The New York Times has reported that two major chicken producers will soon switch to what they call a more humane method of killing: gassing them with carbon dioxide before they are hung and killed, instead of hanging them first and then giving them an electric shock to dull the pain of the blade.
It's not exactly a delightful conversation—a point not lost on the companies that, The Times points out, are struggling with how to market their superior method of slaughter. Humane or not, company officials recognize, most people just don't want to know about any of it.
There's certainly something to be said for inflicting less pain on an animal, but two larger questions still loom: does the change make the killing truly humane, and is the method any better on the environment?
Altering the killing process does nothing to change the fact that chicken farms generate up to eight times more ammonia emissions than oil refineries and steel mills combined, or about the fact that the manure produced by chickens contaminates water supplies with phosphorous, turning them into slimy green messes.
The ammonia stat is from particularly poultry-heavy states, and the slimy mess has been notable near Tyson Foods facilities, the country's largest exporter—while the companies making the switch to gas are Bell & Evans in Pennsylvania and Mary's Chickens in California.
Bell & Evans processes about 840,000 birds a week, and Mary's about 200,000—both less than Tyson Foods' capacity of one million birds a week. So the ammonia emissions might not be eightfold that of oil and steel industries; for Bell & Evans, it's probably about 6.7 times. More to the point, if oil refiners and steel mills are the baseline, is even matching them something to strive for?
I've never seen ammonia emissions discussed in the context of vegetable production, and those plants certainly don't present the same manure problem. As for the humane question—they still live stressed lives, still live in crowded, unsanitary conditions, and they still end up being killed by knife in a factory. So ethically and environmentally speaking, the use of gassing as a more humane method of killing might be a step above the norm, but it's not much closer to the best possible option.
