One Sheep’s Death, One Teacher’s Resignation, and Where the Tragedy and Hypocrisy Lie

Some days, you have a tight deadline that you desperately need to be working toward, but then you see an article tweeted by a friend (I’m here, by the way) that leaves you utterly incapable of focusing on anything else until you’ve said what you need to say to its writer. So you put off work for an hour to say it:

You, Mr. Brooks, are a self-justifying, self-pleasing fool whose definitions of “love” and what children “need” to learn are monumentally screwed up.

Charlie Brooks of the UK’s Telegraph wants his fellow citizens to know that they are a nation of hypocrites — not because they claim to love and respect animals yet still brutally, unnecessarily kill them for pleasure, and he wants them to stop doing the latter; not because many of them were outraged by one animal’s killing, and he thinks they should be equally outraged by the deaths of all animals who are killed unnecessarily for their palates; but because he thinks it’s silly that they feel — or would allow their children to feel — any guilt or compassion at all. What’s needed to fix the like-animals/eat-animals hypocrisy isn’t more compassion for more animals; it’s less compassion for all animals. Indifference for all the animals they eat isn’t what’s wrong. Concern for one animal is the problem.

Seriously.

Perhaps you’ll recall this story: Last year, a UK schoolteacher had her students raise a sheep they named Marcus. The lamb was brought into their school to teach them about where their food comes from, with the intention of killing him all along. And what wasn’t the project set up to teach them? That Marcus was an individual. With personality. With feelings. With experiences. An individual who trusted them. An individual who cared for them. An individual who didn’t want — or need — to die. That we don’t need to kill and eat animals like Marcus to live healthy, happy lives. The kids were encouraged to see him only as food and as a source of income, and when the time to vote came — over whether to send Marcus to auction and slaughter, to “earn” enough money to buy more animals (piglets) they could raise and kill — most of the kids voted for the slaughterhouse.

How many of the kids voted to let Marcus live? I’m not sure. How many of the kids didn’t want to send Marcus to his death but felt they were supposed to vote for his death? We’ll never know. How many of the kids didn’t fully understand what was going to happen to Marcus or the unnecessary nature of it? Almost certainly all of them. But some of the kids were indeed, according to their parents, distraught that Marcus, someone they loved, was going to be killed. And parents themselves were distraught too — hypocritical parents, of course, parents who insisted that this was wrong but that buying the packaged flesh of a different brutally killed lamb at the store and serving it up to their kids was different and morally okay. These were folks who didn’t really care about Marcus, but who wanted to shield their kids from the loss of a “pet” (rather than any other nameless farmed animal), who themselves aren’t dealing with the reality of where their animal-based foods come from and want to shield their kids from that same reality.

But the outrage, hypocritical or not, was nevertheless enough that the head of the school has now resigned. And this is what has the Telegraph‘s Charlie Brooks, who himself claims in the headline to “love” both pigs and pork — he raises and kills them because they are “bred to be eaten” or to produce babies who will be eaten — all worked up. That teacher, according to him, is the “victim” here and a “hero”:

This is a tragedy, because children need to learn to love farm animals, cherish them, nurture them – and then eat them.

You know how sometimes, when you read a line, you don’t really know what to say to it, and you just want to flip the person off? This was one of those moments for me. The children don’t “need” to learn any such thing. Mr. Brooks, just like your act of breeding and raising animals for your purpose of killing and eating them doesn’t mean it is the animals’ actual purpose in life to be your food (or if I start breeding dogs and roasting their puppies and selling them to the neighbors, is that okay simply because I “bred” them with the intention of eating them, so it must be their purpose?), children don’t “need” to learn that “what currently is” = “what must or should be.” Why must children be taught that animals must and should be killed and eaten? Is Mr. Brooks perhaps one of those who opposes the spreading of compassion and critical thinking about the unnecessary nature of what we do to our fellow animals because compassion and nonviolence would cut into his bottom line? Because his own profits depend on people gorging guiltlessly on dead animals?

Mr. Brooks is absolutely right that it’s absurd for people to be upset over Marcus’s death while remaining indifferent to the constant suffering and deaths of massive numbers of other animals, who were and are no different from Marcus. But he is wrong that compassion for Marcus and one human’s resignation from her job are the tragedy here. The tragedy is the billions of other animals mutilated, abused, and brutally killed without any outrage or mourning for, or defense of, their lives. The tragedy is that more people don’t see Marcus in, and extend their compassion to, all animals. The tragedy is that fools like Mr. Brooks think that real compassion is a flaw to be stamped out in our children rather than encouraged and spread. The tragedy is that children are being taught that compassion is wrong, silly, and sentimental, and killing unnecessarily is right, noble, and admirable.