Teen Refuses to Slaughter Chicken for High School Class

At Concordia High School, students are offered choice-in-dissection in science classes, but in Nate Hamilton's Animal Science and Food Production Class, there was no choice-in-slaughter. Students helped raise over 40 chickens, and about five weeks later, they had to "process" them. The chickens' legs were wired together and they were held over buckets while Mr. Hamilton passed out knives to students for the throat-slitting. Any student who didn't want to deal the death blow still had to participate by plucking the feathers or gutting the animals.

Permission slips are widely used by the school for everything from field trips to R-rated movies. But when it came to slaughtering chickens, parents were left uninformed. By the time the students were told about the project, it was too late to transfer classes, and there was no preparation for the teens or their families for the big event.

Whitney Hillman refused to be a part of it, and refused to let her chicken be killed in the classroom. So, as her mom later described, Whitney "chicken-napped him and ran away from the school leaving a letter behind."

Whitney's chicken is safely living at an undisclosed farm. She gladly accepted the two-day suspension for leaving school and will pay the district whatever they want for Chicklett. But she won't apologize, and doesn't regret saving his life.

The sixteen-year-old is a self-described animal lover, so it's no surprise that she bonded with her chicken. She wasn't thrilled with the project since the day Mr. Hamilton made them color their chickens with permanent marker to tell them apart (she only put a purple dot on Chicklett's foot, which she didn't need to identify him), but she didn't go into this with heroics in mind. Whitney didn't eat much meat before, but she did eat chicken. "It really sucks," she said. "I liked chicken, but now I can't look at one without thinking of Chicklett."

What might be more surprising is that more students didn't react the same way. Or maybe they did, but didn't feel that they could stand up to their teacher. Instead, students spent the rest of the day with blood on their clothes and faces, and the image of the chickens they'd named and raised suffering as they were slaughtered by teenagers. Chicklett was the only bird to make it out of the project alive.

High school students should understand that the chicken on their plates comes from animals, but this was nothing short of a lesson in animal cruelty. The students were taught that killing is "processing," without any lessons in the animal's ability to feel pain, from a man who apparently thinks chickens need to be starved for days before slaughter and that they are "not meant to live more than six months."

As Dr. Karen Davis, from the nonprofit United Poultry Concerns, pointed out in a letter to the school, drug-abuse classes don't require hands-on lessons to approach the issues in a "real" way, nor do history classes create mini war zones to teach the truth about war. "The idea that students need to kill animals in order to learn where their food comes from is false and can only be asserted uncritically in a social climate that denies other species the respect and protection they deserve."

What's most disturbing is that students should be learning compassion from their teachers, not killing. When you think about the link between animal abuse and other violent crimes, especially how vulnerable kids in school are to messages about bullying and how to treat others, and then you think about this teacher handing knives over to teens to slit the throats of live birds, and the male student who was playing with a dead chicken's head ... this is not preparing the next generation for kindness.

Animal slaughter doesn't belong in the classroom. Tell Concordia High School to eliminate killing from their curriculum.

Photo credit: woodley wonderworks