Both have their place and appropriateness.

That is what observing lethal injection and the gas chamber last week left me with.

I was not eager to see animals killed and I did not know how it would make me feel but I expected to be devastated during and afterwards.

I prepared myself for a struggle to maintain composure, fighting imaginings of Nazi gas chambers and death row inmates strapped to tables.

But none of my imaginings manifested.

I was conflicted afterwards, experiencing an internal battle with my head telling me I was supposed to be sad and my heart unable to respond.

I questioned what was wrong with me that I didn’t feel what I was supposed to feel and had to analyze those questions.

It was sad when I imposed human values to the situation because I saw three lives snuffed out, something we as humans believe is wrong.

But by the same token, I wasn’t sad because both scenarios were conducted so professionally, so surgically, it was clinical.

I can never truly know what those animals were thinking, but I have seen my share of animals in pain and I know what that looks and sounds like.

I saw nothing, absolutely nothing in either method that indicated pain or suffering.

I saw confusion that led to fear in both methods and I saw discomfort drawn from foreign sensations as the dogs in both situations experienced the affects of the euthanasia, but I saw no pain.

I have analyzed it and analyzed it in the days since and have concluded that though the dogs in the gas floundered and experienced panic, at least in the case of the aggressive pit bull it was still a far cry less than the anxiety he would have felt being held by a human during those final seconds.

The second dog killed in the chamber had a family out there somewhere and he was probably a better candidate for lethal injection and might have found comfort from human contact, but in the end it didn’t really matter because he went so fast.

None of the three had the ability to work through the logical sequences of what happened as the poisons entered their bodies and I was left with the conclusion that the element of human contact at the end was for the humans, not the animals.

Drawn from some need to assuage the guilt and process the sorrow of death, but not for the animals themselves. 

Websters - Humane: marked by compassion, sympathy, or consideration for humans or animals 2: characterized by or tending to broad humanistic culture

The bottom line is fast and without pain. The only negative component that could have been eliminated from all three deaths was those seconds where each dog had to wonder what was happening. 

For an animal that fears humans, the greatest compassion a human can show is to limit contact, criteria met by the gas chamber.

I have heard arguments’ implying the gas chamber is torturous, that the animals suffer. I have to disagree.

It has also been argued that I only saw what they wanted me to see.

I will concede, they were in control of the situation and I was their guest, so yes, I saw what they designed.

And I will admit I expected they would show me a pit bull. Not for any nefarious reason, but because it is more palatable on some level to put down an animal that has the appearance of a dangerous villain.

So I asked to witness a second dog being put down.

And the dog Capt. Ron Hutchison had them go get was a beautiful white Great Pyrenees mix that I had pet as we walked through the kennels.

He was sweet and responsive. His only crime was that he had shown aggression to his family’s young children. 

But he was no monster.

Once they put the dogs in the chamber, the humans were not in control of how they responded to the gas. If the dogs shook, convulsed, bled or cried out in pain, they couldn’t prevent me from seeing it.

But they were confident in the process and confident they were not causing undue pain.

And that confidence proved correct.

What I was left with was the understanding that they have a system that is fast, efficient and painless.

For many the concept of fast and efficient killing is troublesome – wrong in fact.

Well morally, perhaps it is.

But those are the cards they have been dealt.

This community has handed its animal control department a coffee straw and asked them to fit a golf ball through it.

And they are expected to do it with no force or strain.

From what I saw, they have met that challenge.

Those dogs walk into that chamber often bathed, with a belly full of food and many times after a few days of the most loving human contact they have ever experienced. It could be argued that they die better than they ever lived.

I was told that people come and drop off dogs, citing lack of time, money or loss of control over the animal. And within days, those same people return, shopping for a replacement animal.

It seems easy to conclude which group of humans takes the most humane approach to these animals.

If an animal meets criteria that makes it a poor candidate for gas, then an alternate solution should be available.

I’m not going to digress into moral perspective or right and wrong on this issue but I will reiterate, I saw no pain, I saw no torture, I saw no cruelty.

And if neither method creates undue pain for the animals, then logic dictates an evaluation of the affect to the humans tasked with the chore, because humane applies to them as well.

Riddle:

Alamogordo animal control reported they take in about 3,000 animals a year and euthanize 1,200 using lethal injection. They have an aggressive adoption program, they said.

So their intake is on a par with Clovis at 3,802, yet they euthanized a little more than 1,200 while Clovis euthanized 2457.

But if the intake numbers are still high, does that mean the problem is just re-cycling from year to year? Does this mean the animals are just embroiled in a perpetual cycle of shelter-adoption-breeding-shelter-adoption?

The only difference in this scenario seems to be the number of animals killed.

It seems the problem remains unsolved, because the problem, in the interest of humane treatment of animals, is not how they die, but how they live.

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