Pest control
Pest control is the regulation or management of a species defined as a pest, a member of the animal kingdom that impacts adversely on human activities. The human response depends on the importance of the damage done, will range from tolerance, through deterrence and management, to attempts to eradicate the pest. Pest control measures may be performed as part of an integrated pest management strategy. In agriculture, pests are kept at bay by cultural and biological means. Ploughing and cultivation of the soil before sowing reduces the pest burden and there is a modern trend to limit the use of pesticides as far as possible; this can be achieved by monitoring the crop, only applying insecticides when necessary, by growing varieties and crops which are resistant to pests. Where possible, biological means are used, encouraging the natural enemies of the pests and introducing suitable predators or parasites. In homes and urban environments, the pests are the rodents, birds and other organisms that share the habitat with humans, that feed on and spoil possessions.
Control of these pests is attempted through exclusion, physical removal or chemical means. Alternatively, various methods of biological control can be used including sterilisation programmes. Pest control is at least as old as agriculture, as there has always been a need to keep crops free from pests; as long ago as 3000 BC in Egypt, cats were used to control pests of grain stores such as rodents. Ferrets were domesticated by 500 AD in Europe for use as mousers. Mongooses were introduced into homes to control rodents and snakes by the ancient Egyptians; the conventional approach was the first to be employed, since it is comparatively easy to destroy weeds by burning them or ploughing them under, to kill larger competing herbivores. Techniques such as crop rotation, companion planting, the selective breeding of pest-resistant cultivars have a long history. Chemical pesticides were first used around 2500 BC, when the Sumerians used sulphur compounds as insecticides. Modern pest control was stimulated by the spread across the United States of the Colorado potato beetle.
After much discussion, arsenical compounds were used to control the beetle and the predicted poisoning of the human population did not occur. This led the way to a widespread acceptance of insecticides across the continent. With the industrialisation and mechanization of agriculture in the 18th and 19th centuries, the introduction of the insecticides pyrethrum and derris, chemical pest control became widespread. In the 20th century, the discovery of several synthetic insecticides, such as DDT, herbicides boosted this development. Biological control is first recorded around 300 AD in China, when colonies of weaver ants, Oecophylla smaragdina, were intentionally placed in citrus plantations to control beetles and caterpillars. In China, ducks were used in paddy fields to consume pests, as illustrated in ancient cave art. In 1762, an Indian mynah was brought to Mauritius to control locusts, about the same time, citrus trees in Burma were connected by bamboos to allow ants to pass between them and help control caterpillars.
In the 1880s, ladybirds were used in citrus plantations in California to control scale insects, other biological control experiments followed. The introduction of DDT, a cheap and effective compound, put an effective stop to biological control experiments. By the 1960s, problems of resistance to chemicals and damage to the environment began to emerge, biological control had a renaissance. Chemical pest control is still the predominant type of pest control today, although a renewed interest in traditional and biological pest control developed towards the end of the 20th century and continues to this day. Biological pest control is a method of controlling pests such as insects and mites by using other organisms, it relies on predation, herbivory or other natural mechanisms, but also involves an active human management role. Classical biological control involves the introduction of natural enemies of the pest that are bred in the laboratory and released into the environment. An alternative approach is to augment the natural enemies that occur in a particular area by releasing more, either in small, repeated batches, or in a single large-scale release.
