Oklahoma’s Death Penalty Plan Would Be Too Cruel For Dogs

Animal welfare guidelines are clear: Suffocating dogs or cats with nitrogen is not an acceptable method for euthanasia. But Oklahoma may soon use it for executions.

Oklahoma is poised to allow a method of execution that has never been tried before: suffocation with nitrogen gas.

On Tuesday, the Oklahoma House of Representatives voted 85-10 to support a bill from Republican Rep. Mike Christian, a former state trooper and enthusiastic supporter of the death penalty. The bill now moves to the state Senate, where it is also expected to command majority support.

The air we breathe is about 80% inert nitrogen and 20% oxygen. Noting that pilots quickly slip into unconsciousness if their oxygen supply fails at high altitude, Christian argued that the method would be painless and humane. "I believe it's revolutionary," the Associated Press reported him saying. "I think it's the best thing we've come up with since the start of executions by the government."

But studies of animal euthanasia paint a mixed picture. In a 2008 report on methods for dispatching dogs and cats, the World Society for the Protection of Animals, based in London, ruled that nitrogen asphyxia should not be used. "Current evidence indicates this method is unacceptable because animals may experience distressing side effects prior to loss of consciousness." Dogs may hyperventilate before losing consciousness, while mice and rats show signs of panic.

In its 2013 guidelines on euthanasia, the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) reached the same conclusion. Pigs and birds do not seem to get distressed when breathing nitrogen, however, and the AVMA guidelines state that nitrogen asphyxia can be an acceptable method for these species. Indeed, filling poultry houses with a rapidly-expanding foam filled with nitrogen may be the best option if birds have to culled quickly to control a serious outbreak of disease.

Although there have been no studies in primates, the AVMA recommends lethal injection with an overdose of anaesthetic if monkeys or apes need to be humanely put down. And extrapolating from studies on lower animals to people involves a further leap into the unknown. "The AVMA Euthanasia Guidelines cannot be used to support or oppose various lethal methods for people," spokeswoman Sharon Granskog told BuzzFeed News by email.

Christian isn't the first politician to propose that nitrogen asphyxia would be more humane than current execution methods. In a 2008 BBC documentary, the former U.K. Conservative Cabinet Minister Michael Portillo backed the idea, after considering the alternatives already in use.

At that time, Portillo's proposal attracted little interest in the U.S. But since then, states enforcing the death penalty have been forced to consider alternatives to the drugs traditionally used for lethal injection – typically the anesthetic sodium thiopental, plus a muscle relaxant to inhibit breathing and potassium chloride to stop the heart – after manufacturers stopped supplying them for executions.

Christian's effort to allow nitrogen gas to be used as a secondary method of execution in Oklahoma follows the intervention of the U.S. Supreme Court, which in January ordered three executions to be postponed, while the condemned men mounted a legal challenge to the use of a controversial sedative called midazolam. This was one of the drugs used in the botched execution of Oklahoma death row inmate Clayton Lockett, who died of a heart attack in April 2014 after the procedure was halted.

Deborah Denno, a law professor at Fordham University in New York, who has studied lethal injection protocols, argues that such incidents show the dangers of experimenting with novel execution methods. "For over a century and particularly in recent years," she told BuzzFeed News by email, "executions have demonstrated an extraordinary degree of confusion and disorganization."

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