Spy Cams Reveal the Grim Reality of Slaughterhouse Gas Chambers
wired.com
wired.com
Nitrogen, on the other hand, is completely imperceptible (at least in humans; I assume the same thing is true for other animals). People have died in nitrogen rich atmospheres because they had no idea they were in a hypoxic environment until they lost consciousness.
So why not switch to nitrogen asphyxiation instead? Is it that much more expensive? The quality of meat might be better, since the animals would not be stressed moments before dying.
I thought this was well known - it's the main reason why killing methods are 'stealthy' (the animals don't see them coming) in slaughterhouses.
> Even after cooking it? Could anyone double-blinded tell the difference?
It doesn't matter to the company, because it's apparent when you look at the packaged meat.
> We have invested in research to understand which techniques cause the least pain and stress to the animals and to their handlers. For pigs weighing less than 65 pounds, we use either carbon dioxide (CO2), which causes painless loss of consciousness and death, or a device called a nonpenetrating captive bolt gun, which administers a controlled blow to the head without breaking the skin, instantaneously rendering the animal insensible and causing a quick death. For pigs larger than 65 pounds, we use a penetrating captive bolt gun that fires a retractable metal bolt into the brain, resulting in insensibility and death.
https://www.smithfieldfoods.com/animal-care (near the bottom is a section labelled "Humane Euthanasia and Slaughter")
I'm going to reach out to them and ask for clarification, because that statement is entirely inconsistent with reality.
Mea culpa.
I'll do a bit more digging first, to make sure I understand how it's being used. Just putting an animal into a chamber with a concentrated CO2 atmosphere would be identical to putting a bag over their head - obviously inhumane. Logically, that doesn't make sense to me. If nothing else, the animals would struggle and be very loud, which would panic the rest of the queue.
I'll follow up once I know more.
Point being, I believe that you are correct and that it's entirely possible the relevant decision makers simply don't care or, worse, recognize that they are being dishonest and don't care about that.
[0] Unless you can completely eliminate pain it's not strictly painless. Once you allow interpretation, you'll see questionable interpretations.
Have you watched the video in the article of the pigs squealing fighting for their life?
I've raised both pigs and cattle in the past, and pigs are definitely the more intelligent of the two. They're much more likely to be agitated by a rapid change of environment. Both are herd animals, so the agitation of one tends to agitate the others.
In the context of a slaughterhouse, the biggest things that should be done to reduce agitation is to reduce their exposure to unfamiliar sights and sounds, give them time to adjust to their surroundings without being disturbed, limit the duration of disruptions, and keep them in smaller groups.
In my experience in the situation I described in my top-level post, some pigs definitely knew that something bad was happening when they were let in to the kill room. Completely subjectively, I'd judge that maybe 10-20% of them acted like they felt threatened at that moment.
In that particular operation, we'd slaughter no more than ~50 pigs at a time - enough to develop an efficient process and for the workers to be proficient with it, but not enough to justify an expensive mechanical system optimized for throughput.
The person responsible for killing the animal had probably done so thousands of times in the past. It took less than fifteen seconds from the time the pig entered the room to the time it lost consciousness.
For what it's worth, I never saw an instance of the slaughtering method failing on the first try, but there were arrangements in place in the event that it did. A second bolt gun was kept armed and within reach in case the one in use failed. Given that this was a small "family" operation, there was also a .45 handgun a few feet away that could be used in an emergency if there were no other option to end an animal's suffering.
I was in my mid-teens when I worked the floor there, and the training was short but effective. For the first half dozen or so that I killed, a more experienced person was there overseeing, and was ready to step in if necessary. I was given the opportunity to "practice" on previously-slaughtered animals so I knew exactly where to place the gun, how loud it was going to be, etc., so by the time I was in the position to do it for real I had no doubts about what to do and could do it quickly.
Finally, I'll add that agitation - or "stress", or "panic", or whatever you want to call it - is a financial concern as well as a moral one. An agitated animal is likely to injure themselves before being slaughtered, which reduces meat quality and yield. Large companies are definitely optimizing to reduce that. My concern is that they're optimizing the process to maximize yield to the detriment of animal welfare. To be fair, I don't know if that's the case. I've not worked in a larger facility.