Ideally, the released organism will breed and survive, provide long-term control. Biological control can be an important component of an integrated pest management programme. For example: mosquitoes are controlled by putting Bt Bacillus thuringiensis ssp. israelensis, a bacterium that infects and kills mosquito larvae, in local water sources. Mechanical pest control is the use of hands-on techniques as well as simple equipment and devices, that provides a protective barrier between plants and insects; this is referred to as tillage and is one of the oldest methods of weed control as well as being useful for pest control. Crop rotation can help to control pests by depriving them of their host plants, it is a major tactic in the control of corn rootworm, has reduced early season incidence of Colorado potato beetle by as much as 95%. A trap crop is a crop of a plant. Pests aggregated on the trap crop can be more controlled using pesticides or other methods. However, trap-cropping, on its own, has failed to cost reduce pest densities on large commercial scales, without the use of pesticides due to the pests' ability to disperse back into the main field
Jack Kevorkian
Jack Kevorkian was an American pathologist and euthanasia proponent. He is best known for publicly championing a terminal patient's right to die by physician-assisted suicide, he was portrayed in the media with the name of "Dr. Death". There was support for his cause, he helped set the platform for reform, he said, "Dying is not a crime". In 1999, Kevorkian was tried for his direct role in a case of voluntary euthanasia, he was served 8 years of a 10-to-25-year prison sentence. He was released on parole on June 1, 2007, on condition he would not offer advice nor participate nor be present in the act of any type of suicide involving euthanasia to any other person. Kevorkian was born in Michigan, on May 26, 1928, to Armenian immigrants, his father, was born in the village of Passen, near Erzurum, his mother, was born in the village of Govdun, near Sivas. His father left Armenia in the Ottoman Empire and made his way to Pontiac in 1912, where he found work at an automobile foundry. Satenig fled the Armenian Genocide of 1915, finding refuge with relatives in Paris, reuniting with her brother in Pontiac.
Levon and Satenig met through the Armenian community in their city, where they married and began their family. The couple had a daughter, Margaret, in 1926, followed by son Jack – and, their third and last child, Flora. Kevorkian graduated from Pontiac Central High School with honors in 1945, at the age of 17. In 1952, he graduated from the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor. Kevorkian completed residency training in anatomical and clinical pathology and conducted research on blood transfusion. Over a period of decades, Kevorkian developed several controversial ideas related to death. In a 1959 journal article, he wrote: I propose that a prisoner condemned to death by due process of law be allowed to submit, by his own free choice, to medical experimentation under complete anaesthesia as a form of execution in lieu of conventional methods prescribed by law. Senior doctors at the University of Michigan, Kevorkian's employer, opposed his proposal and Kevorkian chose to leave the University rather than stop advocating his ideas.
He gained little support for his plan. He returned to the idea of using death row inmates for medical purposes after the Supreme Court's 1976 decision in Gregg v. Georgia re-instituted the death penalty, he advocated harvesting the organs from inmates after the death penalty was carried out for transplant into sick patients, but failed to gain the cooperation of prison officials. As a pathologist at Pontiac General Hospital, Kevorkian experimented with transfusing blood from the deceased into live patients, he drew blood from corpses brought into the hospital and transferred it into the bodies of hospital staff members. Kevorkian thought that the U. S. military might be interested in using this technique to help wounded soldiers during a battle, but the Pentagon was not interested. In the 1980s, Kevorkian wrote a series of articles for the German journal Medicine and Law that laid out his thinking on the ethics of euthanasia. In 1987, Kevorkian started advertising in Detroit newspapers as a physician consultant for "death counseling".
His first public assisted suicide, of Janet Adkins, a 54-year-old woman diagnosed in 1989 with Alzheimer's disease, took place in 1990. Charges of murder were dropped on December 13, 1990, as there were, at that time, no laws in Michigan regarding assisted suicide. In 1991, the State of Michigan revoked Kevorkian's medical license and made it clear that given his actions, he was no longer permitted to practice medicine or to work with patients. According to his lawyer Geoffrey Fieger, Kevorkian assisted in the deaths of 130 terminally ill people between 1990 and 1998. In each of these cases, the individuals themselves took the final action which resulted in their own deaths. Kevorkian assisted only by attaching the individual to a euthanasia device that he had devised and constructed; the individual pushed a button which released the drugs or chemicals that would end his or her own life. Two deaths were assisted by means of a device. Kevorkian called the device a "Thanatron". Other people were assisted by a device which employed a gas mask fed by a canister of carbon monoxide, which Kevorkian called the "Mercitron".
