Originally Posted by Flyboy

I don't think you quite understood what I was writing. Pets die all the time, but they tend to die a natural death and are very rarely eaten afterwards, but I very much doubt that childen as young as this would vote for it to be slaughtered. At no point did I suggest that this school council had voted for such a thing. If you asked a seven year old to decide to kill a lamb that they had been caring for, from birth for a year, do you really expect them to say, "yes, let's kill and eat it, mmmmmmm, tasty." I have not had a go at children, what a really odd accusation. I don't think that anyone could ever had inferred that from my post. I wonder why you have.

Headteachers influence the decisions of children all the time, if it suits their goals, just as any other adult, especially parents. I have seen teachers and headteachers "supervise" school council elections and votes and as chairs, they hold a veto. Do you really think that if a headteacher wanted to achieve a certain objective, that they wouldn't do their best to persuade the school council to come the "right" decision? I have seen this happen on more than one occasion, even from headteachers who apparently had a reputation similar to this one.

There really is a huge difference between the cognitive abilities and emotional awareness of a seven year old, compared to that of a ten year old. Can you really be that sure that any seven year old would really freely vote for such a thing, if they truly knew the consequences of their choice and that they wouldn't succumb to blackmail and pressure from those who are bigger and older than they are? Children of this age put an awful lot of trust in the adults who surround them and if their headteacher told that the little lamb will be going to a better place, where it can frolic and gambol in open fields and live on a cloud for all eternity, they would believe them.

This is nothing whatsoever to do with knowing where meat comes from. There are many different ways to show childen how this is achieved, but to make them choose whether to slaughter an animal, whom they know personally, I am sure that, if they were given the full facts, the decision would have had a very different outcome. This was about the headteacher imposing her extreme values upon the children, against the wishes of parents. I wonder how many of the children who where vegetarian were asked about whether the animal should be slaughtered.