Eggshausted

Bloody hate egg puns.  Hate myself now for doing one.

I was teaching computing in another class today, the one with the incubator in.  Right place, right time as the first chick hatched right at the end!  An added bonus was that I was teaching video editing and had the Apple TV hooked up to the whiteboard.  With the beauty of AirPlay the whole class got to watch the little dude come into the world 'live' and I could record it for the other classes to see.

As soon as it was out it fell asleep.  Not surprised, it was one hell of an effort and I was the first thing it saw. Bet it wanted to go back in!

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I saw a tweet early this morning about Tesco selling live turtles in its China stores.  They are in tight net bags and are despatched by having their heads chopped off.  I tweeted Tesco and asked if this was true, and all credit to them, they replied and said it was.  Led to a decent, polite tweet exchange in the end.

I had been thinking about the ethics of this all morning and relating it to our cultures attitudes to food, particular the killing of animals for meat.  I love a bit of lamb, but how would I feel about picking a live one up in a tight net bag and chopping its head off to get some lovely curries made? I am not honestly sure once I considered things past my initial reaction of NO WAY!  I discussed it with some of my pupils (they are so great - kids make the best debaters) and we talked about how Western attitudes could be due to the fact that the majority of us haven't had to kill for our own meals for a few centuries now.  Bet back then, ethics were different.   As one said, "These turtles are farmed as food, it's no different from what we do in the UK."  Also, we think nothing of seeing a bag of mussels in a supermarket fish counter, should we rate the well-being of a vertebrate over an invertebrate?  Just because someone else does the killing and puts the meat in a non-cute coloured tray does that make us any less responsible as meat eaters?

I'm still not sure.  Ethics, humaneness, logic.....they don't agree. 

I remember a mate once drunk at a wedding who said that people should have to kill a type of animal by hand once to earn the right to treat it as a food source, and if they refuse then they shouldn't be allowed to eat it.  He wasn't some mad animal-slaughter, I think it was his way of seeing how attitudes are so distanced from what actually happens.

(I had prawns for tea, I could kill a prawn by hand)