On Nov 9, 2005, at 21:05, BrambleLane (Margaret in PA) wrote:
Some years back, out kid raised a wether as a 4-H project. We named it
'Lunch', and although he understood the whole process/purpose (we ate
it
ourselves), he still cried when it was auctioned off at the fair.
Well, there's a precedent, in Charlotte's Web... :) While, at some
level, I understand what 4-H is doing, at another level, I find it an
extremely cruel practice to teach a child to raise an animal from zero,
form an attachment to it (those animals become friends, like pets), and
then have to sell it, knowing it'll be killed.
In a way it's comparable to the Nazi practice of "toughening" its
Hitlerjugend (Hitler's youth) movement. A kid - 12-13yr old - would be
given a dog to raise and train, then was asked to cut its throat...
True, it was teaching them to kill on demand, for no good reason (like
food) at all but, still, it's hard enough on an *adult* to pass a death
sentence on a pet (I was heartbroken, when our -16yr old, blind,
incontinent and unable to move much - dog had to be killed, even though
getting up 3-4 times a night to help him go out was killing me) and
asking a child to do it seems like a "cruel and unusual punishment" to
me.
I remember reading one of the books in "Anne of the Green Gables"
series, where a child's pet-cockerel is sacrificed for a dinner for a
visiting preacher... Not only did I cry cry with the child, but I
conceived a hatred for the clergy that was much longer-lasting than
that of the girl in the book :)
The idea is that thay are a by-product of dairy goats, same as dairy
beef. These days,
however, most wethers I see are half boer, which is strictly a meat
breed,
OK, I'll bite.. :) What's a "boer"? All I could find in my -
addmittedly "concise", but it did have "wether" <g> - dictionary was
"Boer" (them guys of Dutch origin who fought the Brits in South
Africa), and, since you've used the same word twice, it's not a typo...
The dictionary I used, BTW (Oxford Concise) defines "wether" as
castrated *ram*, not goat. Doubtless, the animal had provided "mountain
oysters" first, before being served as a leg o'lamb, casing for haggis
and other "Scottish delights"... :)
T
--
Tamara P Duvall http://t-n-lace.net/
Lexington, Virginia, USA (Formerly of Warsaw, Poland)
To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line:
unsubscribe lace-chat [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