I live in an area with a ton of pork and poultry processing facilities. Given that my assumptions around the slaughter methods were shown in this thread to be incorrect, I think I'll see if I can't get access to one to tour their operations and see for myself.
Does CO2 affect pigs and mice differently? Or is this a one-off being leaked to make it appear that all pigs are stressed when euthanized with CO2? I really don't know and I don't know anyone who works in a slaughterhouse.
Here's the first reference I've found, which appears to be reasonably trustworthy at first glance. Note that it's very much from the perspective of industrial farming.
https://www.grandin.com/humane/meatfocus7-92.html
Basically, there are studies showing that pigs die a suffocating death with CO2, and there are studies showing that they don't even know it's happening. Both could be true, if there are genetic differences that impact the suffocation response. According to the article, those same differences seem to be present in humans as well, when exposed to high (but non-fatal) concentrations of CO2.
> "[...] analgesia is induced at approximately 7.5%, and anesthesia is induced at 30%, with death due to nervous system depression occurring with prolonged concentrations of 30% and higher."
https://rsawa.research.ucla.edu/arc/euthanasia-rodent/
Seems dubious to me, since even very low concentrations of CO2 can make humans feel very uncomfortable (the "stuffy room" feeling, where getting fresh air starts to be the only thing you can focus on.) It's possible that rodents, being smaller, go through these stages of suffocation faster so their suffering is less apparent to people. Or maybe lab workers are telling "white lies" because they think the ends justify the means but they're not sure the rest of the public will see it that way.
It's also interesting they use the CO2 only on the adult mice, for the babies they simply cut their heads off with shears. She explained the babies are the ones that suffer when exposed to CO2, whereas the adults don't.
The thing is it's all a matter of trust. Do we trust the meat industry when they tell us the animals aren't suffering? We've been lied to so many times by corporations that we tend to no longer trust them without some evidence. When they pay off legislatures to pass laws making it illegal to collect any evidence it makes it appear they're lying.
More education is necessary. Right now a lot of people have no clue that they're wrong.
1200 parts per million is fatal. Pump like 2500 PPM of CO into the chamber to be sure, everything dies, no suffering needed.
Do vets really do this? My dog was put down with a tranquilliser.
If I had to die I’d like to go that way.
Why are no startups exploring nitrogen? The world isn't going to go vegan. Cost effective nitrogen gas chambers could reduce a fair amount of animal suffering in a pragmatic way.
As I said elsewhere, at least in this case those incentives are largely aligned.
Food grade gasses (for brewers, at least) seem to put N2 as much cheaper. And that makes sense, it's aggressively abundant in the atmosphere. Concentrating it feels like it should be easy.
But I wonder if there's a safety aspect. If you're handling these gasses, you know if you're in a high CO2 area. Your blood acidity climbs and everything in your body tells you to get to better air. And it's rapid so you still have oxygenated tissues. In a nitrogen environment, you slowly deplete your reserves, faint and die. Maybe they could spike it with an odour like they do methane.
I've worked in a family member's small meat processing facility, and they offered slaughtering for hogs and cattle. The method there was to use a captive bolt gun - basically a gun, but instead of propelling a bullet from a cartridge, it used .25 caliber blanks to push a metal piston ~6" out the end. It was quiet enough that no hearing protection was required.
The process was basically: * animals in queue were kept outside, in a covered holding area, separated from the kill floor by a concrete block wall * a chute door was manually opened to allow a single animal into the building * the animal was killed by placing the bolt gun on the head, driving the piston and parts of the skull into its brain * the carcass was raise with a winch and hooked to an overhead rail system.
The rail system was used throughout the operation, from slaughter to when the carcass was broken down into parts. They didn't have enough employees to always have every workstation in operation, so there were freezers throughout the area that would be used to store the carcasses while slaughtering was taking place. Basically each one would be skinned, dressed, and stored in a freezer. Once slaughter was complete, there'd be a similar setup to break the animals down into quarters or large cuts (depending on the customer's order), and yet another to butcher from quarters into packaged cuts like you'd find in a store. Making finished products like sausages would be another workflow still.
