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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS

MONTH: October 2006

How gassing came & went

 

Gassing pound animals with carbon monoxide gained acceptance across the U.S. after the American SPCA took over the New York City animal control contract in 1895 and introduced carbide gassing in lieu of drowning mass-caged strays in the Hudson River.

 

Carbon monoxide gassing prevailed over many attempts to introduce other killing methods partly because it was inexpensive and easily done, but perhaps mostly because it was perceived as painless.

 

The most successful challenge to carbon monoxide came from the introduction of decompression chambers to kill animals, after World War II, when the San Francisco SPCA developed a side business in purchasing and adapting to shelter use Navy surplus decompression chambers originally used to help divers who developed "the bends."

 

The SF/SPCA in 1954 and 1955, respectively, formed the Northern California SPCA and the Western Humane Education Society to help promote decompression. The SF/SPCA and the subsidiaries argued that decompression produced a quicker, cleaner death than gas, but shelter workers and the public became skeptical.

 

Across San Francisco Bay, the city of Berkeley abolished decompression in 1972. The SF/SPCA itself abandoned decompression in 1976, when newly appointed executive director Richard Avanzino (now president of Maddie's Fund) scrapped the decompression chamber on his second day. Portland, Oregon, banned decompression in 1977, other cities followed, and by 1985 decompression was no longer used to kill animals anywhere in the U.S.

 

Some shelters merely converted decompression chambers into gas chambers, a relatively simple retrofit, but the arguments against decompression had caused the humane community to rethink the whole idea of killing animals in any sort of chamber.

 

A landmark study of attitudes and occupational stress among slaughterhouse workers published in 1988 by Colorado State University psychologist and livestock management expert Temple Grandin had an impact. Grandin found that slaughterhouse personnel responded to killing in three distinctly different ways: some detached themselves, some became sadistic, and some ritualized killing, convincing themselves that what they did was for the greater good.

 

While shelter workers typically resented being compared to employees of slaughterhouses, follow-up studies determined that they responded in the same ways, just in different proportions, with ritualizing predominant among those who killed animals by lethal injection, and distancing more common among those who used gas.

 

As to whether any killing method has ever been easier on shelter workers as measured by either psychological studies or job turnover rates, "There is not much evidence either way that I have seen," Humane Society of the U.S. companion animal issues director John Snyder told ANIMAL PEOPLE. "However, I have heard a number of shelter workers say even though it may be a little more work, they feel that sodium pentobarbital is more humane for the animal, and they feel better using sodium pentobarbital to end the animal's life."

 

"Electrocution, hypoxic gasses such as carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, nitrogen and argon, and decompression became the predominant methods of animal shelter killing by 1970," recalls shelter consultanent and euthanasia instructor Doug Fakkema. "All of the distance killing methods were an attempt to improve the method of death as well as remove the operator from the actual killing.

 

"This is an absurd notion to be sure," Fakkema told ANIMAL PEOPLE, "as anyone who has pushed the button on a chamber full of animals knows full well that killing is going on. A similar movement in human executions has been taking place since the 19th century, with the invention of the guillotine to replace hanging or clubbing, then electrocution, gassing, and finally lethal injection," by a series of methods that are still evolving and often challenged in court.

 

"In animal shelters," Fakkema continued, "carbon monoxide by gasoline engine was replaced by decompression," as the purported best method, if not the method most widely used. "Then decompression was replaced by nitrogen gassing, then [back to] carbon monoxide using compressed, bottled gas," which has the advantages of being relatively quietly administered and not burning animals' nasal passages and lungs, as exhaust fumes do if not properly cooled before introduction into the lethal chamber.

 

Many different approaches to lethal injection were tried before sodium pentobarbital became the standard killing drug. Magnesium sulphate gained brief acceptance, and is still commonly used in India and eastern Europe, but was rejected in the U.S. because it visibly causes animals to suffer. A paralytic injectible drug called T-61 was commonly used to kill mink on fur farms, and crossed over into shelter use, but also caused evident suffering, and was federally banned in 1986.

 

Sodium pentobarbital caught on slowly because it is a federally regulated barbituate. "Euthanasia by [sodium pentobarbital] injection became legally difficult," Fakkema remembers, "when Congress passed the 1970 Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention & Control Act, which permitted only mid-level practitioners such as physicians and veterinarians to have access to sodium pentobarbital. In 1972 the Commonwealth of Virginal passed the first of the direct registration laws to permit animal shelters to directly purchase sodium pentobarbital, now a C-II controlled substance. The Drug Enforcement Agency now allows between 27 and 31 states to purchase and administer sodium pentobarbital without using a veterinarian's DEA license. The number varies depending on how one defines direct registration.

 

"The trend is toward euthanasia by injection," Fakkema believes, calling 'euthanasia by injection' "the preferred terminology, as 'lethal injection' evokes human execution and does not involve the same drugs we use."

 

But critics of high-volume shelter killing, including Nathan Winograd of No Kill Solutions, argue that the term "euthanasia" itself is inappropriately used to describe killing healthy animals, and that people should take it as seriously as executing human convicts.