Zombie Zoo

Interesting that brother America is complaining about this, while he's letting children fire machineguns at shooting ranges.

@Kvaseren I guess I could call this comment

(puts on sunglasses)

Shots fired! XD XD XD

@Kvaseren Where are we doing this in America because as an American I can tell you if and when an American child is taught to use a fire arm is decided by their parents and usually begins with Rifles and Shotguns not Machineguns.

@mactheman3 I would assume Kvaseren is referring to the incident at the Arizona gun range with the young girl and the Uzi...

@Dena Exactly: http://edition.cnn.com/2014/08/26/us/arizona-girl-fatal-shooting-accident/index.html

@Dena Well yeah accidents happen

@mactheman3 oooooooooooh. Ooooooooooooooooooooooh, I bet you wouldn't say that to the instructor's family.

@Kvaseren And people call Americans ignorant. It varies by state but one must be at least 18 or 21 to shoot at a gun range. Even after all that there are still many more laws to be considered.

@aDoCdre Erm, you're being quite ignorant yourself. I don't know where you live, but where I live (down south), people tend to set up their own home shooting ranges if they have a property large enough for it. What kind of guns they fire, and who they let fire them tends to be more of a function of "What's cool?" or "What can I get away with?" as opposed to legality. Just figured I would inform you that your country isn't quite as rose tinted as you'd like to think.

@kaorihinata I live in North Carolina bro. I still live in the city so it is very illegal to start shooting in my back yard. Yes i can go to my uncle's back acre and shoot. You assume too much of me. In my comment i mentioned shooting range laws. I mentioned nothing of country-side ethics on the matter. What people do in their own back yard is their business. However i do hope anyone would have enough common sense to not give a young child (a three-year old) a gun. Regardless of location. Now go be butthurt somewhere else, bro.

@kaorihinata Ditto Alaska, maybe more so.

As a Faroese, I can confirm this. We really aren't afraid to show children how we slaughter animals, and I don't see why that is considered a bad thing by foreigners. It's good that people learn from a young age where their food comes from.

@Valkyrja
This ↑

@Valkyrja Yup, seems silly for people to get so angry over it!

@Valkyrja As an American, I also find our country's general "appall" at this to be pretty hypocritical and well-deserving of an eye roll. Too many helicopter-hovering liberal parents who want to bubble-wrap their kids from reality.

@Valkyrja well ya, but murdering animals right in front of 5 year olds seem to be a bit... intense....

I don't mind hunting or killing animals in general if there is proper reason (for example for food or to keep other animals healthy) and people should teach their kids that killing animals is not always a bad thing. I'm actually very proud of those people who can kill an animal because I can't do it. Even though I wanted to become a hunter I can't because I just can't stand shooting living things myself. Seeing dead animal is okay to me though. "Cleaning up" the dead animal is the worst.

Given America's record for school shootings, are they really in a position to lecture anyone about child issues?

@Lenzar Of course we are! We know what to avoid! While ... not avoiding it ourselves. We just yell at one another. A lot. And then we forget about it. Until the next one. Then we remember all the times it's happened before. And yell at one another. A lot more. And then we forget about it...

Ad. Nauseum.

@Lenzar School Shootings aren't as frequent as our media makes them.

@Shotwells http://harvardpolitics.com/special_features/gun.html

I don't know what you could possibly mean by that, except that the problem is overstated (untrue) or that the media reports more school shootings than there actually are (absurd).

When my daughter was 5, we bought a whole sheep from the slaughterhouse and brought all the bits home in a big plastic bag.

We put a plastic sheet down on the garage floor to sort them out and chop them up and bag them.

The teenaged Korean homestay student took one look, went green , and ran out.

My daughter, though, looked on with interest. After a while, she pointed at one large piece, and with a look of concentration declared: "I think that's his bum."

Then she skipped out of the garage, singing "Baa baa black sheep, have you any wool? We'll chop you up and eat you, and put you in a bag"

@sshipway well that's........................... dark................... ;-;



edit: wait why do i have 2 up votes 0-0

Well.. shame is that it was exotic animals, but other than that. I think everyone who consumes meat should witness a slaughter once in their lives. I witnessed my first slaughter of a moose at the age of 7, it was very educational and made me respect the the animal even more.
I love meat, but if you're gonna eat it, you may aswell know how it works.

