Meow

Meow, bark, squeak, caw, neigh, oink, baa!
No, no, don't worry, you haven't entered the blog of a cow, but you have entered a post about Animal Rights. 
Today at Enrich I went to Katie, one of the teachers, to do a workshop on Animal Rights. We started by pondering a snippet of text about animal cruelty. OK, I can't remember every tiny detail, but it went something like this:
A boy is walking his dog when he hears menacing noises behind a high wall. He discovers that the noises are coming from another boy and his dog called Viking. Viking is growling and barking at the boy. The first boy says "Hey, what's the matter with your dog," and the second boy replied, "Oh, he's just acting stupid 'cos he's hurt himself." The first boy looks at an injury on Viking's leg, which is smoking slightly and blackened with bits of horrible dark red. It's a nasty burn. "We were just playing around." Continues the second boy. "What, with fire?" The first boy asks. "Well, really, I was trying to teach Viking to do a trick." The second boy admits. "You know that show on TV where dogs do tricks? Well, the prize if two hundred dollars, and I was really hoping we'd win, but Viking's tricks are lousy, so I tried to make him jump through a flaming hoop, but he won't do it, he burnt himself, stupid thing, he won't do it for a raw steak, or when I refused to feed him for two days, he's lucky he isn't chucked out already for being so stubborn, the useless thing."
The first boy says, "You can't do that," then the two boys have an argument about animal rights. 
So then we made a list of human rights and a list of animal rights. And guess what? The rights were sometimes the same. Both humans an animals have the right to eat, drink, sleep, and have shelter. Animals have the right to not be abused - that was on everybody's list. 
Then we looked at things that were animal tested and how it wasn't really fair that animals had to suffer. We then looked at alternatives, and also watched a couple of clips out of Babe. (I love that movie). So, next time you pick up something off the shelf, you might want to check if it's been animal tested. Would this make you put it back? Everybody will think differently about this. If you like, comment on this post telling me how you would act if you saw that something was being animal tested. 
Bye for now!