The Tale of a Boy and His Cow
A tearful goodbye from a young Kansas boy after his cow was sold for meat. Click on image to enlarge.
This is a picture of a young Kansas boy crying while he leads his steer away after it was sold for meat. He’s a member of a youth program called 4-H that funds and teaches children to raise farm animals to show and sell in agricultural fairs. Every year, there are photos circulating online of crying children on market day of these very same agricultural fairs. Unlike farmers who often have dozens, if not hundreds of animals, 4-H children work closely with one or two animals for a year or even longer if the animals, such as steers, take more time to raise.
This young boy, for example, is taught that it’s part of being responsible to raise livestock for the market even though he hates saying goodbye when the animals are sold. Raising livestock and showing them for sale is a way of life for his family and he knows how it is going to end when he starts raising a young animal. It’s clear that even though this was explained to him from the beginning, he still has a very hard time dealing with the separation when the time comes for him to give up the animal that he has clearly bonded with.
The Emotional Toll on Youths of Raising Animals as Livestock
As early as the 1990s, studies have shown the inconsistent behaviour and attitudes towards animals in our society. While many people claim to care deeply for animals, many of our uses for animals involve inflicting harm and many others involve killing them for food. An example of such ambivalence can be observed in the youth livestock programme in the 4-H organisation.
In a broad sense, it’s a form of a guided learning experience that involves a socialisation into activities that rationalise morally and troubling ethics of raising animals to be sold for food by young children. The intense contradiction between learning to care and bond with an animal while knowing that the goal of this care is to sell the animal for slaughter teaches children how to disregard their feelings and not get attached, distancing how to view animals as merely “market animals”; and how to justify the process through saving money for the future.
A 4-H participant’s heartbreaking farewell to the animal he cared for and bonded with after it was sold in the agricultural fairs. Image credit: modernfarmer.com. Click on image to enlarge.
4-H is the youth programme of the Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service of the United States Department of Agriculture. At the turn of the 20th Century, researchers at land-grant universities found that rural adults often resisted new technologies intended to advance agriculture. Land-grant universities are learning institutions which receive state benefits in order to run their various programmes. If young people became engaged in projects that involved those technologies, however, they would not only convince their parents of their worth; they would also experiment with other new ideas in farming.
Over the course of the 20th Century, 4-H became the largest educational youth development programme outside of schools in the United States. In the 1950s, clubs began in cities and suburbs, as well as rural areas, and its curriculum extended beyond the realm of agriculture. Its literature describes its programmes as centering on leadership, citizenship, and life skills. Based on data collected from 2016-2017, 4-H currently serves 5.95 million nationally. The young age group between the ages of 5 and 13 makes up 86% of these youths.
The four H’s stand for head, heart, hands, and health, the components of the 4-H pledge:
“I pledge my head to clearer thinking, my heart to greater loyalty, my hands to larger service, and my health to better living for my Club, my Community, my Country, and my World.”
At the 2009 Tazewell County Fair in Virginia, 4-H participant Levi Parks, then 7, showed his fainting goat, Hildie. Image credit: modernfarmer.com. Click on image to enlarge.
The members of 4-H learn by doing; they participate in nearly 200 adult-supervised activities such as cooking, ceramics, electronics, model rocketry, sewing, IT, livestock, and archery. Members of 4-H clubs also become active in local food banks, children’s hospitals, nature centres, homeless shelters, and senior citizen centres.
Support for 4-H comes from the county, state, and federal funds. The Cooperative Extension System of each state’s land-grant university conducts the programme and provides the curriculum in cooperation with the United States Department of Agriculture and individual county governments. Parents and older siblings play a large role in 4-H by volunteering as group leaders. The national 4-H headquarters estimates that half a million adults and teens currently serve in this capacity, many of them former 4-H members themselves. 4-H appeals to boys and girls about equally, with slightly higher membership rates (52.5%) for girls.
A young 4-H participant and her rabbit. Image credit: modernfarmer.com. Click on image to enlarge.
The United States Department of Agriculture (or more specifically, the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture) designates millions of annual Cooperative Extension Programme dollars for regional “youth development” initiatives – a total of $68 million in 2015, much of that going to 4-H. The youth organisation also receives funding from the nonprofit National 4-H Council, which spent approximately $48 million last year, and accepts donations from a veritable who’s who of large agricultural corporations who are well-known to think of only their own profit-making activities over moral, ethical and environmental issues: Monsanto, ConAgra, DuPont, and Altria each gave at least a million dollars in 2015.