According to a report by the Detroit Free Press, 60% of the patients who died with Kevorkian's help were not terminally ill, at least 13 had not complained of pain. The report further asserted that Kevorkian's counseling was too brief and lacked a psychiatric exam in at least 19 cases, 5 of which involved people with histories of depression, though Kevorkian was sometimes alerted that the patient was unhappy for reasons other than their medical condition; the report stated that Kevorkian failed to refer at least 17 patients to a pain specialist after they complained of chronic pain, sometimes failed to obtain a complete medical record for his patients, with at least three autopsies of suicides Kevorkian had assisted with showing the person who committed suicide to
Euphemism
A euphemism is an innocuous word or expression used in place of one that may be found offensive or suggest something unpleasant. Some euphemisms are intended to amuse, while others use bland, inoffensive terms for concepts that the user wishes to downplay. Euphemisms may be used to mask profanity or refer to taboo topics such as disability, excretion, or death in a polite way. Euphemism comes from the Greek word euphemia which refers to the use of'words of good omen'. Eupheme is a reference to the female Greek spirit of words of positivity, etc.. The term euphemism. Reasons for using euphemisms vary by intent. Euphemisms are used to avoid directly addressing subjects that might be deemed negative or embarrassing. Euphemisms are used to downplay the gravity of large-scale injustices, war crimes, or other events that warrant a pattern of avoidance in official statements or documents. For instance, one reason for the comparative scarcity of written evidence documenting the exterminations at Auschwitz, relative to their sheer number, is "directives for the extermination process obscured in bureaucratic euphemisms".
The act of labeling a term as a euphemism can in itself be controversial, as in the following two examples: Affirmative action, meaning a preference for minorities or the disadvantaged in employment or academic admissions. This term is sometimes said to be a euphemism for reverse discrimination, or in the UK positive discrimination, which suggests an intentional bias that might be prohibited, or otherwise unpalatable. Enhanced interrogation is sometimes said to be a euphemism for torture. For example, columnist David Brooks called the use of this term for practices at Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, elsewhere an effort to "dull the moral sensibility". Phonetic euphemism is used diminishing their intensity. Modifications include: Shortening or "clipping" the term, such as Jeez and what the— Mispronunciations, such as frak, what the fudge, what the truck, oh my gosh, darn, oh shoot, be-yotch, etc; this is referred to as a minced oath. Using first letters as replacements, such as SOB, what the eff, S my D, POS, BS.
Sometimes, the word "word" is added after it, such as S-word, B-word, etc.. The letter can be phonetically respelled. For example, the word piss was shortened to pee in this way. Ambiguous statements Understatements Metaphors Comparisons Metonymy Euphemism may be used as a rhetorical strategy, in which case its goal is to change the valence of a description from positive to negative; the use of a term with a softer connotation, though it shares the same meaning. For instance, screwed up is a euphemism for fucked up. There is some disagreement over whether certain terms are not euphemisms. For example, sometimes the phrase visually impaired is labeled as a politically correct euphemism for blind or a blind person. However, visual impairment can be a broader term, for example, people who have partial sight in one eye, those with uncorrectable mild to moderate poor vision, or those who wear glasses, groups that would be excluded by the word blind. Expressions or words from a foreign language may be imported for use as a replacement for an offensive word.
For example, the French word enceinte was sometimes used instead of the English word pregnant. This practice of word substitution became so frequent that the expression "pardon my French" was adopted in attempts to excuse the use of profanity. Euphemisms may be formed in a number of ways. Periphrasis, or circumlocution, is one of the most common: to "speak around" a given word, implying it without saying it. Over time, circumlocutions become recognized as established euphemisms for particular words or ideas. To alter the pronunciation or spelling of a taboo word to form a euphemism is known as taboo deformation, or a minced oath. In American English, words that are unacceptable on television, such as fuck, may be represented by deformations such as freak in children's cartoons. Feck is a minced oath popularised by the sitcom Father Ted; some examples of rhyming slang may serve the same purpose: to call a person a berk sounds less offensive than to call a person a cunt, though berk is short for Berkeley Hunt, which rhymes with cunt.
