"It's Never Too Early" Topic

To traumatize the youngsters:

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Wyatt

This is a big white tail deer hunting area.
A local used to put red noses on his.

Nancy's dad was a Maine game warden, and there always seemed to be an odd conflict regarding the issue of deer carcasses. The law required the carcass to be transported uncovered (the presumption being that if you were hiding it, you were poaching), but all the folks who moved out to the country for the "natural lifestyle" reacted with horror when Ernest and Clyde pulled up behind a school bus full of kids with Bambi tied to the hood of the pickup, early in the morning on their way to a tagging station.

Raymond was usually out on patrol when hunters would come to the house with deer or pelts or whatever, and Nancy's mother Mary would wind up issuing tags. She didn't like dealing with pelts so much, mainly because the trappers themselves were usually pretty ripe.

Right now, Mary's almost 93, living by herself, and the freezer is almost out of venison. She's waiting for deer season, and for friends to come by to fill it up again!

We've managed to distance ourselves so far from the realities of life and death, whether it's the "surgerification" of human birth, or the sanitized ackaging of supermarket meat. It bothers me. It's good for kids to grow up seeing where their food comes from, I think, and to deal with death as a part of life.

Ariel's prize lamb she was going to show next year died in the night last week, and although it's sad, I'm a little relieved that she is able to experience that. And both kids have had the chance to see and participate in both large-scale castration of cattle and some slaughtering. I did when I was a kid; I'm happy they aren't being isolated from it, either.

Color me old-fashioned.

Allen

My nephew and niece grew up in a rural area. Like a lot of folks, her parents kept a pig, a lamb and a calf for slaughter. They were a bit worried about the kids inevitably befriending them, thinking they might get upset come slaughter time.

So they named the beasts 'breakfast', 'lunch' and 'dinner' respectively. The kids knew their fate from day 1, and chatted happily about how they had played with the critters even as they were eating them.

No apparent signs of trauma. That whole axe murderer thing was a completely separate issue. (Okay, there was no axe murder, but the rest is true.)

I raised my kids in the country on purpose, with chickens and cattle, so they would know were meat milk and eggs came from.
All of them turned out great.

My wife is an Ag teacher. When our daughter is older, she will certainly know where that bratwurst came from.

I was taking my daughter to daycare at about the age of three. We go to the back door and the owner's husband has a gutted deer hanging from the swing set, but was covered with a big blue tarp.. Only about 4 inches of the hooves are showing. My daughter asks, "Daddy, what is that?" As a caring father, I put the burden on someone else and I say, "I don't know". Well I go to pick her up and she has to tell me what was on the swing set. She tells me that it was a reindeer and very conspiratorially she says, "he's not going to the north pole this year."

Mike

We've managed to distance ourselves so far from the realities of life and death, whether it's the "surgerification" of human birth, or the sanitized packaging of supermarket meat. It bothers me. It's good for kids to grow up seeing where their food comes from, I think, and to deal with death as a part of life.

Well said. I concur.
-Kle.

I generally agree with Allen's and majority view thus far. Though I think the idea in picture is in poor taste, I would hardly expect it to be traumatic.

"We've managed to distance ourselves so far from the realities of life and death, whether it's the "surgerification" of human birth, or the sanitized ackaging of supermarket meat. It bothers me. It's good for kids to grow up seeing where their food comes from, I think, and to deal with death as a part of life."

It's not the kids who have a problem with life and death…yet. It's the parents.

Steve
cavalcadewargames.com
nycjadie.wordpress.com

I taught an Anatomy and Physiology course at a community college in Oklahoma in a former career. While trying to explain the vasculature of muscle, I asked how many people had found pieces of veins in their pot roast in between the muscle bundles. One young lady said, in a horrified tone, 'You mean meat's muscle!?'. And she lives in OKLAHOMA!

Much adoodoo about nothing, once again. I think the pseudo Santa is being rather clever and obviously having fun. You think the kids haven't seen scores of dead deer already?…

When I worked as a campus security guard at a Midwestern university that had an agricultural campus (quite a well-known one, I might add), the trouble wasn't that the students didn't know the realities of where their food came from, although the sister campus took issue with the whole eating-meat thing (separate issue)…it was keeping the Ag Studies freshmen/pledges out of the barns for their hazing rituals.

Animal Husbandry was a misdemeanor rather than a major at the university.

When I was a kid, I saw lots of deer gutted and hung from a tree at most houses during deer season. Call me jaded but I doubt I would have been shocked by that sleigh back then.