LKL wrote:
Visagrunt, I do not see your connection between the development of antibiotic resistance and the failure of the target animal to metabolically clear sedatives; are you suggesting that the humans who eat such animals will become resistant to sedatives? Or do such drugs have some important action on bacteria, in addition to sedating vertebrates, that I haven't heard of?
At the outset, let me note that I'm speculating a little here. I'm not a veterenarian, and my experience with anaesthesia is concerned with keeping a patient alive, rather than euthenasia.
That being said, my two biggest concerns are drug tolerance and adverse reaction.
Drug tolerance is not limited to antibiotics. A patient exposed to extended use of a drug may require increased concentration of the drug to achieve the same therapeutic effect. Eventually, the drug becomes useless because a sufficient concentration cannot be achieved below the threshhold of toxicity. Tolerance is a potential impact of long term exposure to almost any type of drug.
The second concern relates to adverse reactions from exposure to anaethetic drugs. While allergic reactions to anaesthesia are rare, there are a number of other potential complications depending upon the nature, concentration and length of exposure. Acquired sensitivity is also a potential concern.
These concerns depend, in part, on the type of anaesthesia used. Normally, general anaesthesia actually refers to a cocktail of multiple compounds. General anaesthesia may include a sedative to induce sleep, an analgesic to diminish or impede the sensation of pain and a muscle relaxant to mitigate reflex response to pain. Not all of these might be required in a slaughter situation, but I suspect the first two would be required. There's no point in sedating an animal if you are going to induce pain and wake it right up again, and there might be no point in mitigating pain if the reflex response is just going to kick in anyway.
The entry of the drugs into the meat of the animal will depend very much on their speed and mechanism of action, and the speed with which the animal is exsanguinated after anaesthesia. But if the drugs have had sufficient opportunity to work, chances are that the drugs are widely distributed, unless we are dealing with some extremely localized componds introduced epidurally--which would, of course, requried a veterenarian, significantly increasing the cost of slaughter.
So your concern is more in the downstream reactions of humans consuming the flesh of animals that have been sedated, sort of along the lines of the concern with hormones in meat and dairy. Makes some sense; at the very least, it would preclude the flesh of animals killed in such a manner from being marketed as 'organic.'
23 Jun 2012, 4:58 pm
