I have a vegan friend who is in his late 30’s. He has 50/50 custody of his 8 or 9 year old daughter. She does not eat vegan when she is with him because he doesn’t think its healthy for a child that young to not get enough of the building blocks her growing body needs. She is welcome to share his food, but he always makes sure she has some sort of animal product to eat as well. She can be a vegan when she’s 16 if she wants.
Thankfully, he’s not loudly militant about his choice, so its safe to discuss it with him. I asked him his reaction to a school showing his child that sort of video, he thought that was insane and said he would be complaining to the school board if it happened to his daughter.
Always happy to be that guy: nothing meaningful about war can be conveyed without actually showing some explicit war death. The gains, the losses, the politics, the economics…yeah, you can show how were impacted as a result of this or that war. But the full import of even those changes, to say nothing of the impact on the locals, cannot be even sort of understood, really, without getting right down in the dirt with what war entails. War isn’t about one side’s materiel affecting the other side’s materiel like you see in the whitewashed WWII film reels. War is about one side taking a bouquet of the flower of its youth, and smashing it against a bouquet of the other side’s blooms until all that is left is a mushy heap of shattered petals and broken stems. If the flowers were not absolutely the point of the exercise, wars would be fought in boardrooms.
Are you trying to teach 9 year olds, or anyone else, about meat, or are you trying to scare them away from meat? Before, cow. After, carcass. It’s pretty obvious the cow was killed and skinned. I don’t think there’s any educational value in the gory parts of the process, unless you’re actually trying to teach about the butchery procedures.
History should be taught to children and a limited amount of the harshness of historical events should be taught. I think it’s okay to teach children about the Holocaust. I’d want educators to be very careful about showing pictures of emaciated survivors. Showings pictures of uncovered mass graves? Absolutely not.
It is difficult to bore people to death quite as quickly, but many vegans do give it their best shot.
It might be the part of the country that I’m from that’s skewing my perspective, but I’d be surprised at a nine-year-old who didn’t already have some idea about vegans already. (many, if not most, 9 year olds have seen a restaurant menu with "V"s on them to designate Vegan-friendly choices.) It isn’t a horribly radical idea and feels very in line with a series of talks about Points of View. I’m assuming that the kids are told (during these talks) that it is “ok” to agree or disagree with the speakers (I’m also assuming that the speakers have POVs on which reasonable people can differ).
Of course, there are ways to introduce the idea that are inappropriate for little kids (some of the slaughterhouse videos that I’ve seen were absolutely not appropriate for children), but if the speaker and their materials are vetted appropriately, it doesn’t seem that big of a deal.
Why? I think this is not a hijack, because it addresses the same concern raised in the OP: unpleasant visuals. But why teach about something inherently icky, without examining the icky parts? Without the violence, immaciation, and mounds of rotting former mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters The Holocaust was just another rather hateful series of arrests. The Horrors of the holocaust are the whole point of teaching it.
To use another example, I have zero problem with schools teaching kids about religion. Jesus did that, Moses said this, here’s what Vishnu is all about. It crosses the line when teachers/lecturers/whomever stop explaining what something is about and start instilling which thoughts are correct and which are evil. A talk about why vegans are vegans can be perfectly cromulent and educational. Or not.
Of course, there are plenty of people who will just assume that because someone who doesn’t share their values is speaking, that they are out to indoctrinate kids. You know, because those vegans/Muslims/homosexuals/scientists/atheists/baseball fans have a hidden agenda!!!
The politics and practice of veganism are more nuanced than a 9-year-old is equipped to judge, on top of smacking of white privilege. And the use of shock images is absolutely abhorrent.
If my kids want to squander my hard-earned tuition dollars at vegan conferences or whatever when they’re adults, fine, but I will not have them indoctrinated as impressionable captives.
We’re talking about things which are age-appropriate. Showing 9-year-olds stuff like that is only going to give them nightmares. stop acting like kids can process and understand things the same way adult you can.
Cripes, when you get to the sex ed part of health class, would you put on a hardcore porn vid or something?
Another false equivalency: death in war is when something went wrong. (outside of genocide) death should not be the goal of the exercise.
In a slaughterhouse it is the whole point.
It is someone’s 9-5 to skin cows, there is nothing inherently gruesome about preparing meat. It might be unpleasant, but it is a very normal job. if the process has become so horrible our kids can’t see it maybe we should change how we kill our food, not hide it and pretend it doesn’t exist.
