Gas Stunning Birds

[ChickieBooBoo]

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Ack! That guy sounds like a complete idiot!

I'm leaning further and further away from the gas idea

I dont think he's an idiot, he was proving to people that its not humane.

 

[FarmrGirl]

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DenverBird,

Thank you very much for your very judicious and thoughful reply

N2O really would be painless, eh? I should be able to get that at the welding supply (along with a regulator). I'll do a bit more research and when I do my spring harvest of the Muscovy I'll try it out.

The backup plan remains in place

 

[FarmrGirl]

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Omniskies - I agree about the pillowcase for the geese... I saw somewhere that a gal used an old gym sock and it was very effective at keeping them calm. I didn't try that with the Muscovy but I may give it a shot since I would just cover their eyes while I carried them to the designated spot and they were fine with that.

Good description of the method also... certainly worth a try since they do take much longer than the chickens to pass out and I hate the thought of them in pain any longer than necessary.

 

[DianeS]

I only cut the carotid, not the windpipe. The point is for them to bleed out, not suffocate to death.

For what it's worth, cutting the windpipe does NOT make them suffocate. In fact, it doesn't affect their breathing at all. It's the lungs that expand and contract, the part of the windpipe near the head has nothing to do with that process. Like a person with a tracheotomy - the tube that goes into their throat through their neck. You can do anything with the windpipe you want - put a tube in it, open it completely up, anything really, and it doesn't affect breathing.

You may find that they bleed out a lot faster if you cut the whole way across the neck. (And therefore they would move less, have less time to move, etc.)

Just food for thought.​

 

[DrinkTheRainbow]

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LOL! VROOM! There goes the ducks....

 

[theOEGBman]

We've used the CAS method multiple times at my school. It worked really well, and was simple, but it took longer than just hanging the birds on the shackle, stunning them with the stun knife and cutting their carotid.

 

[aprophet]

If you google " adc trapper euthanasia chamber" these guys use these all day long there is a slight learning curve to using them the mix of gas both pressures and ratios need to be right, they are fairly easy to build and use though. the quail I process I was using the dislocation method I changed to using a pair of sisiors poultry sissiors it is quicker and easier I have used the dislocation method on chickens many years ago it involved walking from a coop to the house and swinging and kinda jerking by the time I got too the house it was over .

 

[Kelsey2017]

my boyfriend made really nice killing cones for us, but they were a little too narrow to keep the chickens from flopping out. We simply made a noose out of baling twine with a cement block tied to it to slip around their necks and hold them down in there. It had the added benefit of keeping the head still while we shot them and then made it easier to slit the throat and ensure a good bleed out. The cones were mounted on a saw horse so all this happened at waist level or below, and it was very safe, of course you have to consider where you are, not everyone can shoot off .22's in their yard. I did some by just cutting their throats and that worked good as well, but it made me feel better knowing they had no brain left after being shot. Tied down tight they didn't flop around at all, just kicked their little leggys and bled out in a bucket, snipped their heads off releasing the noose and pulled them back out of the cone. plastic baling twine stayed cleaner than natural.

 

[mons02035]

I haven't seen it here yet so I'll be the first. What about a stun gun used for personal protection? Would that incapacitate them long enough for you to bleed them out?

 

[DenverBird]

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Somehow the notion of shooting them with a gun while they're immobilized in the cone with a weighted noose around their necks, then slitting their throats and bleeding them out seems like (pardon the pun) overkill. If you're doing this to avoid traumatizing the birds, I wonder whether sitting in the holding pen, hungry, with flockmates getting pulled out and gunshots going off nearby may be just as traumatic, if not more, than the few moments between slitting the throat and loss of consciousness.

I'm sure your boyfriend knows how to safely handle a gun but it also adds gunshot wounds to the potential safety hazards like sliced fingers, etc. The same goes for the bathtub chloroform mixing that's posted above.

I've also heard that a live bleedout allows the heart to continue pumping and more effectively gets the blood out of the bird.

-DB