Only 11% of today’s 4-H’ers, as they are known, live on farms. Nevertheless, animal-related programmes still hold the greatest appeal, enrolling 1,761,798 members nationwide. One of the popular programmes involves the youth livestock programme, in which kids raise commercial breeds of cattle, pigs, goats, and sheep for the market. A livestock project involves approximately a year of work in all aspects of raising a calf, lamb, or other young animals. Ostensibly, it’s an opportunity for an animal lover to work closely with an animal and compete in agricultural fairs. It culminates in the sale of the animal at the county or state fair, where buyers pay far above market value to support the efforts of the 4-H members.
Young children have to deal with emotional and moral dilemmas while raising and selling animals for maximum profit. Image credit: Karen Ducey Photography. Click on image to enlarge.
This is where we can see how relationships between young people and animals destined for slaughter develop and the process through which younger children learn to distance themselves from their animals. It’s also disturbing that the children are also learning to look at farm animals as commodities to be raised for money. Cows, pigs, sheep and goats could easily be pets but the young children are slowly conditioned to consider them as food. Unlike their interaction with their pets, this ultimately leads to attaching a different set of rules for interacting with livestock as the children become eventually desensitised, losing much of the empathy and care they initially had.
The emotional and moral dilemma that the young children have to deal with while raising and selling animals for the maximum profit and to win a competition adds to the trauma of knowing that ultimately the livestock will be killed for meat. It’s essential that children learn the values of compassion and respect for the lives of other sentient beings. Kids can learn a valuable lesson in life if they are taught to respect these farm animals for the interesting living sentient beings that they are instead of focusing on how they can be of use to humans as food.
Many experience distress and have a very hard time dealing with the separation when the time comes to give up an animal that they have clearly bonded with for eventual slaughter. Click on image to enlarge.
There are so many humane ways to teach responsibility and compassion. There’s no need for children to endure the emotional hardship in raising animals for slaughter or for the animals to have their trust so brutally betrayed and their lives ended so suddenly. When a 4-H’er decides to opt-out of selling their new friend or even out of the animal-rearing projects completely, they are not only saving or sparing a life but they are acting as the future ambassadors for compassionate kids everywhere. There are other alternatives to farmed animal projects such as agricultural-related projects or volunteering at an animal rescue centre or sanctuary that is committed to helping animals.
Video: News coverage of the Kansas boy crying over his cow after it was sold for meat
Or view the video on the server at:
https://video.tsemtulku.com/videos/slaugher-kansas-boy-his-cow-goes-viral.mp4
A Happy Ending
While children in the 4-H programme may have to swallow their tears and learn to look at their livestock as commodities, here’s a happy ending when a boy stood up to the system. The story of Bruno and his beloved pig, Lola is a heartwarming story of how a young boy stood up to the 4-H tradition.
Boy Defies School To Save Pig He Loves
When Bruno Barba first saw Lola, he never could have guessed how much the young pig would affect him.
“She’s changed my life so much and I just haven’t been able to look at anything the same anymore,” Bruno told The Dodo.
Now the 16-year-old high school student is paying her back with the ultimate gift: the gift of life.
Bruno first met Lola when he purchased her through the Future Farmers of America (FFA) program at Fullerton Union High School in Fullerton, California. The school’s FFA program has a farm lot attached to the school, and students are encouraged to purchase animals who are then homed on the FFA campus.
As in 4-H programs, FFA students are responsible for all aspects of animal care, from feeding and cleaning to learning to walk with their animals, as if before a judging panel. They then take them to the Orange County Fair – before sending their hand-raised animals off to slaughter.
But for Bruno and Lola, it was love at first sight. The young pig quickly took to the boy, and would eagerly grunt when he came to visit her each day. “She was like my best friend,” Bruno said.
And as their friendship progressed, Bruno’s feelings quickly began to change. “She’s just made a huge impact on me by making me realize that they’re just like us,” Bruno said of Lola. “They have the same feelings as anyone else and they don’t deserve to get slaughtered.”
The more affection Bruno developed for Lola, the more she loved him right back.
“There was this one time where I was just feeling really sad about all the rest of the animals and I started crying, and she noticed I was crying,” Bruno said. “She was inside this little play area. I was sitting down on the ground. She came toward me. I started petting her and she just flopped on the ground so I could pet her belly.”
As the weeks progressed, Bruno became more and more depressed about the fates of Lola and the other pigs. The breaking point came when he witnessed one of the other pigs being slaughtered.
Most children in the FFA program choose to hire a butcher to kill their pigs, and the butcher will come right to campus to do it. The pigs are killed on the FFA lot right next to the high school – and in clear view of any students who happen to be passing nearby.