My understanding is that this operation is pretty typical of small meat processors, and every one that I've visited seems to follow a similar pattern.
From an empathetic perspective, it honestly seems fairly optimal to me. Yes, the animals are uncomfortable because they're in unfamiliar surroundings, but they're insulated from the sights and sounds of the kill floor until literally moments before they're killed. I don't think oxygen deprivation is necessarily any better in that respect. I suspect it's more easily scaled, requires less labor per animal, and cheaper overall once a certain volume is reached.
ETA:
To be clear, I am not making a political or moral statement here. My background is very different from most people that I've encountered in tech, and I'm only sharing my experiences here to contribute to the conversation in a way that I expect isn't possible for most of us.
I assume that most people reading HN haven't spent time in places like this, much less spent participated in the process.
The super majority of us eat meat! We are all complicit to (even encouraging of) the mass execution of these animals. It has to happen somehow - none of which would be pleasant to read about.
Thank you for describing your experience. Yes its a shitty thing to have had to normalize, but you're right it does sound like a decent enough method of mass execution.
Anyone that wants to instinctively downvote the parent comment, please reconsider. Its hard enough to need to be a part of this normalization, let alone get negative reinforcement for something the super majority of us positively reinforce at the grocery store.
Eh, it's not the first time. I've found that as long as my approach is informative rather than accusational, it ends up a net positive.
> Anyone that wants to instinctively downvote the parent comment, please reconsider
Nah - just comment why you felt that way. Maybe we'll all learn something in the process.
Of course I'm against unnecessary cruelty, but often these "outrage" videos from animal rights activists show nothing particularly disturbing.
Thankfully, in this case that largely coincides with the financial motivations of the businesses that do it every day. Not exactly, but largely.
FWIW, I also think that anyone who eats meat should be personally familiar with the reality of what it entails. I have no problem with people who eat meat (I do) or with people who don't for moral reasons. I do think it's self-deceptive to eat meat and avoid the reality of what that means, though.
I didn't realize they fell out of favor because of disease transmission. As the article notes, I think a compressed air version is used in No Country For Old Men (did people not know what that thing was?)
The one I used was an "inline" design, similar to the first photo in the wiki article. It was about the size and weight of a pneumatic ratchet, and used the same strips of blank cartridges that would be used for a nail gun - at least, I think they were the same, as I never had to source them.
I expect prion disorders would be the biggest concern re: disease transmission. Where I was, the entire batch being slaughtered was from the same herd, so I don't think it was a huge concern. The guns were sterilized along with everything else at the end of the day.
They made a claim, but did their best to prevent any recordings from being made, and their claim turned out to be a knowing lie. How many more cases of companies asking us to trust them while hiding evidence will it take, before we finally learn that hiding implies we should assume the worst?
Edit: Specific to this case, is there a good argument for not requiring that the method of slaughter is public? I.e. making those spy cameras mandated by law.
That's an interesting idea. Unfortunately, there will likely be bad arguments ("I don't want to watch that!" ignoring the rebuttal of, "Don't watch it?") which become annoyingly persistent. Then "workarounds" like fake camera feeds.
Still, requiring that this is auditable by the general public doesn't sound bad on its face when it's considered that the general public is eating the things being audited.
The kill is never a pleasant thing to watch however it is carried out and this method is overall quite humane. I suspect most of the stress is created by the transportation (which is often not very kind on the animals) and the unknown environment.
Near me at least, pigs are usually transported in semi trailers with perforated sides. They can see out, hear the traffic around them, and are mostly exposed to the elements.
You don't want to try to slaughter a group of pigs that was just unloaded off a truck - ideally, you want to pen them overnight so they have a chance to calm down and become accustomed to their surroundings. Otherwise they'll be very resistant to being herded into a chute or separated from their herd.
I eat meat but I also believe that animal welfare is important. You can't do that in ignorance. Anybody and everybody who wants to know where meat comes from should be able to see how their meat lived and died. Given the mixed interests between parties, wouldn't it be easiest to just have public CCTV in all areas of slaughterhouses?
