h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I didnt have to sign anything to approve her viewing it but they did tell the children that some scenes may distress them. (I suppose they could have looked away but not sure who would do that)

I saw a clip last year of a schools' programme from the early '80s (one of those "TV from years gone by" type shows), which showed nice little fluffy yellow chicks being sexed and then gassed and poured down a chute into the bin. All very matter of fact, showing what happens in food production. I'd imagine a fair proportion of kids were upset by it, too, but it doesn't mean there was any kind of ALF infiltration or political agenda among the teachers.

I hope this isnt the sort of thing my daughter was subjected to viewing

http://www.peta.org/feat/moorefield/

Most people, even adults, are very squeamish about the reality of food production and prefer not to know about what happens in the average day in a farm or slaughterhouse. Kids even moreso, I would imagine; it doesn't mean there is any political agenda.

that video is awful.

kfc is about the only fast food plac i will eat at due to it bein real chicken rather than mush. thats just put me off

I think if you saw the inside of most slaughterhouses you would find incidents like this. Unfortunately we need people to kill our food for us, and that requires them to have little or no empathy for the animals. I guess they couldn't do the job if they were not so detatched from the fact they are dealing with living, sentient, creatures. The result.........

I find it far more frightening that there is politicising of the educational system.

while I agree that children need to know about the world, if either of the Gruesomes was to be shown a film like that without my having been pre-warned by the teacher... the teacher and i would Be Having Strong Words.

I know that Gruesome #2 would be completely and utterly dstressed and not sleep - she's bad enough after watching Planet Earth sometimes even though we have talked about how violent nature is.

So - no issues with the vid (as long as it's not an ALF agenda pushing jobbie) but big issues about not having parental input.

I think I would be asking when they will be showing the ideal situation of chicken and egg production just to provide balance.

We've mostly (nobody's perfect) only bought free-range chicken ever since the day I happened to see part of a news report which showed a picture of thousands of chickens squashed together in what looked like an aircraft hanger with no windows. So it's not always necessary to show all the gory detail to change behaviour.

This does mean we only eat chicken about twice a month, though.

Mol

It's meat, end of. Once you've made the moral decision to eat meat, it's kind of hypocritical to demand that it be kept in chicken paradise before it's killed, cut up and put on your plate.

Conditions aren't publicised about animal slaughter and husbandry mostly because I reckon people don't want to know. We're cossetted as a society from anything we find uncomfortable to our delicate sensibilities. Hand a live chicken to someone and tell them to cook it and I wager most people would blanche.

Well done the school for showing the reality. I hope they show cows and sheep next week. Do they still do dissection in biology?

>>It's meat, end of<< SWL

Actually no. Quite apart from any considerations of animal cruelty, chicken meat from hens that run around is much less fatty and tastier to eat than that from hens sitting on their arse for hours and hours on end, which they haven't evolved to do. Not dissimilar to humans probably.

Nitpicking.

We farm meat like we used to farm wheat. Who cares if it's got less taste, that's what spices are for. Still got more taste than tofu.

Animal cruelty? Hah. Never been in a slaughterhouse have you.

Something that seems to be missing from the conversation is the additives in your chickens.
A mate of mine used to work with chickens - he said there were a line of chickens houses - you put chicks in at the beginning, and moved them onto the next hut week after week until they were killed and processed. *At every stage of the process, in every shed, they were pumped full of anti-biotics to keep them on their feet and reduce vet's bills*. And get this; the only restriction was that it was prefered that for the final week that they had no anti-biotics. This never happened of course, because people hardly ever changed thier wellies when walking between the sheds,so cross contamination was rife.
The same man also used to work in an animal feed factroy - you don't want to know what happens at that end of the food spectrum.
I've always been dead straight with my daughter about where meat comes from, and as a result she is moving of her own accord towards being largely veggie - this means we have to make an extra effort in finding different sources of iron and whatever in her food, but I think it's largely worthwhile.

