“Anesthetizing the Public Conscience: Lethal Injection and Animal Euthanasia”, 2008-08-05 (; backlinks; similar):
Lawyers challenging lethal injection on behalf of death row inmates have frequently argued that lethal injection protocols do not comport with standard practices for the euthanasia of animals. This article studies state laws governing animal euthanasia and concludes that many more states than have previously been recognized ban the use of paralyzing agents in animal euthanasia. In fact, 97.6% of lethal injection executions in this country have taken place in states that have banned, for use in animal euthanasia, the same drugs that are used in those states during executions. Moreover, a study of the legislative history of state euthanasia laws reveals that the concerns raised about paralyzing drugs in the animal euthanasia context are identical in many ways to the concerns that lawyers for death row inmates are currently raising about the use of those drugs in the lethal injection executions of human beings. This article takes an in depth look at animal euthanasia and its relationship to lethal injection by examining in Part I the history and origins of the paralyzing drugs that veterinarians and animal welfare experts refuse to allow in animal euthanasia; in Part II the standards of professional conduct for veterinary and animal shelter professionals; in Part III, the state laws and regulations governing animal euthanasia; and finally in Part IV, the legislative history that led to the enactment of the various states’ animal euthanasia laws and regulations.
[Keywords: death penalty, lethal injection, animal euthanasia, capital punishment.]
In the late 1970s, when Texas was considering whether to adopt Oklahoma’s three-drug lethal injection formula for the execution of prisoners, Dr. Ralph Gray, the doctor in charge of medical care in Texas prisons, consulted with a Texas veterinarian named Dr. Gerry Etheredge.1 Dr. Etheredge told Dr. Gray that veterinarians used an overdose of one drug, an anesthetic called sodium pentobarbital, to euthanize animals and that it was a “very safe, very effective, and very cheap” method of euthanasia.2 Dr. Etheredge remembers that Dr. Gray had only one objection to using a similar method to execute human beings. “He said it was a great idea”, Dr. Etheredge recalled, “except that people would think we are treating people the same way that we’re treating animals. He was afraid of a hue and cry.”3 Texas rejected Dr. Etheredge’s one-drug, anesthetic-only recommendation and, in 1982, became the first state to actually use lethal injection—via the three-drug formula—as a method of execution.4 This history is almost hard to believe in light of the fact that three decades later, death row inmates in Texas, as well as in nearly every other death penalty state, are challenging the three-drug formula on the grounds that the method is less reliable, and therefore less humane, than the method used to euthanize animals.5
…It was through the use of curare in vivisection that people began to consider the implications of what curare did not do, namely serve any anesthetic function. While curare inhibits all voluntary movement, it does nothing at all to affect consciousness, cognition, or the ability to feel pain.46…Dr. Hoggan, described the experience of a dog subjected to vivisection while paralyzed by curare.51 Curare, he testified, was used to:
render [the] dog helpless and incapable of any movement, even of breathing, which function was performed by a machine blowing through its windpipe. All this time, however, its intelligence, its sensitiveness, and its will, remained intact… In this condition the side of the face, the interior of the belly, and the hip, were dissected out… continuously for ten consecutive hours…52
In 1868, the Swedish physiologist A. F. Holmgren condemned curare as “the most cruel of all poisons.”53…in 1864 Claude Bernard offered another description of such a deceptively peaceful death:
A gentle sleep seems to occupy the transition from life to death. But it is nothing of the sort; the external appearances are deceitful… [I]n fact… we discover that this death, which appears to steal on in so gentle a manner and so exempt from pain is, on the contrary, accompanied by the most atrocious sufferings that the imagination of man can conceive.81
No inmate has ever survived a botched lethal injection, so we do not know what it feels like to lie paralyzed on a gurney, unable even to blink an eye, consciously suffocating, while potassium burns through the veins on its way to the heart, until it finally causes cardiac arrest. But aided by the accounts of people who have suffered conscious paralysis on the operating table, one can begin to imagine.