Bureaucracies spawn euphemisms intentionally, as doublespeak expressions. For example, in the past, the US military used the term "sunshine units" for contamination by radioactive isotopes. An effective death sentence in the Soviet Union during the Great Purge used the clause "imprisonment without right to correspondence": the person sentenced never had a chance to correspond with anyone because soon after imprisonment they w
Domestication
Domestication is a sustained multi-generational relationship in which one group of organisms assumes a significant degree of influence over the reproduction and care of another group to secure a more predictable supply of resources from that second group. Charles Darwin recognized the small number of traits that made domestic species different from their wild ancestors, he was the first to recognize the difference between conscious selective breeding in which humans directly select for desirable traits, unconscious selection where traits evolve as a by-product of natural selection or from selection on other traits. There is a genetic difference between wild populations. There is such a difference between the domestication traits that researchers believe to have been essential at the early stages of domestication, the improvement traits that have appeared since the split between wild and domestic populations. Domestication traits are fixed within all domesticates, were selected during the initial episode of domestication of that animal or plant, whereas improvement traits are present only in a proportion of domesticates, though they may be fixed in individual breeds or regional populations.
The dog was the first domesticated vertebrate, was established across Eurasia before the end of the Late Pleistocene era, well before cultivation and before the domestication of other animals. The archaeological and genetic data suggest that long-term bidirectional gene flow between wild and domestic stocks – including donkeys, horses and Old World camelids, goats and pigs – was common. Given its importance to humans and its value as a model of evolutionary and demographic change, domestication has attracted scientists from archaeology, anthropology, zoology and the environmental sciences. Among birds, the major domestic species today is the chicken, important for meat and eggs, though economically valuable poultry include the turkey and numerous other species. Birds are widely kept as cagebirds, from songbirds to parrots; the longest established invertebrate domesticates are the silkworm. Terrestrial snails are raised for food, while species from several phyla are kept for research, others are bred for biological control.
The domestication of plants began at least 12,000 years ago with cereals in the Middle East, the bottle gourd in Asia. Agriculture developed in at least 11 different centres around the world, domesticating different crops and animals. Domestication, from the Latin domesticus,'belonging to the house', is "a sustained multi-generational, mutualistic relationship in which one organism assumes a significant degree of influence over the reproduction and care of another organism in order to secure a more predictable supply of a resource of interest, through which the partner organism gains advantage over individuals that remain outside this relationship, thereby benefitting and increasing the fitness of both the domesticator and the target domesticate." This definition recognizes both the biological and the cultural components of the domestication process and the impacts on both humans and the domesticated animals and plants. All past definitions of domestication have included a relationship between humans with plants and animals, but their differences lay in, considered as the lead partner in the relationship.
This new definition recognizes a mutualistic relationship. Domestication has vastly enhanced the reproductive output of crop plants and pets far beyond that of their wild progenitors. Domesticates have provided humans with resources that they could more predictably and securely control and redistribute, the advantage that had fueled a population explosion of the agro-pastoralists and their spread to all corners of the planet. Houseplants and ornamentals are plants domesticated for aesthetic enjoyment in and around the home, while those domesticated for large-scale food production are called crops. Domesticated plants deliberately altered or selected for special desirable characteristics are cultigens. Animals domesticated for home companionship are called pets, while those domesticated for food or work are known as livestock; this biological mutualism is not restricted to humans with domestic crops and livestock but is well-documented in nonhuman species among a number of social insect domesticators and their plant and animal domesticates, for example the ant–fungus mutualism that exists between leafcutter ants and certain fungi.
Domestication syndrome is the suite of phenotypic traits arising during domestication that distinguish crops from their wild ancestors. The term is applied to vertebrate animals, includes increased docility and tameness, coat color changes, reductions in tooth size, changes in craniofacial morphology, alterations in ear and tail form, more frequent and nonseasonal estrus cycles, alterations in adrenocorticotropic hormone levels, changed concentrations of several neurotransmitters, prolongations in juvenile behavior, reductions in both total brain size and of particular brain regions; the domestication of animals and plants began with the wolf at least 15,000 years before present, which led to a rapid shift in the evolution and demography of both humans and numerous species of animals and plants. The sudden appearance of the domestic dog in the archaeological record was followed by livestock and crop domestication, the transition of humans from foraging to farming in different places and times across the planet.
