Posted on 05/25/2008 3:48:35 AM PDT by markomalley
Canandaigua, N.Y. -
After heavy lobbying from animals-rights groups including People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, Canandaigua Academy Principal Lynne Erdle has terminated the so-called “chicken project” which has a class of students each year raising chickens and killing them.
Lindsay Rajt, manager of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, said Friday that Erdle sent an e-mail to the organization saying that school officials “recognize the concern” and had discontinued the project, which had been part of a high school ecology class for the past three years.
“In no way were we trying to create a controversy,” wrote Erdle in the e-mail provided by PETA. “This is a project adopted from a 4-H project that we have done for years.”
Animal-rights activists from across the country, including PETA members, lobbied school leaders to end the project. School district spokesman Andy Thomas said the district has received as many as 50 letters from activists. “I think Lynne’s feeling is, ‘Enough is enough,’” Thomas said. “We think it’s a great class, but sometimes a controversy makes it not worth it to pound on through.”
Thomas added, “Their opposition to the program, to me, is somewhat shortsighted — there’s a chance that some of the kids that go through this program will consider vegetarianism much more seriously.”
Thomas expressed frustrations with how the program — aimed at giving students a close-look at the true cost of today’s diet — has been portrayed by PETA and another group, United Poultry Concerns. In announcing the school’s decision, PETA issued a press release Friday that said, “School Had Been Holding Mass Decapitations of Birds in Classroom.”
PETA also said “slaughtering” animals fosters a dangerous mindset “that glorifies and even rewards violence.”
Rajt commended Erdle for ending the program.
“Now, students — and faculty — have a golden opportunity to learn one of life’s most valuable and enduring lessons: compassion for others,” she said in a prepared statement.
Last fall, students raised 22 hens in pens outside Eric Cosman’s ecology classroom. Starting from when they were chicks, they fed them, gave them water and cleaned their pens. Then, in groups of three or four, the hens were killed, plucked and gutted for a December barbecue day.
Reached by phone Saturday, Cosman said he had not been told that the program had been ended. “It wasn’t anything that was discussed at school with me,” he said, noting that the project is “much more than a project that kills things.”
“That’s the end result,” he said, “but my goal is to educate people to the true cost of today’s diet.”
Cosman said that, as part of the elective course, he has always shown a PETA film called “Meet your Meat,” and he invites the school’s vegetarian students to offer their insights to fellow students. “I approach it from an environmental point of view, not a slaughter point of view,” he said. “If we would all eat a little less meat, it could change a lot of things.”
The program drew ire from Canandaigua activist Joel Freedman, who said the program could “bring out the callous side of students.” He met with school officials before Christmas to plead on the birds’ behalf and ask that they be sent to a farm sanctuary.
Freedman said he was pleased with Erdle’s decision. “The school should be teaching kindness to animals, not cruelty to animals,” he said. “What was going on with the chicken project was a very cruel endeavor that never should have gone on in the first place.”
As for the district, Thomas said, “it’s never a happy feeling saying you’re bowing to a public pressure you don’t agree with, and yet we all make those decisions from time to time.”
Nature is cruel. People, remarkably less so.
I would never revel in being cruel to any animal. Snapping a chicken’s neck is extremely humane. You obviously have never watched a farmer do the procedure I mentioned. It’s fast and painless. Slaughter houses are cruel. Most farmers that raise their own food are much more humane than slaughter houses. Personally, I can’t kill anything, even for food, but I have no aversion to raising animals for food. I can cook it and eat it but somebody else has to do the killing.
Yeah, I’ll check it out. I am always open to new ways of fixing a kill.
How about crowding 10s of thousands of chickens into an enclosed space with no natural light and no fresh air, feeding them hormones, supplements, and animal byproducts that are not even part of their natural diet, subjecting them to being de-beaked so they don't cannibalize each other (chickens kept naturally in an open air farm do not do this) because they are overcrowded and are not getting the nutrition they need from the slop they are fed.
Instead of slitting their throats like I do which allows them to bleed out, factory chickens are electrocuted, and their blood is retained. I shouldn't have to tell you about the possibility of fluid borne pathogens. Which will become apparent to you in the next paragraph.
After culling and eviscerating factory chickens are subjected to a water bath to bring their body temperature down. The problem with tis is that countless hundreds of chickens have been through the same bath before, and whatever is left of their viscera and its contents (feces, urea, blood, bile) washes out in the bath contaminating all of the other chickens. Then to bring them "up" to USDA standards they are subjected to as many as 40 (yeah forty) chlorine baths to remove the contaminants, what is finally packaged and sold to you and in the stores is as far removed from chicken as the chicken is from the housefly.
There is nothing cruel about allowing a chicken to exist on a natural diet, and then killing and processing them for the dinner table. People today are so soft, and have been so sanitized from reality that they would starve in a room full of food, because they are too damn timid to take the proper measures for their own survival, and that of their families.
The stupidity that people revel in, it's just mind boggling
Every single pathogen to which you so romantically describe will be killed in the process of thorough cooking.
They’re food, not companion animals.
Thanks for the info. Gonna have to try it with chickens, or the next time I am out for birds.
Maybe so, but I won’t take the chance.
There’s chicken, and then there’s chicken sh*t. The Principal is both.
It might be interesting to see what would happen if enough people emailed and wrote Principal Chicken Sh*t about the dangers of caving in to PETA and other such animal rights whacko groups.
self-ping
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.