Killing meat birds with carbon monoxide?

cutechick2010

Songster
9 Years
Aug 22, 2010
354
20
128
Illinois 20 chicken years
I sadly had to euthanize a sick guinea this week. I put her in a sack that I tied to the tailpipe of my car, this was the first time I had done that and found that it was super fast and seemed to be pretty gentle on the bird as well. What I am wondering is, can I kill my meat chickens this way too? Or will the meat be poisoned too? I read a blog written by a man that raises roosters for meat, but he uses the carbon monoxide poisoning method so that he can save the feathers to sell to fly tyers too. He claims to have done this and eaten the meat many times without ill effect, but I am nervous about it because I feed this meat to my family. Has anyone else ever tried this? Opinions yay or nay?

Begging your pardons, I think I named the wrong gas, mabye it is carbon dioxide? At any rate, whatever comes out of the tailpipe of a car.
idunno.gif
 
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carbon dioxide is ok be breath it out

but carbon monoxide is very dangerous and can kill if exposed to it

not sure which you want to do but you can always kill your birds by popping in a box and have a indigestion tablet and water and drop it in and close the lid

that released carbon dioxide and eats away at the oxygen suffocating the animal

personally im not for any of the above

I like the old traditional way with a knife
 
I sadly had to euthanize a sick guinea this week. I put her in a sack that I tied to the tailpipe of my car, this was the first time I had done that and found that it was super fast and seemed to be pretty gentle on the bird as well. What I am wondering is, can I kill my meat chickens this way too? Or will the meat be poisoned too? I read a blog written by a man that raises roosters for meat, but he uses the carbon monoxide poisoning method so that he can save the feathers to sell to fly tyers too. He claims to have done this and eaten the meat many times without ill effect, but I am nervous about it because I feed this meat to my family. Has anyone else ever tried this? Opinions yay or nay?

Begging your pardons, I think I named the wrong gas, mabye it is carbon dioxide? At any rate, whatever comes out of the tailpipe of a car.
idunno.gif
Carbon monoxide is what comes out of the tailpipe of a car. Carbon dioxide is what you breathe out.

With normal respiration, the oxygen in the air we breathe attaches to hemoglobin, the iron containing molecule in our red blood cells, and delivers it to the cells in the body. When a person breathes in carbon monoxide, it attaches to the exact same place as oxygen is supposed to. So it prevents oxygen from getting to the tissues in the body. In addition, once the carbon monoxide attaches to a hemoglobin molecule, then it sticks there. So with every breath in of carbon monoxide, more and more of the places that are supposed to have oxygen have carbon monoxide, and less and less oxygen gets to the rest of the body. So the end result is that there is increasingly less and less oxygen in the blood and you lose consciousness. Though you will continue to breath for a brief period of time, you quietly die.

In a chicken, the same thing would happen, but here is the issue, in my opinion. The chicken breathes in carbon monoxide, loses consciousness, but there is a little breathing and the heart will still beat briefly. In order to get a good bleed from the bird to drain it, you would have to cut the neck anyway before the heart stops beating. So it would change a one-step process into a two-step.

As for whether or not the meat would be tainted, keep in mind that there are many chemicals in car exhaust that aren't good for you. So, while carbon monoxide in the meat might not hurt you, there are other chemicals there that could. Kinda defeats the whole purpose of raising your own chicken.

Hope this helps.
 
As for whether or not the meat would be tainted, keep in mind that there are many chemicals in car exhaust that aren't good for you. So, while carbon monoxide in the meat might not hurt you, there are other chemicals there that could. Kinda defeats the whole purpose of raising your own chicken.

Hope this helps.
Thank you, that is exactly what I wanted to know, is if it would taint the meat. It didn't matter with the guinea I put down, she was badly infected so we wouldn't have eaten her anyway.
 

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