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Comment by yusina | Hacker News Reader

The squirrel example sounds terrible, but people don't realize the danger that moving pathogen-carrying specimen across ecosystems poses. Introducing a disease into your local environment can have devastating consquences for wildlife or farming or both.

Example: Dairy farms have strict rules about not letting anybody in who was abroad within the last 48 hours because of possible spread of foot-and-mouth disease. There are many such examples and similar examples exist for wild ecosystems.

So, while it may seem cruel to kill a few hundred squirrels, the precaution is justified. The "guilt", if there is any, is with whoever didn't ensure all the paperwork is in order.

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The acute guilt levied wasn't about following orders and exterminating the ground squirrels...

... but using an industrial shredder to do it. (on 440 of them)

For reference, this is an industrial shredder: https://m.youtube.com/shorts/I15kCJyl6po

Anyone who did that to a live animal deserves to be in prison, orders or no. There are innumerable compassionate, humane ways to kill animals, if it's necessary.

I suppose you are vegetarian? Cause the amount of suffering that the majority of animals have endure which are killed for meat is on a similar level. (Transport to slaughterhouse and subsequent death by suffocation or boiling, depending on species.)

Or rather, vegan? Since average dairy cow or hen endures quite some suffering over their whole life too. In addition to then experiencing a similar death to what animals mainly used for meat production endure.

This is meant to point out that the shredder is a terrible machine, buy not categorically worse than how the typical production animal is treated at some point of their conscious life.

(To clarify, I'm personally neither vegan nor vegetarian so am not trying to elevate myself morally above you.)

Spare me the whatabout- and no-true-scotsman- isms.

People in this position had a choice: they chose a terrible option.

There weren't economies of scale. There weren't labor cost concerns. There weren't quotas.

At minimum, someone could have researched how slaughterhouses stun prior the euthanasia.

When you think about it, it's probably not actually that easy to kill 440 squirrels in a way that doesn't give everyone involved PTSD, if said people are not already used to doing such a task and already have methods and equipment to do it.

The shredder though, I'd rather do anything but that, that's really insane.

I'm genuinely curious now.

If you have 440 squirrels to kill, in an airport, that are legally not allowed to leave the airport... how the heck would you do it humanely?

It feels extremely non-obvious to me. Are there extra-large portable CO2 chambers the size of a whole room or something you can rent? And whose budget is that coming out of? I'm assuming nobody's going to try to inject them all individually with something.

Getting suffocated with CO2 is also a terrible way to die. Animal welfare research is clear on that. There are other options (with other gases that just make the animal fall asleep and avoids the suffocation reflex) but they are still more costly currently. If we'd switch to those then one reason I feel uncomfortable as a meat eater would disappear.

To the how question, constructing a quick airtight chamber then flooding it with nitrogen would be more humane than a shredder, and it's something that could have been cobbled together at an airport.

The abrogation of imagination or basic empathy is the travesty here.

Is that the type of shredder they used though? It seems too slow especially when considering live squirrels. I imagine it would be more like the one used to kill male hatchlings in the poultry industry[1]. Quicker and bit more humane.

[1] -https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udSiluTAOaQ (warning : potentially disturbing footage)

Article noted industrial, which means they were probably using a high-torque, low-speed machine (aimed at pallet shredding).

Are you vegan? Your food goes through much worse before it reaches the grocery store.

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