“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.”
-4-H motto.
As an animal-loving father of two children, I read, with sorrow and dismay, the story of a young girl who raised a blind bull named Oatmeal, only to sell him so he can be butchered for food.
Her grandmother expressed amazement by their closeness. “I don’t know what she says to him, but he responds to her like no other steer I’ve seen,” she said. “When he hears her voice, or even just smells her, you can see his whole body just relax.”
“The process to realize that potential took a lot of love and patience,” said her father.
“I’d go to his stall every day and talk to him,” the girl told the reporter. “You can’t be rough with him. He doesn’t respond well to roughness. One day, it just clicked. I started gaining his trust.”
That mutual trust, indeed, that loyalty of the heart which the 4-H motto claims to champion, was broken for both when Oatmeal was “sold and trucked away as 964 pounds of prime beef.” The reporter called it a “tearful goodbye.” It was far worse than that.
These are the kinds of programs groups like 4-H and FFA portray as beneficial and entrepreneurial. I believe such programs seek to destroy what is inherently best in children. In our family, my wife and I nurture our children’s natural desire to care for and be with animals by fostering sick or newborn orphaned animals for local rescue groups. And at the end of their stay with us, these animals are placed into new homes where they will be equally loved and cared for. We also rescue and rehabilitate wild animals. And at the end of their stay, they are released back to their habitats. I cannot imagine the anguish and pain my children would feel knowing that after their stay with us, we would be handing them over to the knife and dinner plate. All the money in the world would not convince my children to make such a trade-off, nor would I think it was something to be celebrated should they ever be capable of making such a cold and heartless calculation.
Don’t get me wrong. That little girl was a victim; not a perpetrator. And while she will not suffer the abuse that awaits Oatmeal at the slaughterhouse, she will suffer, too. Because independent of the tragedy of allowing children to be complicit in the brutality against their animal friends which inevitably awaits them at the slaughterhouse, such programs encourage children to view other living things which they have come to know as unique individuals with their own personalities and emotions, as mere commodities: to be bought, sold, abused, and killed because there is a profit to be made in doing so. Regardless of whether you are a vegetarian/vegan or not, how does encouraging such behavior in our children contribute to building a better word, as is the 4-H creed?
Quite simply, it teaches children to suppress their natural empathy in favor of financial gain – to turn off their hearts in a way that harms and diminishes them. And while 4-H programs such as these may leave children’s pocketbooks brimming, I cannot imagine that their hearts are not left full of loss and betrayal.
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