Friendly farms

716:

My next door neighbours have just come back from their holiday in the country. I knocked on their door early, to give them their mail. Their little girl is four years old and she couldn’t stop telling me about the piglets she saw when they visited one of those ‘family-friendly farms’.  She was allowed to play with them in the straw. “They weren’t very little” she said. She stretched her hands out wide, the size of her small dog. “Just like Sammy” she said. “And they snuggled up to me and they let me hug them. They grunted and pushed their noses under my arm”. She was over the moon.

            She went on like this for some time. While I was listening to her story I could smell their breakfast cooking in the kitchen. Bacon and eggs frying. I figured Mum and Dad weren’t going to be telling her about pigs and bacon. I assume they’d decided not to spoil her memory (her innocence more like). I knew they’d be nervous about me speaking up. As if I would!

            I’m not a parent. I don’t really know the dynamics of all this. But I do realise why the truth about animals may not be made clear to youngsters and that parents, usually quite consciously, decide that their kids must be kept in the dark to prevent them making the obvious connections.

            “When they’re older they’ll understand ...”. But understand what? Perhaps the kids will understand that a loving parent can be ultimately duplicitous, not on the scale of telling fibs about Santa Claus but over the truth about violating animals! If a young child’s curiosity about animals and meat and farms and killing can be sidestepped, it’s likely the whole thing will blow over soon enough. On some level, as a child grows older, they’ll stop worrying about the animals and start salivating over how delicious crispy bacon tastes, and how tasty the googy-egg!

            The cynic might suggest some rules of parenthood: don’t make the connection between animals and the food you feed them. Tell the kids as little as possible about animal farming, if you want to keep their dreams alive. Keep the memory of that summer day at the farm with the little piggies - it’s priceless. Let them keep this much while they are children ... until they have to get their priorities straightened out, in preparation for the real world beyond, so that they fit in ... so that when they grow up they can, without a second thought, ‘bring home the bacon’.