Butchering your friends

1690: 

You might have seen it already, but if you haven't, there's a local newspaper here in Sydney, the North Shore Times - it's front page had a picture of seven teenage girls from Pymble Ladies College standing in front of two steers who they raised, and named Lionel and Lenny. You can see on the girls' faces a beaming smile that would melt your heart. The only trouble is that Lenny and Lionel are no longer alive. In fact, along with a man in the photograph (presumably the butcher) the animals are now just two sad carcasses, each hanging by their legs on hooks. Are these girls being introduced to the butchering trade? I doubt if these girls would be smiling so brightly if they'd had to slaughter their two friends.

Some children can be brainwashed into thinking that animals should be turned into meat. Does that mean they can love them when alive and in a different way still love them, as meat? Does it mean that they can erase from their minds the intervening process at the abattoir? Are these girls expected to imagine their friends being slaughtered 'humanely', without experiencing the killing for themselves?

To let these girls see their friends being killed would be considered by their teachers and parents to be far too disturbing for children. So how suggestible are these girls, and what exactly has been suggested to them? Probably, they've been told that killing animals is essential if they want to continue eating them. That might sound fair enough, but if we follow that line of logic through, we arrive at a point where violence is acceptable when it fulfils a need and presumably in this case, meat is a 'need'. Could we then go one step further and say that sexual intercourse is a valid 'need' for male soldiers. So when they're denied the company of their women folk, it's quite acceptable for them to find women and girls and rape them? It fulfils a need, as meat does, and justifies the violence against the innocent, be they vulnerable animals or vulnerable humans.

PS - A copy of this blog has been sent to the Principal of PLC with an accompanying letter