Had we had this conversation in 1973, when I was ten, I would have strongly objected to that characterization. At ten, I was quite able to make such conceptual leaps. So on behalf of my ten-year-old self, and all ten-year-olds similarly situated today… I appreciate the concern, but let’s watch the sweeping generalizations, please?
Pepperland Girl: I can’t believe that you don’t see the distinction here. Yes, pets die. So how would you feel if a school let children raise a dog and then shot it in the head in front of them? This is education? We really need to expose children to this in order to teach them that animals die?
Frankly, I think the people that don’t get the distinction are the ones that really don’t understand the role of animals in farm life. Killing a pet is NOT the same as killing a producton animal. I watched dozens of chickens be killed on the farm. I saw cows and pigs being butchered. None of that made me feel any better when we had to shoot my dog. It was a totally different experience, and I still carry the emotional scars of that. And I’d do anything to prevent my daughter from having to go through something similar.
Frankly, the whole notion of having children raise an animal and then be forced to watch it be killed in front of them is sick. It’s cruel to the children, and it serves no purpose.
Unless the purpose is what Stoid is getting at. She sees it as a good thing that children will never look at a hamburger the same way again. That’s imposing a value judgement that says there is something wrong with the way they look at hamburgers now.
You know, I’m a fan of letting kids be kids. I think it’s a sad day when a 5 year old can’t enjoy a happy meal without being forced to think about the dead carcass of his pet cow at school.
You’ll note that the animal was named T-bone. I am certain that the children were warned, as I was not to form an emotional attachment to an animal you were going to eat. We did have pets, Rex, Fido, Calico, etc. but anything going into the freezer and ultimately our stomachs remained unnamed or we called pork chop or whatever. I won’t pretend that there are not some sad times when butchering time comes around, but we understand. We’ve even had some interesting conversations around the dinner table about how good 'ol pork chop tastes.
My kids understand the difference between livestock and pets, having raised chickens, rabbits, pigs and sheep for the table or for 4H projects. I think rabbits are the hardest though because of their inherent cuteness. I take care of butchering the rabbits when alone for that reason. Fortunately my kids are sensitive enough not to ask why so many of the “chickens” we eat don’t have any wings.
Letters and numbers look like chicken scratch until someone teaches you how to read. Saying they will never look at a hamburger the same way doesn’t imply that the previous way of looking at it was bad, just ignorant. Replacing ignorance with knowledge is pretty well accepted to be a good thing; their opinion of what happened is probably going to vary widely from ‘Eww! I’ll never eat meat again!’ to ‘Neat! I want to be a doctor!’
I think all knowledge is good. It’s one thing to know intellectually where your food comes from, but another to actually see where it comes from. This is why I think this is a lot different than drowning guinea pigs to prove they don’t swim- everybody eats. In America, almost everyone eats meat. Therefore, this is quite interesting stuff that has a lot more relevance to my day-to-day life than just about anything in I learned in algebra (not to knock algebra; it’s useful but I don’t use it. I hope you get my point). I also expect in addition to that they were getting first-hand anatomy lessons- it’s much more interesting to look at a heart up close than to look at a drawing of one in a health book, or even a shriveled-up one in a jar of formaldehyde.
As to the pet v. food animal thing, 4H animals are sort of in an in-between area. The kids are practice-farmers, so instead of giving them 400 head of cattle, they’ll get one. It’s pretty common that chickens, pigs, etc. are named (it’s human nature to name things. I had a flatworm in biology class named Russell, and I put him to the knife when the time came) by the students, but they know from the get-go what will end up happening. It’s not as if it’s sprung on them after they knitted the animal sweaters with its name on them. Kids are a lot sharper that most of us realize, but they lack in real experience. I’m glad, personally, that the school is providing some to them.
All very well put, Mielikki.
(golf clap)
stoid
DDG, I understand the hesitation but I really don’t see a problem here. I’m very much a disbeliever in “let-them-be-kids” neo-Victorianism, in which children become these little faberge eggs who reside in an emotional cotton-wool. To me there is something fundamental in teaching that we cannot live without killing. We can minimize our killing - we can choose to kill only the non-sentient, for example - but the horror and miracle of life is that we are made of the shit and corpses of others. Ashes-to-ashes, dust-to-dust is just the more polite way of putting it.
Now, it’s hard to tell from the article you cite how much emotional attachment these children may have had with “T-Bone.” We’re assuming that it was they who came up with the name - if that’s the case, “T-Bone” is perhaps the least anthropomorphic candidate possible. It suggests they knew full well what this critter would become.
Now, I also think it’s educational on a practical level as well - I don’t think using a computer program is an adequate substitute for dissection, and here, at least, the death is ultimately going to a useful (and tasty!) purpose. It beats killing frogs and cats specifically for bio classrooms.