I don't know, there are many sides to stories like this. My argument is why this was made openly at a Zoo where exotic animals are supposed to be witnessed alive, while autopsy and anatomi education should be taken and performed elsewhere, I mean, surely they don't come to the zoo to the watch a slaughter? And If i remember correctly Marius, the giraff was at perfectly good health, to me it would've made more sense to butcher an animal that died/or had to be put down because of natural causes.

Anyways, I'm sure they had their reasons, and I respect that.

@Svear They didn't have the space for it and other european zoo's wouldn't take it in, because it was closely related to the other girafes, so you couldn't breed it, since it would lead to incest. So they had to put it down.

Why not show the autopsy? People actually came to the zoo to see it and the zoo uses the meat to feed other animals, so if you did the autopsy another place, you will have to move the girafe around unnecessary.

@denfriefugl Well that settles it. See, I didn't know about the reasons why It was put down. The media is simply distracting these days.

@Svear @denfriefugi
You have my full agreement.

well in my school (us in grade 0-2 (age 6-9) together for a time) had chickens, like we had them from when they were eggs, and let them grow up as our pets, and we played with them and hold them and just in generel took care of them. then when they got bigger they had to stay at some of the students, that of course also had chickens, and after some time, when it was winter and there was snow and all, all the chickens where big enough to be slaughtered... so all us 50-60 kids from grade 0-2 walked to some twins from grade 2nd, and there we succeed to slaughter the chickens outside in the snow, and see how they jump around after you chop of their head and all, and then we all tried to pull out the organs and all, and ou could see all the blood in the snow. BEST SCHOOL DAY EVER!!! seriously no one had second thoughts about killing of the chickens we had raised from infants in egg to fat chickens, we just thought it was funny, and we got to eat chicken soup, which was awesome

As a kid I was utterly fascinated with biology, medicine, nature and all the gross things all of that entails. A lot of kids like gross things. It's normal to be fascinated by them. I totally would have loved to see the dissection of a lion or giraffe for educational reasons.

No I'm not a psychopath, I'm just descended from doctors.

@longtail4711
Of course you was interested. Its natural. Children are curious, and the mind in that age is very focused on learning (wich is not necisarely the same as school book learning).

@Bloodblender Of course. Especially here in America, where school book learning has really little to do with true learning.

Thanks to our ... erm ... shall we say, poor performance with education in rural and inner city areas, our esteemed leaders have so leaned on standardized tests as a measure of educational progress that teachers have been teaching the test, not teaching the subject or application.

If they weren't outright not reporting the poorly performing students' scores to artificially inflate the school's average...

@Dena
I knew that the education system in USA had major problems, but this sounds worse then I imagend. I would ask why this can go on, but it is painfully obvious. Teachers who only have learned a bureaucratic system, rather then accual knowlage, will teach just that to the next generation. Then some people, who can afford to put their kids in decent schools, will get children who become top members of society, widening the gap (and thus severing the connection) between the social classes.
And then the cycle keeps spinning.
No wonder the population of your homeland is pissed at the gouverment.

@Bloodblender
Yeah, our education system it quite messed up right now.
I'm sorry to say that I'm from Texas. Every so often a committee of Texans get together to decide what should be in the textbooks.
When I was a kid, there were always "Texas Edition" books for us. Now other states just use the textbooks that the Texas committee put together. Texas is so big that it's easier to make the books for Texas, then sell off what's left to other states.

The things is, lots of politicians and lobbyists are trying to put religion in the books and trying to whitewash (if not totally ignore) the racist issues in history. Like making it seem like slavery wasn't as bad as it seems, that the Civil War wasn't fought over slavery, Texas' part in the Civil Rights Movement, etc. The Latino civil right movement doesn't even warrant a mention.
And because they're the Texas texts, kids all over the country will be using them.

It's frustrating and scary as hell!

