Children & animals

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1996:

Scots law prevents animal and child protection
agencies from sharing case data, but veterinary pathologist
Helen Munro intends to change that. “Some of Britain’s most
notorious child murders reaffirm the link between animal cruelty
and child abuse,” she told The Daily Telegraph. “The two boys
who killed the Liverpool toddler James Bulger pulled the heads
off baby pigeons, double child-killer Mary Bell throttled
pigeons for fun, and Dunblane murderer Thomas Hamilton shot
birds from his bedroom window.”
The Eton College natural history museum scheduled
an October 23 auction to unload 460 taxidermic mounts,
mostly donated by graduates between 1850 and 1903. Proceeds
will be used for renovation, under retired biology teacher David
Smith. “In the past,” Smith said, “the emphasis of teaching was
on anatomy, classification, and the collecting of specimens.
Now biology means genetics, ecology, and evolution.”

Westside Elementary School, of Cabot, Arkansas,
where genetics, ecology, and evolution are not popular subjects,
has accepted 30 full-body taxidermic mounts donated by
local trophy hunter Earl M. Cherry.
Promoting vegetariansm, Saskatoon Institute of
Applied Science and Technology student Shauna Fehr put up
poster versions of ads published by the Coalition for NonViolent
Food in recent editions of ANIMAL PEOPLE. T h e
school’s student association tore them down due to complaints
from students in a retail meat-cutting class. Fehr on October 4
asked the Saskatchewan human rights commission to investigate.
Ella Magers, of Carrboro, North Carolina, on
October 5 received the 1996 Bill Rosenberg Award for outstanding
animal rights activism before the age of 18. Runners-up
were Paul Shapiro of Potomac, Maryland, and Gwendy ReyesIllg,
of Miami. The Farm Animal Reform Movement presents
the award annually in memory of Bill Rosenberg, a young
activist who died under mysterious circumstances in 1990.
“The Houston Animal Rights Team just got the goahead
to pilot a new Animal Rights course at Creighton
Intermediate School, in the Conroe Independent School
District,” HART humane educator Rae Henderson Ott reported
on September 24. “From there, we plan to expand into other
school districts.” The course was to begin on October 1.
School superintendent Charlie Head of Albany
County, Wyoming, says there will be no repetition of a
September 11 incident at Laramie High School in which vocational
agriculture instructor Jack Corson shot three pigs and
slashed their throats in front of his class and that of biology
teacher Nate Balstad. Head said that while Corson has killed
pigs in front of students to teach slaughtering technique for 10
years, the killing is not part of the biology curriculum, and will
no longer be allowed on school property. Corson apparently
broke both the Humane Slaughter Act and a Laramie gun law,
local authorities said, but he was not charged with any offense.
Of the 200 students at the John Cooper Upper
S c h o o l in Woodlands, Texas, 45 belong to Students for the
Prevention of Animal Mistreatment, a lunchtime club.
“Twenty-five members are freshmen,” says faculty adviser
Shannon Wiley, postulating “a lot of hope for the future.”