Anyway, CO2 poisoning is a horrible way to kill something. Mammals have a blood-acidity panic reflex. It's objectively cruel. As others have said a pure-N2 environment would allow them to expel CO2, and just faint and die from hypoxia, calmly.
Maybe we have different definitions of "painless" here but that seems very harmless for "The Inhumane Cruelty Of Factory Farming." I was imagining something really vicious from the headline.
Is there off-the-shelf hardware available to do this? Perhaps something that links to a cleverly placed nearby concealed mobile phone?
Edit: It's revealed deeper into the article. Not generally available to civilians, which is probably a good thing because creeps would abuse it.
> Deerbrook also used tiny cameras, specifically ones produced by Sony that are sometimes sold to law enforcement for hidden camera surveillance. But she was able to power them for days with small lithium-ion batteries and connected them via Wi-Fi to a hotspot generated by an Android phone that she hid on the top of the Marel gas chamber.
This statement from the article does not mean:
> Not generally available to civilians
There are very few pieces of technology a regular person can't get their hands on. A camera is not a controlled device or something.
People who make IoT devices regularly use similar cameras and hand-soldered batteries, etc. The setup from the article wouldn't even raise an eyebrow over at HackADay or similar.
I have three people in my circle of friends who have been vegetarian or vegan since they were little. All despite coming from a family background where meat consumption was the norm. Two are German, one is Croatian.
All of them witnessed animal slaughter firsthand from close distance at a very early age.
I still eat meat, and definitely know what's involved. If nothing else I don't take it for granted.
I think our ancestors whose spiritual practices included things like taking a moment to give thanks to the spirit of the animal before consuming it were on to something. It doesn't necessarily have to be spiritual, but feel like internal acknowledgement is a positive thing for the development of empathy.
What a hopelessly optimistic statement. As if a different kind of meat, or different country of origin, would be any better?
Not millions. Billions.
An average head of cattle yields maybe 880lbs of usable meat + fat (https://beef.unl.edu/beefwatch/2020/how-many-pounds-meat-can...)
1lb of beef has around 1,100kcal. This differs depending on the protein/fat ratio of course, but let's just do a simple calculation.
An average person would have to eat about 2lbs of beef per day as the only source of food. This is actually quite common in the carnivore and zero-carb communities, people mostly report between 1.5lbs (lil' old ladies) and 3lbs (big, tall, strong people who work out a lot).
So one head of beef cattle can feed the average person for ~440 days, or a little over a year. That means that less than 1 animal needs to be killed per year for your entire nutritional needs.
Compare this to chicken. How many chickens do you need to eat per day? Probably 2 or more, since they're so lean. So you're at <1 death per year vs. several deaths per day.
I say, let's eat more beef.
Need? 0.
The same animals die in the production of plant based food _used_ for the production of meat.
Yes
Given what I know about the process from end to end, the ideal would be an instant slaughter, away from the other animals, where they were raised.
There are pretty big roadblocks to making that happen - sanitation and refrigeration are the two that immediately come to mind, but there are others as well.
This line of thought does make me wonder if there might be a market for a mobile slaughter operation. Something on the scale of a single 52' semi trailer, where the animal goes from "farm to freezer" on-site. You'd definitely need to "field dress" them there, but you'd probably want to skin them as well for efficiency.
For game animals you can get away with removing the organs but leaving the carcass otherwise whole; for pigs, skinning is significantly more labor-intensive if not done as the first step. I won't go into detail here, because it's both potential disturbing and might be a bit of a trade secret - but there is an easy way to skin an animal that takes only one person less than a couple of minutes. I've done it for deer that have been field dressed, and it's much less effective.
"What do they know—all those scholars, all those philosophers, all the leaders of the world[...]? They have convinced themselves that man, the worst transgressor of all the species, is the crown of creation. All other creatures were created merely to provide him with food, pelts, to be tormented, exterminated. In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals, it is an eternal Treblinka."
[1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-apr-21-oe-dujac...
[2] https://books.google.com/books?id=WjTgvykUFNcC&lpg=PA9&vq=Tr...