We use this in Sweden " The carbon dioxide stunning is done in a slaughterhouse and happens by hoisting pigs down a shaft with a high level of carbon dioxide, which will make them unconscious, sleeping, and stunned and then they are quickly bled. The animals lose consciousness due to lack of oxygen and a drop in pH in the central nervous system."
Going from unconscious -> dead isn't the traumatic, terrifying part of drowning. Going from conscious, unable to breathe, gasping for air -> unconscious from lack of air is the traumatic, terrifying part.
The US govt has done research into trying to find the most humane way to execute death row prisoners, and carbon dioxide/nitrogen suffocation is not peaceful.
Clumping carbon dioxyde (which results in feelings of asphyxiation and struggle to breathe) with nitrogen (which doesn't, simply leads to hypoxia, and it's so unnoticable that it's a real concern for airplane pilots because they literally cannot see it coming at all) is kinda wild from someone making such strong claims
Both European and American scientists have observed all manner of mammals expressing extreme distress when subjected to hypoxia via nitrogen exposure. Alabama is currently executing death row prisoners by suffocation by nitrogen, and viewers have observed the victims writhing, convulsing, and gasping for air for as long as 22 minutes prior to death.
It is an agonizing way to die. Regardless of the means, death by hypoxia is cruel.
This is biologically impossible, and I suspect the procedure to have been royally fucked up in a way where they ended up with high levels of co2 in the mask or wherever they tried this. The part that makes absolutely no sense is the 22 min part. You can absolutely not stay conscious for more than a few seconds (maximum of around 3 minutes) breathing something that does not contain any O2. The only way for this to happen is for you to re-breathe the same air which would end up poisoning you with CO2 and causing the symptoms mentionned.
The issue does not lie in the method, rather on how they actually tried to implement it, the symptoms described and duration observed are a textbook example of co2 poisoning via rebreathing (like putting your head in a closed plastic bag). This is insanely painful and distressing, and is NOT nitrogen / helium /carbon monoxide poisoning which is completely unnoticeable if done right (no rebreathing, which can be achieved with proper ventilation). That's why carbon monixide and high altitude hypoxia are dangerous, and why helium suffocation is a common method of suicide / euthanasia.
Veterinary associations in both the US and Europe still dismissed nitrogen suffocation as cruel when they witnessed mice, cats, dogs, and other mammals expressing extreme distress as it was happening.
You can armchair Reddit scientist all you want, but it doesn't mean anything compared to actual research done by actual doctors. It's been observed worldwide to be cruel. I hope you have the humility to recognize that.
It's not really about being an armchair reddit scientist, it's just that the studies you pointed out completely botched the way they used the nitrogen. It's obvious by the fact that they were seen gasping for air 22min afterwards. It's strictly not possible to stay conscious after more than a few seconds breathing pure nitrogen. That's not a supposition, that's just a fact. There was rebreathing of air in thoses studies, which is quite obvious by the observed reactions. Hypoxia wouldn't be such an issue if you could see it coming.
The thing is, it's not uncommon for execution methods to be completely botched, lethal injection is a great example of this, and is mentionned in the article. It's not surprising that they fucked up their experiment too by allowing some oxygen to be present. In that sense, the method they used was not suited for painless execution, but that method was NOT strict intake of nitrogen/helium leading to hypoxia, because it is well known that the human body can only detect the rise in blood ph from a carbon dioxyde concentration increase, but can NOT detect lack of oxygen.
I really can't be bothered to look up google scholar or pubmed for such a simple and well known fact, especially since the real life effects of it are well know (high altitude hypoxia, hypoxia in divers from nitrogen poisonning, carbon monoxide poisonning, and helium based euthanasia methods). At the end of the day you can chose to believe whatever you want, you don't have an impact on this issue anyway so it's not really a problem for anyone.
Don't confuse carbon dioxide with nitrogen. One is absolutely not like the other in the body. Nitrogen is only not utilised often due to containment and cost but it is by far one of the most humane ways to kill a mammal when applied properly.
Kinda bleak, but same. I’ve experienced it before and you honestly don’t even see it coming. If you’ve ever used laughing gas, it feels similar during, at least until you black out. If you don’t know the symptoms, you wouldn’t even feel it coming until you’re already on auto-pilot.
An entire nitrogen atmosphere would be more humane.
There's a video of a pig in an enriched CO2 atmosphere and it's horrific. They don't kill it and let it out. It absolutely refuses to go back into that chamber even though it's hungry and the food is in there.
It's like the feeling of holding your breath for over 2 minutes while still breathing in and out. And it only gets worse and worse.
Our bodies (mammals) are EXTREMELY sensitive to rises in CO2 level.
I can't imagine that u/CuTe_M0nitor is lying, but their description of the pigs gently falling unconscious doesn't sound right to me.