@AnnieM
That sounds like pure propaganda! Scary indeed.
Somthing big will change soon, I can feel it. Hopefully, it will land with the right side up this time.

@Bloodblender -- I keep forgetting the rest of the world doesn't freak out about ruining the innocence of children as much as Americans do!

@longtail4711
There are some who does freak out concerning such things here and in other parts of the world as well, just not as many and mainly more dramatic people, usuly from the big (well, relatively big) cities, and it mostly concerns other things then witnessing animal anatomy up close. There is deep care for children here, but they are not underestimated in the same way.
For example, my mother forbade me from watching horror movies as a child. Not becourse she thought I would become a murderer, as I have heard some USamericans believe, but becourse she didnt want me to get nightmares, and they would offer no knowlage in return.

I grew up in a city (San Antonio, Texas) but it was on the edge of town where half my classmates were city-folk like me and half lived on ranches or in other rural or semi-rural areas.

In 6th grade my Social Studies/History teacher took it upon herself to "unteach" us all the lies and fairy tales we'd been taught about Native Americans up to that point in our school careers and to teach us some actual facts about them. Especially about the tribes that had inhabited central and south Texas.
We started our own gardens, where we could only grow things Native Americans would have had access to. We were divided in to nomad and agricultural tribes and built tee-pees, arrows and spears or miniature long houses and gardening tools, respectively. We were taught to make fire with no flint (I think she might have gotten in trouble for that lesson.)

The best and most memorable of all those lessons, though? We got to tan deer and javelina (also called a collared peccary. A common pig-like animal that is often hunted here) hides. We were presented with the deer and javelina skins, one of each animal for each class, that were 'cleaned' only as far as was absolutely necessary for the butcher to get the meat. I think he left a lot on when he heard about the project, honestly. There was gobs of raw meat and sinew and stuff on those hides. For this hyper-sensitive, sheltered city girl, it was a gory mess.

We used tools we'd made in the previous lessons and some that some professors from the nearby University had gotten for us. All were rough hewn stone or wood. We had to scrape the hides totally clean, tan them and so on. We had hides staked out on the school lawn for a long time while they dried, lol. With stakes we had handmade. I can't remember all the details, but I remember scraping the meat off with a specially sharpened stone until my arms and back were *killing* me and I remember smelling like deer hide for a week or two. No matter what I did I couldn't get the smell off of me.
I also remember it being my very, very favorite school project up to that point, and even now at 32 and with a college degree, it's easily in the top 3.

@AnnieM So many people underestimate early lessons like this, but studies show that this sort of hands-on in-depth learning is crucial to children's curiosity. A thirst for knowledge is an essential part of the educational process and inspiring that in children is hard, but essential. Good for your teacher, this must have been great!

@Liv it was pretty awesome. And it worked since I remember it all these years later. I remember which tribes we were assigned to research and that I was in a group that studied the agricultural tribes' practices.
I also had brought in a copy of a letter one of my ancestors wrote. She had moved to the hills north of San Antonio from Germany in the mid-1800s. In one of her letters she described how every so often several Native Americans would ride through town wearing a dozen hides each and their horses and donkeys loaded down with tools, corn, squash, jewelry, etc. Then they'd go in to downtown San Antonio, pick out a spot near the market and set out all their things to sell. A couple days later they'd ride back through town on their way back home completely naked. They would sell literally everything. Even the saddle blankets, bridles and reins for their horses if they could. They had no qualms about making the 2-day trip home completely nude and on bare backed horses if it meant having money to buy the things they couldn't make or grow themselves.
That had to be a sight, huh?

I don't think Brother America would actually take offence by this, (infact I sorta think sister America would be better for this).

Anyway, I know that there were a bit of a debacle over a class of students in Sweden that was allowed to watch the slaughter of a reindeer, (mostly it had to do with the fact that they killed the Reindeer infront of the class by slicing the throat IIRC) but IMO it's quite important for kids to understand what goes on. They can definitley handle it. seing as they've handled it for the last 30 000 years or so.

Infact I'd say knowing the basics of slaugthering a few for the region common animals is a perfectly reasonable skill to posses, to many people in Sweden never gets to touch this unless they decide to take hunters exam...