In 2011 a young beagle named Daniel survived an Alabama gas chamber after 17 minutes of carbon monoxide exposure. The other 18 animals were not so lucky. A common method of euthanasia, Daniel's story has inspired a number of proposed laws and regulations to outlaw this particularly crude practice.

Permissible in most states, gas chambers are needlessly expensive, archaic, and inhumane, taking as long as thirty minutes to suffocate terrified animals with hot gas filling a noisy chamber. And as Daniel's story demonstrates, this method is unreliable, sometimes failing to kill the animal at all.

In October 2012, Pennsylvania joined a growing number of states when they amended their 1983 law governing euthanasia. H.B. 2630 prohibits the use of carbon monoxide gas from any source, repealing an earlier statute permitting the use of so-called "gas stations". Let's thank Governor Tom Corbett for signing this important legislation for animal welfare.