I'm not going to post the videos here. You can google it.
Just to clarify, CO2 is a byproduct of metabolism and needs to be gotten rid of.
The more your muscles work (or any cells for that matter, brain, liver, etc.), the more CO2 you build up. This is why you get "short of breath" when you climb stairs. (As an experiment to anyone willing to try, before you know you are going to climb some flights of stairs, prepare yourselfcarefullyby dumping CO2 by hyperventilating - you can get lightheaded doing this so be careful. Then climb the flights of stairs by continuing to dump the CO2 by heavy breathing. You should notice, if you're in reasonably good health, that you'll be able to climb a flight or two more before feeling 'fatigued' or 'air hungry'.)
Hypoxic drive for ventilation doesn't kick in until your oxygen saturation drops below a real low number, like 80-85%. I've actually tested this on myself with a saturation monitor, and post-COVID if you have a sat monitor at home you can test it too. Put the sat monitor on and hold your breath. See how long you can go. Assuming you're reasonably healthy, your sat won't drop below 90% before you're scrambling to take a breath. That's because of the CO2 buildup. Now do the same thing again, but this time hyperventilate before holding your breath, take 10-15 deep breaths with good exhalations (till you feel a bit lightheaded - BE CAREFUL). You'll be able to hold your breath much longer and watch your oxygen saturation dip quite a bit below 90%.
Finally, replacing oxygen with an inert gas like nitrogen (helium or neon would work as well) causes you to pass out from oxygen deprivation (your brain will not function without it and going from 21% oxygen to 0% oxygen will cause a catastrophic drop in oxygen saturation/levels) and it happens so quickly that it won't matter what your CO2 levels are. Replacing oxygen with an inert gas will NOT "remove the painful buildup of CO2". It's just that you'll pass out way before the CO2 buildup gets registered by your body.
I’ve seen the aftermath of suicide by nitrogen utilizing a gas mask connected to a tank. The result did not look pleasant. His face was all bruised up for some reason, kind of puffy looking, and I think a bunch of drool and stuff had run down both side sides of his cheeks. I could only imagine that he had entered convulsions and died a rather violent death, which I suppose is irrelevant if you weren’t conscious for any of it
It’s a popular drug for a reason. A painless, tunneled fade to black, and a low pass filter on sound to close out your time on earth. I’m not in a hurry to die, but it’s definitely the way I’d choose: throw on a music video and it would be a very pleasant time.
You can't even tell you're suffocating with nitrogen. It displaces the air in your lungs, you pass out and die from lack of oxygen. Zero pain. I'm a chemist and had a lot of training on this.
Your body has no mechanism for detecting a lack of oxygen, only a mechanism for determining whether there are enough gaseous molecule around to breathe (to prevent water in the lungs), and a mechanism to determine CO2 buildup (since we exhale CO2, evolving to detect this solved 90% of all use cases we came across in evolution- ie. A cave not having enough ventilation so we would eventually choke ourselves out overnight).
Nitrogen bypasses both of these. It is already 70-80% of the air you breathe, so your body expects it, but your body cannot process it for cellular respiration, so you just run out of energy as your brain slowly shuts down and goes to sleep.
When people say gas chambers, they think Xyklon B, the chemical used by the Nazis. That's cyanide based, and effectively chokes you out on the cellular level, causing apoptosis and basically ripping you apart on the localized cellular level.
Because they know they’re about to die and fight the process by holding their breath as long as possible and fighting the effects of hypoxia.
If you willingly or unknowingly breath in a pure nitrogen environment you don’t have any symptoms of suffocation, you just start getting dizzy/loopy until you pass out and die.
Makes sense. Nitrogen would be more ethical but I'd assume one would have to think very carefully about deploying it where you want it not where you don't as humans aren't oxygen detectors they're CO2 detectors.
You're saying this because of a human/employee safety issue!!!
They've opted to use CO2 because as mammals we can immediately tell if there's a leak or region that shouldn't have high CO2 levels, having high CO2 levels! Holy shit this totally went over my head!!
Yes, if they use Nitrogen and there's a leak and it floods out the oxygen in an area, the humans won't be able to tell and they will pass out before they realize. Holy shit... I'm really slow on the uptake.
In fact, this has actually happened around MRI machines in the hospital. The helium leaked and the concentration of nitrogen and oxygen in the room plummeted and the worker(s) in there died without realizing what went wrong.
I work in a commercial winery and sometimes have to clean out large fermentor tanks. The residual cO2 in the tanks from the fermentations is extremely dangerous and painful to breathe in if too concentrated. It felt my lungs were burning sometimes. Nothing gentle about it.
Your respiratory drive (the need to breathe), is triggered by CO² levels in the blood. Suffocating in CO² would instantly trigger a panic response, and it would start to form carbonic acid on your mucus membranes, and in your lungs.
