The painless extinction of life in animals designed for human food / by Henry Maccormac, M.D.

  • MacCormac, Henry.
Date:
1864
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The painless extinction of life in animals designed for human food / by Henry Maccormac, M.D. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

    5/12
    sliarp pointed tube, to which the bag of fluid is at- tached, thrust in between the fifth and sixth ribs, though perfectly efficient as methods of destruction, require considerable skill to perform, and, taking into account the character of the operation, the coercion to which the impatient animal would have to be subjected, and the more or less protracted preliminaries, would, I conceive, entail as great or even greater suffering than any of the methods already in use. Under these circumstances, I come forward with a proposal to render the parting of life to the crea- tures which we require for our use, if not absolutely painless, at least as nearly painless as it is possible to imagine. The act of dying, I affirm, may be rendered painless, or next to painless, while the preKminaries need entail no bodily suffering of any kind. At the same time, I do not expect that the community at large will at once abandon its time honored customs at my suggestions. I, therefore, do not appeal to butchers or their ordinary cus- tomers only, but to the humane and intelligent, in particular to those who feel and know that God has not handed over his brute creation to us except on the tacit but not less binding condition that we should work them no avoidable ill. I cannot tell, I am sure, why no one, so far as I am aware, before now seems to have entertained the humane idea of putting animals designed for human food to death by means of carbonic acid gas, except that the first origin and growth of all useful ideas arc slow. And yet the fact that carbonic acid gas