I’m a farm girl – I don’t remember a time when I DIDn’t know where meat came from, and it didn’t hurt me or any of my siblings. We grew up naming the calves in the barnyard and knowing full well that we’d eat them eventually. Really, it’s just a further extension of the “circle of life” concept. As long as the animals aren’t mistreated while they’re alive…

I was, however, appalled at the A&W adds for their new (by this I mean when they were new years ago) chicken dishes on the menu – usually companies tend to avoid putting cute pictures of the animals on their packaging in order to avoid the “I just can’t eat the cute ___”. And here they were selling little stuffed animals of the cute “Chubby chicken.”

While I realize that the subject needs to be treated carefully, I’m not sure that it should be avoided just because children are young. Why do characters die in Disney movies? ‘Cause creatures die in real life. We can’t avoid that, can we? In one episode of Friends, Phoebe leanred that her mother had protected her from this truth. She had been allowed to watch Bambi, but not that fatal scene. They had watched Old Yeller, but stopped before THAT scene. The episode consisted in part of Phoebe going back and rewatching the countless movies that her mother had edited. Do we really want to raise children to believe in such an alternate reality?