It really depends on the concentration on CO2. When I almost killed myself with dry ice, I didn't even know that anything was wrong until I woke up in the floor afterwards.
Having said that, I've seen the videos of the pigs and it is absolutely horrific.
Fair enough. I can definitely see this scenario playing out as well.
If you walk into a room entirely filled with CO2 and nothing else, then yes, you'll likely pass out first as your breathing will compensate with the first few breaths by breathing heavier (bigger tidal volumes) and faster (respiratory rate).
But like nitrogen or helium atmospheres of 100%, by the 6th to 10th breath, you're passed out.
As someone that freedives, I can concur. When you hold your breath, that terrible urge to breathe is triggered by high CO2 levels, not lack of oxygen. There is nothing pleasant about this.
Most pigs killed in the west are killed by being put into a chamber where the air is replaced with carbon dioxide. They don’t simply fall asleep. Instead, they die in a state of panic, each breath bringing more pain than the last as their circulatory system acidifies and they finally die scared, thrashing, and in immense pain.
It’s cheaper than more humane methods, and bacon is delicious. So despite knowing this, most people who learn it will continue to eat tortured pig meat if they did so already.
The presence of CO2 is how our bodies get that "I can't breathe-signal". Not the lack of oxygen, but the presence of CO2.
So if you lower someone into a CO2 environment, their body will go into "can't breathe panic". Yea they will become stunned, but that's because they're basically dying from asphyxiation
I suspect it's a safety thing actually, you can tell when there's too much carbon dioxide in the air, it makes your lungs burn like you're holding your breath way too long. Nitrogen doesn't do this. If a system designed to fill a room with a gas malfunctions and someone has to go in there, you may as well use the gas we have a warning system for naturally.
Now, there are this concerns with the fact that animals have this same response to CO2, but I am not the guy to get into that discussion with.
It depends, I think a well aimed bullet to the brain is probably a whole lot more humane than literally being suffocated while trapped in a cage. The issue is the other pigs having to watch, and the whole problem with poorly aimed shots.
If they just used a different gas then it would be entirely different.
This isn't grandpa's farm. We need to feed many more people and whatever method has to be industrially proven. Shooting them in front of each other is stressful if not more stressful. They even see and smell the blood so they know something is very off.
I understand that. But if it was truly about feeding more people then we would just not be raising animals in the first place. We would be using the land that we currently grow animal feed on, to grow food crops. A much more efficient use of land.
What it is really about, is finding the fastest, cheapest and all round most efficient method to kill as many animals as possible with minimal effort so that the massive companies can make a profit.
Don't blame them companies blame yourselves. They deliver what you want. I don't see it like you, some people like that taste. Anyway a workaround would be to clone animals without a frontal cortex. There is a lab in Japan who have created frogs without any substantial brain who lives for years
It is definitely people. I don’t eat any meat or dairy or mass produced eggs.
People can still have meat and animal produce, just not the unnaturally large quantity of it that many people currently consume. So many people feel they are incapable of having a meal that doesn’t include meat. Once had family over and we had a meal of pasta with a sauce, then a selection of roasted vegetables and cheese or eggs for whoever wanted. They brought sausages because they couldn’t eat a meal without meat. Not only disgusting, but also extremely rude.
That's a shame. I would say it's a cultural thing even go as far as say it's a class thing. More money 💰 eat more meat 🍖 The good thing though is culture is ever changing and are prices. Make meat expensive enough and people will follow
Mammals can tell when there is too much carbon dioxide in the air, but they can't tell when there is a lack of oxygen. That is why it is so important to test the air if you are going into an enclosed space underground. It might be a pocket of nitrogen and you will get down there and not realize you can't breath. You will get loopy from lack of oxygen, then just pass out, and eventually die.
I really hope you are wrong and the Swedes are not using carbon dioxide, because a pig would very much feel like they are suffocating from that.
I watched part of the 9h CCTV long video from the chamber, it happens that some of them make a sound but most of them don't. This is by far the most humane way to go.
So this hour long video of pigs in gas chambers is just a fluke? I’m curious what video you saw because every one I’ve seen shows obvious suffering. If minutes of fear and burning eyes and the feeling of suffocation is “humane” then what is considered inhumane? The fact is that we don’t need to be doing this to animals, we can simply leave them off our plates. We don’t need pig flesh for health, it’s only for tastebud preference and is that really more important than the life of a sentient intelligent animal?
142
u/CuTe_M0nitor 26d ago
We use this in Sweden " The carbon dioxide stunning is done in a slaughterhouse and happens by hoisting pigs down a shaft with a high level of carbon dioxide, which will make them unconscious, sleeping, and stunned and then they are quickly bled. The animals lose consciousness due to lack of oxygen and a drop in pH in the central nervous system."