(November 7, 2019 at 12:32 pm)Gae Bolga Wrote: You could certainly shop your thesis around to any of the boards or advocacy groups that work towards making humane practices uniform. You'd be dismissed as a crank, but I'm sensing that this isn't a problem for you.
The concentration of CO2 determines it's effects (as do differences in biology)..but, in general, low concentrations are not capable of killing an animal, though they are capable of rendering it..first, disoriented, and then, unconscious. You could, if you wanted to, use CO2 to kill the livestock outright...but here again the process for doing so humanely is to first expose them to a low concentration, rendering them unconscious, then....-and only then- rapidly backfill the chamber.
No matter what the method used may be (and no matter how we kill) the goal is to render the animal insensate and immobile -before- you do anything that would cause pain or death. So...if you wanted to behead an animal, for example...you would still want them unconscious beforehand. Working with fish, I could very easily behead them....and this is not the case with a pig, but go ahead and find a pig to behead if you doubt that. Thing is, there's no need, since I use a spike to do the same job just that much more simply...leading to a more humane process for the fish and a better product for sale.
As someone who works in a slaughterhouse has already explained to you...beheading is just making more work for yourself than necessary....and, fwiw, animals tend to notice when the one in front of them has their head cut off.
It is alright to have been wrong about something, man. Most people don't kill animals for a living, so it's not as if you'd be expected to understand how any of this shit works. I didn't know how it worked, I had to get trained. I've mentioned before that there's no shortage of things to be concerned about when it comes to conventionals. You don't have to die on this hill in order to take the prevailing model to task for actual and potential abuse of livestock. Especially when it comes to pigs and cattle.
How they're kept is a much larger problem than how they die. That's when they suffer. Farmed fish often live in what amounts to sewage. That's why it tastes like shit. Cattle have severe issues with confinement and a grain based diet...and pigs...fuck, don't even get me started. Those poor little fuckers live in a lightless hole if they're not being kept in a body fitting cage and it drives them nuts..to the point of violent cannibalism being a thing that the producers have to keep in check. Then..there are the beak-less chickens.......
All of these things are problems with a specific model, though. We don't have to keep livestock this way anymore than we have to kill them some specific way. That's what free range stuff is all about - though that classification is routinely gamed, particularly in the case of chickens. It's an issue of a very well worded access provision that actually was, unlike food safety regs, the product of a corporate conspiracy, lol.
About CO2 suffocating, please have a look at this video, you can start somewhere from the middle:
https://youtu.be/HwxcKqXNRsM
This is footage from inside of the CO2 chamber. Are you telling me those pigs aren't in extreme pain? Are you a conspiracy theorist who will claim that footage is fake? Are you telling me pigs are pretending to be in pain? It would be hilarious if we weren't talking about something that happens again and again... because of people eating meat.
As for the rest of your post, it seems to me like a giant unicorn fallacy. You can imagine meat is produced humanely, so the criticism of the actual meat production seems besides the point to you.