Because it’s wrong to inflict trauma upon a child. Some children cry when they read or listen to the (non-fiction) story of Anne Frank and find out that she died. Telling those children that in some versions of the story, Anne’s mother starved herself to death passing food to her daughters in what was ultimately a futile effort is nightmare inducing. Describing Anne’s death as a combination of disease, squalor, and starvation which likely involved terrible suffering is heartbreaking, and an analytical assessment of her suffering would be horrifying.
I think Anne Frank’s story should be told, and 9 years old seems old enough for an abridged version of it to be taught including the fact that she died. Putting in the horrific parts to scare kids in order to achieve some kind of ideological agenda? Yeah, I object to that.
Remember the old “MTV Unplugged” from the early and misd 1990s? When Pearl Jam performed, Eddie Vedder got out a marker and wrote “PRO-CHOICE” on his arm. A pen pal I had at the time had a tween daughter who did that herself, and Mom said, “I think we need to talk.” As she predicted, the daughter had no idea what that really meant, just that Eddie Vedder did it on “Unplugged” and was applauded for it.
I wouldn’t have a problem with kids being exposed to veganism by a registered dietitian, or someone who followed that diet for health or religious reasons as long as they’re OK with other people doing otherwise. Whaddya bet there are already some vegan kids at the school, and they don’t make a big deal about it because it’s all they’ve ever known and it just happens to be what they bring for lunch?
There are a gazillion You Tube videos where this kind of thing is shown, although their policy prohibits actually showing the killing of the animal, on or off screen. For example, you can show someone loading a rifle and pointing it at an animal, and then show them transporting it for dressing out, but not the actual slaughter.
Here’s an interesting video I saw a few days ago of a whole ostrich being cooked at a restaurant in Vietnam that is run by Americans. They did this because they hadn’t been able to find a similar video online, and they also show the egg being prepared. It’s apropos at Christmastime because of the whole “roast beast” thing. It’s 17 minutes in length.
I've eaten ostrich. It tastes like very lean roast beef, NOT chicken.
Out of that class, some of those kids have gone fishing, and there are almost certainly kids who saw this presentation whose parents or other relatives hunt.
Do you really think a vegan activist showing shock videos as described in the OP is trying to educate children about meat butchery? I think there’s a societal need for people who eat meat to understand how the animals they’re eating are being raised and slaughtered. That will improve animal welfare standards and encourage personal responsibility. But society’s not going to achieve that through gross-out tactics, especially when they’re inflicted upon children.
Is your opinion that food shows that start with the cow and end with the steaks should also show the cow being shocked and then shot in the head, followed by decapitation, removal of the feet, gutting, and then removal of the skin? I’m sure there’s a market for those shows, but I doubt they sell many commercials. I’ve seen light versions of such shows, but I wouldn’t show them to a nine year old, especially without a lot of preparation.
There’s at least one vegan teacher at my school. I know because one time (once!) she posted a pro-vegan video on her FB page. Also, at one point I was talking with her about food (I forget details, maybe asking her if she’d gotten one of the cookies in the break room), and she mentioned her veganism in response to my comment.
The caricature is absolutely inaccurate with her, and with other vegans I know.
That said, I teach 9-year-olds, and I would never bring any sort of activist in to the classroom to preach. I’ve brought in politicians as part of our study of government, but they’ve been overwhelmingly, and appropriately, nonpartisan within the classroom. I’d love to know more details about why the teacher brought this person in.
I’m sure the balanced presentation also showed aspects of plant food production:
Cute little rodents getting swept up in the combine blades or crushed under it’s wheels
Close-up views of insects dying a horrible death from pesticides
etc.
Something that challenges kids, opens their eyes, makes them think about common things in new ways is not “propaganda”. This wasn’t a Scientologist in their class, FFS. I think a deep calming breath and some healthy perspective is much needed here if you think that showing kids where their happy meals come from is some sort of threat to their fragile psyche.
I think it comes down to being age appropriate and being balanced. Scaring the kids into veganism by showing them terrible imaged of what happens to lambs and cute animals is not appropriate for a 9th grader. I’d also like veganism to be presented as part of a range of ways to eat. Life is not just a food pyramid. People have other choices to be healthy.
When the kids are older, it is more appropriate to talk about the costs involved in any type of diet. Just like (as has been mentioned) you would not show a 9-year-old piles of bodies. When they are older, sharing the human costs of the Holocaust may be appropriate. My school did show us piles of bodies. Another key difference, in addition to age, is that our parents were given the option to have me skip the presentation. Spoiler: I saw it and I have never forgotten it.