Earlier this week, Reuters reported that a group of 14 English schoolchildren had voted (13-1) to have Marcus, a six month-old pet lamb that the class had raised from birth and hand-fed, put to death.
Although 250 children at the primary school in Kent take part in the program, designed to teach them about raising and breeding animals, the school’s 14 member council of 6 to 11 year-olds voted almost unanimously to send Marcus to the slaughterhouse. Predictably, animal rights activists, parents and impartial observers were outraged by the news, which now threatens to collapse the entire animal education program. And, equally predictably, the school issued a statement saying (emphasis mine):
“The children have had a range of opportunities to discuss this issue, both in terms of the food cycle and the ethical aspect… It is important for everyone to move on from this issue, so the children can focus on their education.“
Although the article doesn’t illuminate which opportunities the children had to discuss the decision to have Marcus killed, or how a group of 6 to 11 year-olds was counseled on ethical ways to make life and death decisions, I have to admit that the decision itself is as predictable as the resulting public outrage it triggered.
Why? Because I fail to believe that if you hand anyone — much less a group of children whose worldview is still being shaped — the power to decide who lives and who dies, you’re playing with fire. Humanity is not known for its ability to make humane decisions in a vacuum of consequence, and being granted the ability to destroy something while still keeping one’s hands clean is an opportunity rarely afforded even to those possessed of the wisdom to know better.
I highlight the school’s assertion that “it’s important for everyone to move on from this issue” for two reasons:
- Certainly it’s important for the school’s image that everyone else forgets about this incident and moves on, and
- It’s undeniably important that the children’s education continue, for a variety of reasons.
But what I’d like to know is whether or not the 13 children who voted to have Marcus slaughtered will be required to observe the slaughter itself, or (preferably) to take part in it. If that were the case, I’d be all for it — and I’d be doubly interested in seeing the program continue, so future classes would have the same “range of opportunities” to learn (as the school claims) about the entire food cycle. But without seeing and fully understanding the consequences of their vote, the school is truly doing those children — and the concept of ethics — a great disservice.
(Then again, given the general disinterest in the lives of animals on both sides of the pond, perhaps I’m expecting too much from allegedly reasonable adults.)
Tags: common sense, education, England, ethics, honesty, perception, Sociology