Around 10,000 YBP, a new way of life emerged for humans through the management and exploitation of plant and an
Rights of the Terminally Ill Act 1995
The Rights of the Terminally Ill Act 1995 was a controversial law legalising euthanasia in the Northern Territory, passed by the Parliament of the Northern Territory of Australia in 1995. The Act was passed by the Northern Territory Legislative Assembly on 25 May 1995 by a vote of 15 to 10, received the Administrator's assent on 16 June 1995, entered into force on 1 July 1996. A year a repeal bill was brought before the Northern Territory Parliament in August 1996, but was defeated by 14 votes to 11; the effect of the law was nullified in 1997 by the federal Parliament of Australia which passed the Euthanasia Laws Act 1997. The Act continues on the Territory's statute books. Dr Philip Nitschke founded Exit International in response to the overturning of the Act. While voluntary euthanasia had been condoned in the Netherlands and the US state of Oregon, the act was the first time that a legislative assembly passed a law explicitly legalising euthanasia; the Act allowed a terminally ill patient to end their life with medical assistance, either by the direct involvement of a physician or by procurement of drugs.
The Act set out a somewhat lengthy application process, designed to ensure that a patient was both mentally competent to make the decision and in fact terminally ill. Under the Act: a patient had to be over 18 and be mentally and physically competent to request their own death, the request had to be supported by three doctors, including a specialist who confirmed that the patient was terminally ill and a psychiatrist who certified that the patient was not suffering from treatable depression, once the paperwork was complete, a nine-day "cooling-off period" was required before the death could proceed; those who assist in the ending of a person's life under the Act were immune from prosecution or other legal consequences if acting in good faith.. The passage of the Bill—one of the first of its kind in the world—provoked a furor in Australia, indeed in much of the rest of the world; the Act received both widespread support from "death with dignity" and right to die groups who saw it as a model to be followed elsewhere, widespread condemnation from euthanasia opponents, such as right to life groups, who sought to overturn it.
Opponents included the Australian Medical Association, the Bishop of Darwin, Edmund John Patrick Collins. While the law was in effect, four people died by suicide through its provisions; the first was carpenter Bob Dent, 66, who died on 22 September 1996. Dent was a prostate cancer sufferer who became Australia's first person to lawfully end his life by means of physician assisted suicide. Dent, suffering from prostate cancer for five years in what he called "a rollercoaster of pain", left an open letter when he died that stated: "If I were to keep a pet animal in the same condition I am in, I would be prosecuted. If you disagree with voluntary euthanasia don't use it, but don't deny the right to me to use it." He died with the help of Dr Philip Nitschke. The law applied to non-residents of the Northern Territory as well, one non-resident did take advantage of the law. A resident of South Australia, Janet Mills, 52, came to Darwin in December 1996, she had suffered for some 10 years from a rare disease known as mycosis fungoides.
She used Nitschke's device to take her life on 2 January 1997. In addition, an anonymous 69-year-old male cancer patient used the law and Nitschke's device to die on 22 January 1997. A further two people had received approval to use the law. While some people in the Northern Territory were unhappy with the Act and campaigned for its repeal, the Northern Territory legislature was unwavering in its support. Views in the rest of Australia were much less supportive and opponents began demanding that the federal parliament overturn the law, which it had the power to do since the Northern Territory does not have the same standing in Australian jurisprudence as the states; the federal parliament could not have overturned an identical state law, since the states are sovereign entities possessing legislative power in their own right. However, self-governing territories like the Northern Territory derive their power by way of a grant from the federal parliament; the federal parliament retains the right to legislate for the territory, including the right to territory laws.
