I once went to the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival, and one of the stops I made was the tent showing off the award-winning lambs. The table for the top winner had pictures of the farm family members holding the lamb and giving it a baby bottle – and then it had a rack of lamb.
To take home the blue ribbon, you had to win the all-around.
falls over laughing
I love your kid.
“Look baby-girl, it was you or him. Short-pig or long? You decide.”
My daughter doesn’t really like meat and she loves animals but she’ll strangle every cow alive with her own tiny hands for a coach purse.
She’s 13
Do you wear leather? Is your currency enclosed in dead animal skin?
Do you eat gelatin? (if you think hot dogs are gross, do NOT find out how gelatin is made).
As a child, I was always aware of the source of meat. My parents were both raised on farms. It was simply never an issue. Cows and pigs and chickens (and the occasional turkey) are born, live, and die so we have food. Just like corn, wheat, soybeans and rice.
How did you get a kid to age seven without knowing the source of meat? Did he think the cows went into the barn and somehow manufactured meat? That would be the only other explanation of “cows make beef”.
One of my kids tried to be a vegetarian for 6 or so up until her first year of college until she finally gave up on that stupid shit. Her reasoning was based on compassion for the animals but I guess that first year of college convinced her that she had more important things to worry about. She admitted that the taste of her first ham samwich in years was like nirvana. Now she regrets those vegetarian years as having probably stunted her growth.
You know, there’s some rank bullshit being thrown up in here, with frankly no respect for the OP.
Me too! Glad I made someone laugh. 
The poll options don’t fit. I introduced the concept that we eat animals casually, and discussed it frankly and without fuss. We eat cows, that’s a cow you’re eating, it used to be a cow just like that one in the field next to our house but it was killed, chopped up and now we eat it. Yes, the cow died. The farmer only keeps the cows and feeds them because one day they’ll be eaten. They aren’t pets.
I’ve even used the innate ghoulishness of children to get them to eat things they didn’t want to. Pea and ham soup? Tom’s having none of that. Pig’s foot soup? Couldn’t get it into his bowl fast enough (spoiler alert: he still hated it, but at least he was willing to taste pig’s foot soup).
I don’t remember it ever coming up with my now 16 year old and it hasn’t come up yet with my five year old. I assume he’s made the connection that “chicken” the food is “chicken” the bird (as opposed to beef/cow or pork/pig) but he hasn’t shown any regard either way.
This thread teaches me that the only ones with a real understanding of where meat comes from, were kids who grey up on farms that slaughtered their own, or that saw hunting. And that they probably got used to it quick.
City kids know, my kid knows, but they don’t really KNOW, you know? Think of the way you know; you know, but you don’t voluntarily visit slaughterhouses the way you would visit a farm, a winery or bakery. So, I suppose, my real question is, is it ethical, or not ethical, to hammer the message down. Somewhere between 8 and 10 years old. Because the kid does have a choice. If he wanted to eat vegetarian, I would cook it.
Pondering this question, I looked up what developmental psychology has to say about the question. They say that kids aren’t ready for this kind of moral understanding until age 10 or twelve. So telling kids under 8 probably is not much use, I realize now; empathy doesn’t kick in until 8. Empathy in the sense that the other might feel different about the situation then the kid does himself. Until then, morality is about kids taking cues from parents; if mommy lets me eat the hotdog, and she eats it, and other kids eat it, it’s okay. Empathy, for three to five year olds, is not much more then emotional contagion; if the kid feels that if she love eating pig, then the pig must feel equally delighted. No problem there.
(Some adults never get over that stage, and see nothing strange about smiling-pig-signs outside butchersshops).
This question is beginning to sound, to myself, a lot like the questions in religious upbringing. “Should I tell my kid about sin and hell, or just, for now, stick to Jesus-loves- you-and-nothing-bad-can-happen-if-you-say-your-prayers?”.
I have no problem with the other traditional questions, like religion and sex. I tell my kid that God is a story, that there are many stories, and it might yet be true, but I don’t think so, but everyone can believe his own story and it is bad manners to comment on that. That’s easy teaching.
