'm wrong, and this is completely irrelevant to the discussion, just try to enjoy seeing a Tory bought to the brink of oblivion [satire]
- bloak 6y agoWhy is CO2 different for "small" animals than "large" animals? If CO2 is humane for chickens, say, then why do they sometimes use Nitrogen or Argon, which are more hazardous for humans and probably more expensive?
- hprotagonist 6y agospeed of onset is proportional to body size; above a certain size it's impractical to induce loss of consciousness fast enough with CO2 compared with, say, a .45 to the brainstem.
- badRNG 6y agoNitrogen is largely viewed as the more humane option compared to CO2
- hprotagonist 6y ago" Concern regarding animals being hypoxic prior to unconsciousness led the AVMA Panel on Euthanasia to conclude neither nitrogen nor argon is an acceptable euthanasia method for rodents." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5605172/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5605172/
- downerending 6y agoMy prior impression was that nitrogen (at high concentration) would induce unconsciousness quite rapidly, and painlessly. Obviously hypoxia is part of this, but I'd never heard of this as being distressing in itself. Does anyone have further insight on this? (CO2 buildup, on the other hand, is inherently distressing, though the AVMA doc suggests that pigs would become unconscious in about two minutes, under proper conditions.) Thanks for the link.
- sokoloff 6y agoIndustrial nitrogen is incredibly cheap as it's basically a high-volume byproduct of the production of other industrial gases. (When you need to extract Argon, you have about 100x as much N2 and O2 as a by-product.)
- Ididntdothis 6y agoI find it interesting that different methods are used for death penalty and for farm animals. You should think that whatever is considered as humane for one should be ok for the other.
- toasterlovin 6y agoWhys shouldn't we privilege our own species in our moral calculations?
- hprotagonist 6y agoThere's increasing consensus that capital punishment methods, at least in the US, are not appropriate! Given that we allow the state to execute people -- a dubious proposition in the first place -- i don't understand why we don't just push a shitton of phenobarb and xanax or whatever. "an anaesthetic overdose" is pretty darn humane if we're willing to accept the premise that anaesthetic "work" by "decoupling consciousness". Scare quotes intentional here, because we genuinely don't know how anaesthetic work but we broadly agree that when you've taken a lot of them you don't feel any pain.
- berbec 6y agoHell, let them go out high as a kite. 1g of Carfentanil and it's over. (agree strongly with the dubiousnes)
- bbrree66 6y agoPlease define humane. Killing an animal that doesn't want to die is not humane.
- missedthecue 6y agowhen the alternative is them starving to death, it is quite humane.
- bbrree66 6y agoThat is illogical. That's like saying: I chopped someone's arm off so the only humane thing is to shoot them. Maybe don't do the terrible thing in the first place (breeding them to be slaughtered), and you won't have this issue.
- ksdale 6y agoDoesn't it follow from this that it would be beneficial to kill wild animals so that their far more numerous offspring won't die grisly natural deaths?
- bbrree66 6y agoLet's start with the human-created suffering then we can discuss this question.
- ksdale 6y agoWhy? If we can create moral good by preventing the existence of animals, do we have a duty to prevent the existence of as many animals as possible?
- hprotagonist 6y agoThere was an ethics paper that won a student prize at oxford ..? or cambridge ..? that argued this exact position. I can't put my fingers on it right now though, it's really annoying. edit: http://www.jpe.ox.ac.uk/papers/consistent-vegetarianism-and-the-suffering-of-wild-animals/ http://www.jpe.ox.ac.uk/papers/consistent-vegetarianism-and-... Ethical consequentialist vegetarians believe that farmed animals have lives that are worse than non-existence. In this paper, I sketch out an argument that wild animals have worse lives than farmed animals, and that consistent vegetarians should therefore reduce the number of wild animals as a top priority.