“They slaughter the animals on the farm that we raise the animals at. I witnessed it and it was heartbreaking for me,” Bruno said. “I couldn’t handle it.”
He was also unnerved by what he perceived to be the indifference of the other students. “I think it’s pretty sad because they don’t care – they really don’t care about it,” Bruno explained. “I was just there, horrified of the experience.”
At that moment, Bruno realized he needed to find a better home for Lola. At the FFA lot, she was kept in an empty concrete cell, with no enrichment or hay to nest in. Bruno knew she deserved more than a dark, lonely life followed by an early slaughter.
Fortunately, he reached out to Farm Sanctuary, which was more than happy to lend a helping hand.
Alicia Pell, national placement coordinator for Farm Sanctuary, told The Dodo that it’s not uncommon for the group to receive calls from sad students second-guessing their FFA or 4-H projects. But many children don’t realize that saving the animal will mean a change on their end, too.
“Sometimes they don’t make the connection that they need to not purchase pigs in FFA anymore,” she said. “They think, ‘Oh, I’ll just raise another animal in FFA next year and find a sanctuary again’ … That just perpetuates the cycle.”
But Bruno was different, she said, and Farm Sanctuary jumped in to help. Last week, Bruno and his mother joined Lola and the Farm Sanctuary volunteers on the pig’s six-hour journey to her new home at the rescue’s Orland, California, location.
Bruno said the entire experience has wrought a significant change in him, and that he’s reevaluated his beliefs about both animals and the FFA program as a whole.
“It changed my perception by just showing that FFA tends to … desensitize the students that go in there,” he said. “Students in the FFA are getting changed by [the program] showing them, ‘These are just things that you should kill and eat, not things you should bond with.'”
And he realizes he’s lucky that he could help Lola escape. While students in FFA programs pay for their animals and technically own them, he said, he’s heard rumors from other students that their schools will discourage students from backing out of the butchering.
“They do bond with them,” he said of other students. “They do cry when they have to give them up; they don’t have any place to take them elsewhere.”
Most importantly, he said, he’s realized that animals are just like us, and he and his mother have decided to go vegan as a result. “She’s just like any type of animal or person,” he said of Lola.
Pell echoed Bruno, noting that what makes FFA, and other programs like it, so tragic is that it teaches children to become desensitized. “They’re coming to understand them [the animals] as they understand their dogs and cats – that they’re thinking, feeling beings – and then they’re sending them off to slaughter,” she explained.
And the damage is even more hurtful to the animals, who are on the receiving end of what Pell described as “the ultimate betrayal.”
“The animals come to know their caretakers very well,” she said, adding that they form very strong bonds with the children, who are often the only source of love and companionship they’ll ever know. “They trust them, because they’re their friend … They follow them willingly into the fair, willingly into the stadium where they’re being auctioned off.
“They don’t know that their best friend is watching them being sent off to slaughter,” she added.
But fortunately, Lola’s future is a much brighter one. Pell said she’s doing great at her new home, which has lots of grass and mud and – once she’s out of quarantine – other pigs to play with.
“She immediately took to having a large yard with dirt for her to root in and mud for her to wallow in,” Pell explained. “She just found her pigginess very quickly and with great ease.”
Lola has also quickly endeared herself to her caretakers, just like she did with Bruno. “She loves the caretakers, she loves belly rubs – she’s incredibly sweet and friendly,” Pell said.
But of course, the move is bittersweet. Bruno couldn’t help but be sad when he said goodbye to his best friend, but kept his chin up by remembering what a happy future she now had.
“I was really happy that she found a new place where she can actually play around,” he said. “Of course I wanted to cry. But I didn’t because she found a new home where she can be happy.”
Source: https://www.thedodo.com/boy-saves-lola-pig-1253914071.html
Conclusion
What children learn from animals in 4-H touches issues at the heart of how we view and treat animals who share our world as sentient beings. These young animals form very strong bonds with the children, who are often the only source of love and companionship they will ever know. They trust their young caretakers because they are their only friend. This trust is betrayed when they are led willingly to the fair and sold for slaughter. It’s clear that many of the younger children who still have an affinity and bond with the animals in their care are traumatised by their experience of betraying the trust of the animals they raised and cared for.
There are so many more compassionate programmes that can teach children to value the life of all sentient beings, and certainly the morality of betrayal of trust at such a young age can have life-changing consequences. We can teach children that a more compassionate choice would be to become vegetarians as in the example of Bruno, who realised that animals are just like us and should not be viewed as “market commodities”, to be raised and slaughtered for food when we have so many other options available to us.
