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Just pump nitrogen in the sealed pens. The animal doesn’t panic due to perceived oxygen deprivation. They just get sleepy and die.
Hell it would be the way I’d want to go if I was sick with terminal cancer. Cheap, easy, and painless.
I imagine that would be pretty difficult to do in a chicken coop. These are barns made out of corrugated steel and generally aren't even remotely air tight. You will, ultimately, need about 10x the nitrogen you would otherwise need, and that's if it even works.
So a special coop would need to be built for this purpose.
Chicken farmers are some of the poorest farmers in the country. They generally don't have the means to build a special kill shed to humanely euthanize their flock. They barely have the means to keep up with Tyson and Perdue's ridiculous bullshit.
So, while I agree, heat stroke is a fucking awful way to kill these animals, the issue isn't just "there's a humane method bro, just build a kill house bro"
The issue is, we are paying FAR too little for chicken, and most meat, honestly.
If you have millions of chickens to kill, you're not so poor of a farmer that be you can't afford to come up with a humane method to do this job.
There are several documentaries on this topic, but they don't have a lot of authority over how many chickens they buy. They're dictated a flock size, they pay for it, and then they pay to feed and raise them, then they sell them back to the people they bought the chicks from. Inevitably every year the chicken processor, whoever it may be, makes additional demands that they also have to pay out of pocket for.
I'm not justifying their actions, I'm saying they are stuck between two masters and they have no room to wiggle.
Out of complete ignorance - do Purdue or Tyson even run their own hatcheries/coops?
No.
It's cheaper to out source it this way because as their farmers are contractors they don't have to adhere to the legal responsibilities they would if they ran them in their own.
They can keep their contracted farmers in debt to them indefinitely and essentially have a class of indentured servants.
I have learned more in this discussion about chicken farming than I ever thought I would.
Sometimes I just love the internet.
Welcome to the Internet, come and take a seat.
I thought that was the case. They probably own the IP rights to the breed too, so they keep the money circulating within their own pockets
You’re not wrong and nuance is often the bane of rationality. I didn’t say it was an easy solution just a more humane one.
I imagine there are a handful of ways to do it besides “long, slow heat stroke”
I imagine the long, slow, painful, heat stroke method is the cheapest, thus the suffering is capitalist-approved!
We are getting that heat stroke thing thrown back to us soon lol
Us: pumping heat into the atmosphere.
Mother earth: oh you guys cold? Don't worry, I got you fam!
Doesn't sound as cheap as running the heater for a few hours.
Think of the power/gas savings!
Carbon monoxide would be cheaper. We used it for euthanizing animals that couldn't be saved at the wildlife rehab center I worked at. Though, it was done with sealed induction box, not a drafty barn like someone mentioned
Sounds like it would be more expensive? Nitrogen is incredibly cheap to concentrate out of the air, 70% of what we breath is nitrogen after all.
Monoxide is incredibly cheap to produce with a crappy farm truck or old tractor. You doing need to distill or concentrate anything, just a hose and the exhaust pipe and a couple hours of fuel for idling.
We used it to gas a nest of rats that had settled in under a grain bin floor. Only a couple rats popped out and they were dazed, the dogs quickly snacked them up. The rest expired rapidly.
A chicken barn is big and drafty but you could just use multiple tractors or detune them on purpose. Any engine running rich produces a lot of CO.
Nitrogen is expensive and these buildings aren't airtight
These are engineering problems. The point is it’s way more humane than dying in a sweat lodge.
Eh, the atmosphere is 70% nitrogen, making liquid nitrogen is basically just a suped up AC.
There are also various methods of simply filtering the nitrogen out of the air. Having on site machines doesn't seem too bad.
wouldnt that be more expensive than just cutting off the ventilation? on top of paying for disposal afterwards & whatnot?
Disposal of what? The air we breathe is 75% nitrogen. The chickens are already going to have be disposed of.
Those big coops are not anything close to airtight. Heat, however, doesn't require it to be airtight.