I’ve seen (and participated in) the slaughter of chickens, ducks, geese, rabbits, peacocks, cows, and horses. I’ve also seen my dogs shot, ran over, or otherwise killed. It didn’t traumatize me, because I understood from a very early age that death is a part of life, whether it’s a chicken or my favorite dog. Did I cry for my pets when they died? Yeah. Did it upset my entire existance? No.
Trying to shelter a child, or expecting them to be too stupid to understand that pets die just as cows do, is counter-productive.
So children don’t have the right to understand where their food comes from? Children are not as stupid as some people would like to believe, or some people would like to keep them.
Furthermore, I doubt very, very much that any child was forced to watch the animal die.
From the article
They were not held there screaming, against their will, with their heads tied to a pole so they could not look away. If they didn’t want to see it, they didn’t have their permission slips signed. If they couldn’t take it at the time, they got up and left.
From the article
:rolleyes:
Even if they couldn’t handle it, is it best to shelter them with the misquided belief that they’d never need to?
[Kurtz]The Horror! The Horror![/Kurtz]
We are so removed from the realities of life that I think it is a good thing that the children learn where food really comes from. It is the cycle of life and nature is cruel but it is a part of who we are.
I hope they had a big celabratory BBQ aftwards where they all had a piece.
I believe that society should see what it creates. Our society creates a heck of a lot of hamburgers, therefore I think it is right that the people of this society (including our children) should see everything that a hamburger entails, even if it is unpleasent.
Likewise I think that society should be able to witness the administration of the death penalty, our actions in war and all the other usavory stuff that we participate in.
We need to have a full understanding of the full implications of our actions in order to make informed choices in our lives (and a populace that can make informed choices should be important in any democracy). If the truths are too traumatizing or bitter or upsetting, perhaps we should rethink our participation in those actions.
even sven:
How about field trips to the emergency room, to see life-saving (yet stomach-churning) surgery taking place? Or flesh-eating bacteria patients?
That would be pretty traumatizing… but I don’t think “is it pleasant to watch” is a good measurement of whether something is beneficial.
::shrug
I saw my first animal (a pig) killed when I was about 5 or 6 years old. Killed my first animal ( a chicken) when I was about 11. Children are always facinated about normal ‘adult’ things like butchering animals, driving a car/tractor, sex, death, love, etc…
Hijack…
Is it better to kill one cow and get 400 lbs of meat or is it better to kill 100 chickens and get the same 400 lbs of meat.
Oh, I don’t know. I think we as humans living in a nice, safe, sheltered first-world society could use a little more desensitizing when it comes to death. I think we take it entirely too personally when something or someone dies. And I think a lot of that comes from not allowing school systems to teach these sort of fundamental truths.
Things die.
They don’t “pass away.”
They don’t “go gently into that good night.”
They may or may not “go up to heaven.”
But they do die.
The sooner that children are acquainted with, and not protected from, this very basic fact of biology, the better, IMHO.
I would have been one of the parents that signed the permission slip.
I’d a been there for that one. I wanted to be a doctor so badly…as well as a slightly morbid interest in that sort of thing.
As to the OP, add me to the list of those on the cautiously so what list.
I grew up in a remote northern town that had bush life on the curriculum. I learned how to set rabbit snares, how to skin them, and how to deal with the skins. I got to watch the preparation of a lynx hide from the dead carcass to stretched pelt. And naturally, due to the fact that we didn’t have a lot of money, I learned how to butcher big game. If I have to, or I get a share. If it’s moosemeat, I’ll even help you pack it out…
If they did in fact know from the beginning they were gonna eat it, no problem. There was a big kerfuffle here in the Yukon a couple of years ago about something like this.
One of the first locations in the Yukon to go on-line was the school in Old Crow. It is a mostly First Nations population that depends heavily on the Porcupine Caribou herd for most of their food. Via the Web, they got involved in a cross-cultural exchange with a school in Germany. As part of the exchange, the students made and exchanged films about their lives and how they lived. All that was very cool, until the Old Crow students shared the film of a moose hunt, and its aftermath - the butchering and all. With shots of happy faces taking bites of the fresh meat. It’s part of their life.
According to the coverage I saw, the kids on the German side thought it was gross but wayyy cool. The parents, on the other hand, were not taking it well. Apparently, there were nasty letters flying around, the media jumped in, and the circus began. Meanwhile, the kids in Old Crow are going, “What? Whaaaat? We were supposed to show what our life was like, right?”
Being Canadians, Stern Letters of Censure were sent, everybody promised not to do it again, and the kids told their German friends what raw meat tasted like, and that the nose and the “bum guts” were especially tasty.
I think that fostering the belief that the meat you eat just appears in the supermarket pre-wrapped is wrong. That type of thinking leads to the abuse of the animals we most commonly eat, because the transition from animal to meat doesn’t exist, therefore there’s no reason to make that transition easy on the beast. That’s one of the parts I like best about the kosher butchering tradition - as I understand it, the animal has to die quickly and relatively painlessly.
YMMV, of course.