Video: Paul McCartney talks about animal rights in Glass Walls
Or view the video on the server at:
https://video.tsemtulku.com/videos/slaughter-paul-glasswalls.mp4
Sources/References:
- https://www.peta.org/students/student-life/this-is-whats-wrong-with-4-h/
- https://www.peta.org/blog/4-h-agricultural-programs-hardens-hearts/
- Video:Paul McCartney talks about Animal rights in Glass Walls
- https://animalplace.org/the-emotional-socialization-of-4h-and-ffa-kids/
- http://www.animalsandsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/ellis.pdf
- https://www.onegreenplanet.org/animalsandnature/kids-being-taught-to-raise-animals-for-slaughter/
- https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/08/30/545603450/for-4-h-kids-saying-goodbye-to-an-animal-can-be-the-hardest-lesson
- https://www.producer.com/2017/07/animal-rights-activists-begin-targeting-4-h/
- https://www.thedodo.com/boy-saves-lola-pig-1253914071.html https://assets3.thrillist.com/v1/image/2496978/size/tmg-article_tall.jpg
- https://www.thedodo.com/boy-says-goodbye-to-cow-1549031135.html
- https://youthtoday.org/2017/10/4-h-disputes-claims-that-it-is-or-was-racist-sexist-bound-to-corporate-interests/
- https://modernfarmer.com/2017/07/4-h-indoctrination-nation/
For more interesting information:
- Do animals reincarnate back as humans?
- Wake Up, Mom!
- Earthlings
- Animals Show Love for Humans
- A touching hug
- “I Don’t Eat My Friends” – by Tenzin Palmo
- Why Losing a Dog Can Be Harder than Losing a Relative or Friend
- Global Superpower China Will Cut Meat Consumption by 50%!
- Animals Help Us to be Better Humans…..
- All sentient beings can feel happiness and fear
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I think this is very cruel because they tell the kids to feed and love the animals and they ended up asking them to kill them or sell them to the market. This is a very cruel way to teach them that all the animals are human’s food to consume freely. I don’t think animals should be our food, they are not born for us to eat because they also have feeling like us. They can feel pain as human do. So this is a very selfish way, they should also have rights to live freely like us.
To allow the children to care for animals is a very good initiative. However, it is very cruel to let the children establish a close relationship with the animals and then have them engage a butcher to slaughter the animals they care for.
The objective of the program is purely for commercial reason. It does not take into consideration the emotions of the children. Instead of helping the children, the children are actually traumatised. Look at how many children cry when they have to send the animals they care for to be slaughtered.
This program should be modified to let the children learn how to focus out, to care for others unconditionally. It is important to educate the younger generation the right values so they will grow up to be a happy and positive adult.
4-H in the United States is a youth organization , with the mission of engaging youth to reach their fullest potential while advancing the field of youth development. The programme includes activities such as such as cooking, ceramics, electronics, model rocketry, sewing, IT, and so forth. It’s a good training ground it seems. But to raise animals ?? I do not really agree.
The youths are taught to raise animals as livestock. From there those livestock will be send to slaughter house. The goal of 4-H is to develop life skills of youth through experiential learning programs and a positive youth development approach. But to me it seem to be traumatic for the youth to see their animals , betraying them to be slaughtered. By the time the animals are send away, the youth have already built a relationship with the animals. Surely sad and disheartened for those youths. Looking at those pictures where the youths were crying tells all. This program should be reverse and look for other activities for the youth to develop their skills.
Thank you for this sharing.
It is actually excellent for the school to have this type of programme to educate the kids on responsibility. However, the schools have to take in consideration of the part where the kids will have to eventually send their animals off for slaughter. It seems like the programme is training a bunch of cold-hearted kids that do not care about the animal that they cared so much in the past.
Animals have feelings too and the school is teaching the kids to ignore them. The worst part is the kids knew what will happen to the animals that they bonded with but they still did not do anything to save the poor animal.
This tells us that generally, people do not care about those animals that they bonded with for so long and they are okay for them to be killed for food. There is a lot of education that needed to be done to raise awareness for the animals.
How could one given their time, care and love to a living being then at the end to send them off to slaughterhouse just for money? Taking care of the animals created bonding between humans and animals. We can’t just keep our eyes closed and just send the animals to be food to satisfy our taste buds.
The program indeed gives the kids an experience to care and love for the animals. How could the kids kill the animals that they have brought up? It’s not easy at all. The program should continue but not for consumption, instead of an educational program to nurture the young one to take care of the animals from being harm. This program should educate the youngster on how to look after individual animals.