In practice, it rarely exercised that right. On 25 March 1997, the federal parliament passed the Euthanasia Laws Act 1997, although not technically repealing the Rights of the Terminally Ill Act, for all practical purposes rendered it of no legal effect. Rather than repeal the Act directly, the law instead amended the Northern Territory Act 1978, the act under which the Commonwealth Parliament has delegated legislative power to the Northern Territory Parliament—effectively the territory's "constitution" or "charter"—removing the Territory's constitutional power to pass any law permitting euthanasia; the Act technically remains in force in the Territory, but to the extent that it permits euthanasia it is now invalid and of no legal effect. Although passed as a reaction to the situation in the Northern Territory, the Euthanasia Laws Act 1997 made similar amendments with respect to Australia's two other self-governing territories, the Australian Capital Territory and Norfolk Island preventing them from passing a law permitting euthanasia.
The Euthanasia Laws Act 1997 has no effect on the power of an Australian state to pass any law permitting euthanasia, it expressly leaves open the possibility of a territory passing laws regarding the withholding of life support. Euthanasia device Northern Terr
Non-voluntary euthanasia
Non-voluntary euthanasia is euthanasia conducted when the explicit consent of the individual concerned is unavailable, such as when the person is in a persistent vegetative state, or in the case of young children. It contrasts with involuntary euthanasia, when euthanasia is performed against the will of the patient; the different possible situations considered non-voluntary euthanasia are when the decision to end the life of the patient is 1) based on what the incapacitated individual would have wanted if they could be asked, 2) based on what the decision maker would want if he or she were in the patient's place, 3) made by a doctor based on their own criteria and reasoning. Euthanasia can all be divided into active variants. Passive euthanasia entails the withholding of common treatments, such as antibiotics, necessary for the continuance of life. Active euthanasia entails the use of lethal substances or forces, such as administering a lethal injection, to kill and is the most controversial means.
A number of authors consider these terms to be unhelpful. Active non-voluntary euthanasia is illegal in all countries in the world, although it is practised in the Netherlands on infants under an agreement between physicians and district attorneys. Passive non-voluntary euthanasia is legal in various countries, such as India and many parts of the United States and is practiced in English hospitals. Non-voluntary euthanasia has been debated. For example, Len Doyal, a professor of medical ethics and former member of the ethics committee of the British Medical Association, argued for legalization, saying in 2006 that "roponents of voluntary euthanasia should support non-voluntary euthanasia under appropriate circumstances and with proper regulation". Arguing against legalization, Peter Saunders, campaign director for Care Not Killing, an alliance of Christian and disability groups, called Doyal's proposals "the worst form of medical paternalism whereby doctors can end the lives of patients after making a judgment that their lives are of no value and claim that they are acting in their patients' best interests".
Non-voluntary euthanasia is cited as one of the possible outcomes of the slippery slope argument against euthanasia, in which it is claimed that permitting voluntary euthanasia to occur will lead to the support and legalization of non-voluntary and involuntary euthanasia, although other ethicists have contested this idea. Permitted euthanasia in the Netherlands has been regulated by law since 2002, it states that euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide are not punishable if the attending physician acts in accordance with criteria of due care. Prior to the establishment of that law and assisted suicide in the Netherlands were tolerated for many years, as for example described by G. van der Wal and R. J. Dillmann in 1994. In a 1994 study, of the studied 5000 requests in the Netherlands, in about 1000 of the cases, doctors prescribed drugs with the explicit goal of shortening the patient's life without the explicit request of the patient, which can be considered cases of non-voluntary euthanasia.
Since 2004, the Netherlands has a protocol to be followed in cases of euthanasia on children under the age of 12, ratified by the Dutch National Association of Pediatricians, although the practice remains technically illegal. Together with colleagues and prosecutors, Eduard Verhagen developed the Groningen Protocol, in which cases prosecutors will refrain from pressing charges. Active euthanasia on newborns is illegal throughout the world, with the de facto exception of the Netherlands mentioned above; because a newborn child is never able to speak for themselves, euthanasia on newborns is by definition non-voluntary. An early example of documented cases of child euthanasia are those performed by the surgeon Harry J. Haiselden in Chicago in the early 20th century. In ancient Greece, non-voluntary euthanasia of children was practiced as an early form of eugenics, the belief and practice of improving the genetic quality of the human population by withdrawing care rather than a physical extermination, an act termed as “exposure”
Animal slaughter
Animal slaughter is the killing of animals referring to killing domestic livestock. In general, the animals would be killed for food; the slaughter involves some initial cutting, opening the major body cavities to remove the entrails and offal but leaving the carcass in one piece. Such dressing can be done in a slaughterhouse; the carcass is butchered into smaller cuts. The animals most slaughtered for food are cattle and water buffalo for beef and veal, sheep for lamb and mutton, goats for goat meat, pigs for pork, deer for venison, horses for horse meat, poultry and fish in the aquaculture industry; the use of a sharpened blade for the slaughtering of livestock has been practiced throughout history. Prior to the development of electric stunning equipment, some species were killed by striking them with a blunt instrument, sometimes followed by exsanguination with a knife; the belief that this was unnecessarily cruel and painful to the animal led to the adoption of specific stunning and slaughter methods in many countries.