I also have no problem with teaching my kid about sex. At his age it’s just biology, and biology is cool. Oh, and kissing your girlfriend, if she wants to, is a bit eww and a bit fun and nice. And touching your own willie is nice, just like picking your nose is nice, and we all do it, but don’t do either one where anyone can see you because you will be teased mercilessly. That’s easy teaching, too.
But meat…it seems that I cannot NOT choose what to teach, and that each way has disadvantages. Some for the kid, some for what he eats.
Well, my conclusion is that for now, I will push more for him to love vegetarian meat. When he is nine or ten, I will sit him down for the real Talk. Whew.
Oh, and while googling, I found this article on teaching empathy that sounds like a great help.
Don’t kid yourself, Billy, if a cow ever got the chance, he’d kill you, and everyone you cared about.
Actually, they sometimes do. There are several clips floating around on Youtube of, for instance, a deer eating a young non-flying bird he found in the grass. Easy pickings. Nature is fluid and complex.
We told them without softening it and before they asked. We aren’t hunters or farmers, but we do know a lot of vegetarians, so its a topic of household planning if we are having people over.
My daughter, upon discovering that people ate fluffy bunnies, became a four year old ethical vegetarian for two weeks. Which we supported. I thought bacon would do her in, what did her in was chicken nuggets. She had no issue with cows or chickens, it was the extrapolation into rabbits that did her in.
Well, we visit quaint pastoral farms, bakeries and wineries because they’re pleasant. I went on a field trip to the Wonder Bread plant as a kid which was moderately interesting (and we got free bread; did you know that just-baked white bread is pretty delicious?) but I wouldn’t take my wife there on a date.
I don’t visit slaughterhouses for the same reason I don’t visit plastic injection plants or petroleum refineries or paper mills – it’s loud, stinky and unpleasant.
Telling that your comparisons are to toxic industrial sites. Farms that do their own processing–the most genuinely pastoral ones–don’t actually have to be that way. Yes, handling the innards of slaughtered animals can be a little smelly, but less so with fresh air and sunshine. It need not be loud at all.
Well, Maastricht specifically said “slaughterhouses” which I equate to large scale industrial work versus killing a chicken on the farm for Sunday dinner.
Trees get killed for wood products. I’d visit an Amish furniture shop and watch some guy hand lathe a table leg but I wouldn’t be interested in visiting an industrial paper mill. That has nothing to do with my affection for trees. Likewise, I’d rather watch some lambs scamper around a farm than visit the Hormel plant but not because I’m naive about where meat comes from.
I guess my point is, meat does not “come from” the large-scale industrial places–certain classes of meat products do. If you don’t like those places, you don’t have to avert your eyes and hold your nose while continuing to eat their products. You can buy meat from pastoral farm processors. (More expensive, of course, but better in every way.)
Again, I was addressing the statement that people visit wineries and bakeries but not slaughterhouses. I’m aware that animals can be turned into food outside of a slaughterhouse but that’s the example that was given.
I personally don’t care where my cows are killed even if those places make for terrible weekend family trips.
I don’t think this ever needs to be a sit down “real talk”. I mean, how does that go? “Son, it bugs me that eating meat doesn’t bother you. I don’t really want you to stop eating it–and I plan to keep eating it myself–but I want you to feel bad about it. I want you to have a lot more empathy for the animals that suffer. But not like, totally freak out”.
Just talk to him over time. Be honest about your own conflicted beliefs and the compromises you’ve made. When the occasion arises, talk about slaughterhouses. But a “Big Talk”? That seems weird to me.
I’m not a parent but I do go to movies.
So you could try The Lion King approach and explain how in the circle of life, animals eat other animals.
On the other hand, I took my young niece to see Chicken Run. And there’s a scene (which I hadn’t known about) where the farm owner is walking up and down the line of chickens to “choose” one. And the next scene shows the farmers sitting at a table after supper with a large piles of chicken bones on the platter between them. I was hoping my niece wouldn’t figure out the connection but she turned to me and solemnly told me “They ate the chicken.”
