Off Topic PETA & Schools
Where I lived when I was a kid, dog fighting was not functionally illegal. One Animal Control person, once told me that it had been illegal back then, but not for attending a dog fight, only for organizing one - and the fine was so low, that the dog fight sponsors made more money in each minute of the fight than what that day's fines would be, and that shelter risked having one of their officers corrupted each time they sent him to the fight to issue a fine, so they never bothered.
Whatever the excuse, while private people might be arrested for animal cruelty, dog fights were held in public places. They were only advertised through word of mouth - but dead dogs, and blood splatters indicated where they were held - as well as the pit structures themselves.
In school, teachers very often ridiculed people who said anything in an animals defense.
For example:
At junior high age, we got a new school board and new principal - I don't know why, maybe new houses were built somewhere in the district and different people moved in? Maybe it had to do with new federal guidelines? I don't know, I was only a child then.
One of the new changes, was a new literature book.
The new literature book had stories about dog fighting - no not criticizing dog fights, but about dog fighting. And we were assigned stories that had dog fights in them.
Why? I don't know. When I complained to the teacher, she said that we had been reading "girl's stories" in the younger grades and now were going to read "boy's stories".
One of the boys in my class said that after the teacher had said that, he could not speak up about the gross subject of the stories, which he and some of the other boys had been planning on complaining about as a group. Young kids are so easily manipulated by teachers like that, aren't they?
One of the boys did complain and the literature teacher just got mad. The principal came, and spoke to some of us - he said the same sort of line the literature teacher had used - that some (none that I knew of) the students liked these stories and that it was their turn to get the stories they liked.
Cleverly, these stories were mixed in with sports stories. It became a problem for me, because the questions on the tests could not be answered by having read the story. I read some of those stories until I could almost quote them - but still couldn't get the answers right on the test.
Like, after the story, the quiz might say:
"The score was 6 to 0, and Joe hit a home run, what was the score at the end of the story?" Unless you knew how the game was scored, you couldn't answer the question.
It did help when one of the boy's explained that baseball was about the same as softball - we did play "softball" and what our PE teacher could "hardball" was what the books called "baseball".
Another kid gave me a good tip - don't bother to read the stories, because these quizzes were never about the stories. When I complained to the teacher - she said that I should call up male relatives and have them explain the rules to me.
Perhaps it was the whole point, but some of the kids who could not read (the teacher read the quiz out loud, and you just marked a, b, c , or d on a sheet of paper) did better than most of the other kids.
Something was going on. Mixed in with all of this was the dog fighting stories. It could be that this was a way of trying to toughen up the boys because it was assumed that they would become soldiers - perhaps somebody somewhere upstairs thought we were heading into some prolonged battle which would draft all the young guys?
Perhaps the new principal just wanted a higher percentage of students to pass - so the found out what the would-be flunkers wanted to read aobut, and then loaded the class in their favor?
One has to be careful about drumming empathy out of young people - even if they are going to go into battle, because they usually return from battle and have to become part of a non-war society again.
In high school not only did the science teacher have dissection of live pithed frogs, but some of the boys would steal the mice after class and take them out and torture the mice to death.
When I complained to the teacher, the teacher got mad, and said that ONE of the boys had said he wanted to grow up to be a researcher, and therefor the first thing we all needed to learn to get through college (this was high school) was not to feel sorry for animals.
Why were teachers actively working to destroy empathy in their students? I don't know. But a few of them were. Perhaps they came from a generation who lived on farms, where everybody raised animals, and then killed and ate them - so every child had to learn not to care about the animals they had to care for.
This is one of the reasons why I don't get bothered by PETA wanting to teach animal compassion in school - it is a counter balance to some of the other teachers like my biology and literature teachers.
But I am not a vegetarian, and although I don't hunt, I don't blog against it either - it would be too weird for someone who eats stockyard animals to complain about hunting - the wild animal at least are free until they die.