One of the first campaigners on the matter was the eminent physician, Benjamin Ward Richardson, who spent many years of his working life developing more humane methods of slaughter as a result of attempting to discover and adapt substances capable of producing general or local anaesthesia to relieve pain in people. As early as 1853, he designed a chamber, he founded the Model Abattoir Society in 1882 to investigate and campaign for humane methods of slaughter and experimented with the use of electric current at the Royal Polytechnic Institution. The development of stunning technologies occurred in the first half of the twentieth century. In 1911, the Council of Justice to Animals was established in England to improve the slaughter of livestock. In the early 1920s, the HSA introduced and demonstrated a mechanical stunner, which led to the adoption of humane stunning by many local authorities; the HSA went on to play a key role in the passage of the Slaughter of Animals Act 1933. This made the mechanical stunning of cows and electrical stunning of pigs compulsory, with the exception of Jewish and Muslim meat.
Modern methods, such as the captive bolt pistol and electric tongs were required, the act's wording outlawed the poleaxe. The period was marked by the development of various innovations in slaughterhouse technologies, not all of them long-lasting. Many countries have adopted the principle of a two-stage process for the non-ritual slaughter of animals; this is to ensure a rapid death with minimal suffering. The first stage of the process called stunning, renders the animal unconscious, thus not susceptible to pain, but not dead. In the second stage, the animal is killed by slitting its throat and allowing the blood to drain. Countries differ in the methods which have been legalised for different species or different ages, some regulations being governmental, others being religious. Various methods are used to render an animal unconscious during animal slaughter. Electrical This method is used for swine, calves and goats. Current is applied either across the brain or the heart to render the animal unconscious before being killed.
In industrial slaughterhouses, chickens are killed prior to scalding by being passed through an electrified water-bath while shackled. Gaseous This method can be used for sheep and swine; the animal is asphyxiated by the use of CO2 gas before being killed. In several countries, CO2 stunning is used on pigs. A number of pigs enter a chamber, sealed and filled with 80% to 90% CO2 in air; the pigs lose consciousness within 13 to 30 seconds. Research has produced conflicting results, with some showing pigs tolerate CO2 stunning and others showing they do not. Nitrogen has been used to induce unconsciousness in conjunction with CO2. Domestic turkeys are averse to high concentrations of CO2 but not low concentrations. Mechanical This method can be used for sheep, goats, cattle, horses and other equines. A captive bolt pistol is applied to the head of the animal to render them unconscious before being killed. There are three types of captive bolt pistols, non-penetrating and free bolt; the use of penetrating captive bolts has been discontinued in commercial situations to minimize the risk of transmission of disease when parts of the brain enter the bloodstream.
Firearm This method can be used for cattle, sheep, goats, horses and other equines. A conventional firearm is used to fire a bullet into the brain of the animal to render the animal unconscious. Exsanguination The animal either has its throat cut or has a chest stick inserted cutting close to the heart. In both these methods, main veins and/or arteries are allowed to bleed. Drug administration Drug administration to ensure the animal is dead; the measures for sanitary checks, animal welfare protection and slaughtering procedures are harmonised throughout the European Union, detailed by the European Commissions' regulations CE 853/2004, 854/2004 and 1099/2009. In Canada, the handling and slaughter of foo