As a society we pretend that we don't raise animals en mass, usually in condidtions that would be considered intolerable for kennels or zoos, before having them slaughtered and processed. We try and make it not look too much like animal - anyone who has bought meat from a supermarket recently will have found that every pack contains a tampon to soak up any stray blood which may give away its origins. Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall recently did a program where he went into a slaughterhouse to show people where their food comes from, and all but a handful found it distasteful. It's not surprise really - as a species we're very good at deliberately ignoring things we find distasteful, as long as they taste a bit like chicken.

Offsoon (begrudging meat eater)



Oh - SWL "It's amazing what's actually taught in schools. My step-son came home from High School once and started telling his mum what they'd learned in Modern Studies that day. At first, Mrs SWL was only vaguely listening until he started saying stuff that was actually wrong. She corrected him and he said "No, look. It's in my book". He showed her his textbook which gave a *very* selective view of recent British history. Looking a little more closely at the book, she saw it was printed by the Labour Party."

I'd like to know more about this. As a child of the 70's it's hard to escape the fact that education was (is, has always been) politised. All I got in history was the Industrial Bloody Revolution - it put me off history for years. This sounds like formalisation though - could you provide me with the name and author of the book in question?

This link seems appropriate for here (found it on the thread about Overweight Kids)...

http://kentuckyfriedcruelty.com/

It turns out that beak snipping *is* painful, as I assumed it would be. I saw this procedure being done on a BBC documentary about factory farming about 15 years ago - the chickens beaks were clearly bleeding after they were snipped. How could that not hurt?


az

Oops, just saw that a link to that site was already posted by RT_JFC in post 23 ...

az

I tried and failed to find a response from KFC on those PETA sites. Does this mean that I'm looking in the wrong place, there was no response, or PETA are being selective in the bits they choose to publish?

I had a bit of a rant at the flatmate last week for buying 24 'not from a happy chicken' eggs and offered to pay the difference for 'sightly less unhappy chicken' eggs. Yeah, all meat and poultry farming is to some extent cruel, but every little helps.

We are now awaiting organic, free range eggs & chicken from the supermarket delivery.

I agree with SWL (post 31) We are cosseted, especialy the kids.
Ive worked as a cook for many years, Im also vegaterian, tho I cook meat for my job.
On several occasions I have had various bosses offspring keeping me company whilst cooking, and it never failed to amaize me that they didnt know where meat comes from. They made no conection between prepacked red lump from tescos and a cow. Didnt realise sausages were made from pigs.
I used to go shopping to the butchers with Mum when I was little and see half pigs and chickens hanging from big hooks in the shop. Now meat is all clean and clingfilmed and bears no relation to an animal.
Ive raised my daughter as a vegetarian, and have taught her the facts of animal farming and why I dont eat meat. She has a free choice now of whether she wants to eat it. She doesnt.
Kids should be taught how our farm animals are raised and treated and what and how they are fed, right up to the end process of how some sausages and nuggets are made from mechanicaly reclaimed meat. Then they can make an informed choice of what they would like to eat.

Political organisations like ALF and PETA send videos to schools for free as I understand it so the videos are likely to be biased.
What I can never understand is how such people who claim to be so careing for animals can so readily physically harm people, their grave robbing of the farmer's mother's skelington recently and using it for blackmail must be surely the lowest of low acts.

Two quick points:

SWL tells us about the Labour party providing books for schools with a biased view. This sort of thing has been going on I suspect for years. It's certainly a running joke in the Simpsons, right from the very early episodes. It's not just political parties either - big companies do a lot of this. Parents ought to keep an eye on what their children are being taught, and teachers ought to be a little more careful about this sort of thing - although they're very overworked and it's quite understandable.

Also, someone said that cutting off the chickens beaks doesn't hurt them. That may be so, but if I anaesthetised you and amputated your leg, even though it wouldn't hurt I feel that you'd be... distressed, to say the least.