Young carnivores should be taught the truth
Meat-eating children need to learn about how the animals we eat end up on our plates.
In flight: it is better to shoot a duck than eat an intensively reared pig - Young carnivores should be taught the truth
By Jemima Lewis
At a time when many schools no longer dare organise field trips, for fear that someone might chip a nail and sue, you’d think Shirley Stapleton would be hailed as a national heroine. On Wednesday, the headteacher of Ashbeach Primary School, in Ramsey St Mary’s, Cambridgeshire, despatched a class of 10-year-olds on an evening “wildfowling” trip.
What that means, for the uninitiated, is that they got to tiptoe across the local marshes in the gloaming, looking for ducks, and then watch one being shot out of the sky and retrieved by a gun dog. Darkness. Bogs. Firearms. It could hardly get more exciting if the Hound of the Baskervilles hoved up.
Yet instead of marvelling at Mrs Stapleton’s chutzpah, some parents have accused her of traumatising their children. Ray Poolman, 46, claims his daughter came home in tears after the “harrowing” experience of seeing a duck shot. “They allowed children to witness the death of an animal,” huffed the outraged paterfamilias. “Ramsey might be rural but we have a Tesco – people don’t need to walk around killing animals to survive any more.”
Now, strictly speaking this may be true. Here in London, too, we don’t usually “walk around killing animals” for the table. There wouldn’t be much to choose from anyway, apart from rats and weapon dogs. But – and it surely shouldn’t be necessary to explain this to a country-dweller – just because you buy your meat shrink-wrapped, doesn’t mean you’re not a killer.
The reality is that, if you eat any meat at all, you have blood on your hands. No animal wants to be killed and eaten. Whether the creature in question gets hooked out of a river, blasted out of the sky or strung up by its ankles and electrified before having its throat slit, you really can’t claim to be doing it a kindness.
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So if you’re going to be part of the carnivorous majority, you ought to at least be realistic about what that entails. When Jamie Oliver was criticised for killing a lamb on a 2005 TV show, he defended himself on the grounds of honesty. “A chef who has cooked 2,000 sheep should kill at least one,” he retorted, “otherwise you’re a fake.”
But it’s not just chefs: it’s anyone who’s partial to a bit of Peking duck, a crispy sliver of bacon or a chicken sandwich. You cannot eat an animal without participating in its death; to pretend otherwise is pure hypocrisy.
Granted, there are advantages to letting the experts do the slaughtering. A friend of mine once announced that, for a year, he would eat nothing he hadn’t killed himself. Even for a practical and unsentimental countryman, this proved extraordinarily difficult. For the first six months, he ate a lot of winkles. Then rabbits.
Finally, just when he thought he might go mad with longing for a proper roast, a farmer gave him a live sheep. After a prolonged tussle, my friend managed to slit its throat – but the intimate experience of slaughtering a large mammal as it fought for its life put him right off his chops. For the rest of the year, he murdered nothing but broccoli.
Nevertheless, most of us would be better carnivores for getting a bit closer to the action. The more you know about an animal’s life and death, the more humane your meat-eating is likely to be. Some years ago, my restaurateur husband took me to visit a chicken farm; I haven’t been able to touch a battery-farmed nugget since.
The idea that children are too delicate to cope with the realities of the food chain is, in my experience, sentimental nonsense. My four-year-old son, George, loves nothing better than cross-examining his father about whatever’s for supper.
“What are sausages made from, Daddy?” “Bits of pig, minced up and stuffed into little skins made from stomach lining.” “How do they kill the pig?” “They clonk it on the head so that it can’t feel anything, and then they cut its neck with a knife so all its blood pours out.” “Where is its head now?” “I’m not sure. It’s probably been chopped up and turned into catfood.” “I’d like a sausage with a head on it.”
In the same spirit of openness, George has seen a whole pig being butchered, held its eyeball in his hand, helped to pluck a pheasant, eaten sushi made from a freshly caught, twitching mackerel, and (his favourite) learnt to prise a limpet off a rock and eat the raw mollusc inside.
So far – and I realise it’s early days – this hands-on experience of carnivorism doesn’t seem to have turned him into a sadist, or a vegetarian. I hope it means he will grow up with some understanding of, and respect for, the animals he eats.
Shooting a duck is a hundred times more morally sound than tucking into, say, an intensively reared pig. If you let your children grow up thinking of meat as a disembodied protein that comes coated in breadcrumbs and shaped like a T. rex, you are not protecting them from anything – except their own responsibilities.
