A few weeks ago, Human Rights Watch released a report describing negligence in the method the U.S. uses for lethal injection, stating, among other things, that veterinarians take more care in euthanizing cats and dogs than the state does in executing condemned criminals. However, the real irony here is not the fact that the process we use in killing criminals isn’t even fit to kill a crippled stray dog, but that over a century ago during the Electricity War, dozens of animals, including horses and a circus elephant, were electrocuted in an attempt to prove the lethal effects of electricity, pushing for the acceptance of the electric chair as an efficient instrument of death, as well as to sabotage a corporate rival. The animals will have their day.

It’s been two years since the last execution by the electric chair, and most states except Nebraska consider lethal injection their primary method of execution. The efficacy of the chair has varied widely, and there are many accounts where it failed to deliver the “quick and painless” death it initially advertised. One man was actually electrocuted and survived. His case went to the Supreme Court, claiming violations of the double jeopardy and cruel and unusual punishment clauses, but lost and he was sent back to the electric chair where he was electrocuted successfully. Bob Butterworth, Florida’s 33rd attorney general, once said, “People who wish to commit murder better not do it in the state of Florida, because we may have a problem with our electric chair.” Currently, eleven states still retain the electric chair as an option, depending on the prisoner’s request, when the prisoner was convicted and if current methods, like lethal injection, are ruled unconstitutional or encounter particularly sticky legal hurdles.

Lethal injection, by comparison, seems much tamer. It’s a three-drug process, starting with sodium thiopental, a short-acting barbiturate used as an anesthetic, followed by pancuronium bromide, which stops all bodily movement save the heart and would eventually cause death by suffocation, and finally, potassium chloride, a painful drug that ultimately kills the prisoner by inducing a heart attack. The whole process, from the outset, seems quick and painless: put the prisoner under, paralyze him to avoid any involuntary movements or gasping (this is, ostensibly, for the benefit of the witnessing audience), and then kill him. In fact, it even sounds almost somewhat arachnid in form. However, the HRW report, titled “So Long As They Die,” points out evidence that prisoners are not always adequately anesthesized, and are, in fact, in a lot of pain when the potassium chloride runs through their veins. It’s so painful, the report states, that the American Veterinarian Medical Association refuses to use it on animals unless vets can determine a suitable level of unconsciousness.

“The pancuronium bromide will conceal any agony an insufficiently anesthetized prisoner experiences because of the potassium chloride,” the report states. “Indeed, the only apparent purpose of the pancuronium bromide is to keep the prisoner still, saving the witnesses and execution team from observing convulsions or other body movements that might occur from the potassium chloride, and saving corrections officials from having to deal with the public relations and legal consequences of a visibly inhumane execution.”