Kids raise Marcus the lamb only to see it slaughtered

I understand that children can’t be sheltered forever and that they have to learn how things work in this world… even if those things are, on some level, disturbing. But what is the appropriate way to teach a kid about those things? Is it the way Headmistress, Mrs. Charman, chose to teach her kids where meat comes from ^[1]? She had her students raise a lamb from birth; taught her kids to care for it, bottle-feed it, love it, and even named it Marcus — and then sent it off to be slaughtered.

All of this in the name of education? The children grew attached to this animal and were absolutely devastated when Marcus was sent to be slaughtered. Isn’t there a better way to teach young children how they get their meat?

Charman said “Many children don’t realise animals they probably pass every week end up on their plate in one form or another.”

Are you kidding me? The kids were hand feeding this animal. There is a right way and a wrong way to teach little ones about how things work in this world and I think Charman didn’t fully consider the consequences of her hands-on lesson and the emotional attachments children form. Shit, you take my son’s puppy blanket away from him and he is a wreck.

After my anger subsided I was trying to think rationally about the lesson she was trying to teach. I mean, kids do need to know where their food comes from, right? But do they need to hug it and squeeze it and call it Marcus? And to top things off… she was planning to raffle off the meat as a prize. Really? Come on!

Maybe I could justify this lesson if the kids were in middle school and they were told from the beginning that the purpose of raising this lamb was to eat its meat. Maybe. Am I totally off base here?

I have two kids and my mother constantly tells me she thinks I shelter them too much. Of course, her reasoning is because I won’t put Hannah Montana on for my kids. My thought is, as long as my older one is willing to watch PBS programming why introduce her to girls being obnoxious to each other — she will have a lifetime of that to endure. In terms of what goes on in the “real world” I constantly ask myself how much should I let my kids see. When the earthquake hit Haiti I wondered how much my 5-year-old needed to know. There was a collection at her school and so I needed to explain that some people got hurt and lost their homes… but does she need to know children were left parent-less and parents were left child-less? She certainly doesn’t need to see the images of the countless adults and children crying, bloodied and missing limbs. Those images were hard for me to see.

I talk to her about things we should be thankful for all the time. I explain that there are people in this world that don’t have food or fresh water; that she should be happy for what we have and not take it for granted.

What I am not going to do is take her to a farm, have her fall in love with a baby lamb, name it, visit it five days a week for nine months, and then tell her it’s time to kill the lamb and eat its meat. Does that make me seem like I am sheltering her? If it does… too bad.

Via Newser ^[3]