Teaching Animal Rights Teaches Caring

Iwould like to commend Denise Hamilton on “Mixing Kids, Animals . . . and Issues” (Nov. 26). It is absolutely mandatory to teach children to cherish and empathize with animals. This is not ideology or politics, in spite of what the animal-abusing industries will have you believe. In these times of aggravated youth crime, and crime in general, it is shown that torturers and murderers start their lives of crime by “practicing” on animals. For that reason alone, animal-rights teaching is preventive medicine.

It is not, however, the only reason for inculcating humaneness in young people. Most children are naturally drawn to animals, have empathy and wish to help the helpless. These often repressed qualities will ensure that a young person grows up caring and ethical.

But as important as all the anthropocentric reasons for teaching animal rights are the animals themselves, whose lives and nature are to be respected for their own sake.

RACHEL ROSENTHAL

Los Angeles

*

Parents who send their children to private schools, by dint of their tuition payments, exert some control over the curriculum, or understand the bias of the school that they have chosen.

Those who send their children to public school have no such control, and expect that teachers will remain close to an established and approved curriculum. That is what those faceless school bureaucrats we hear about are supposed to be developing and monitoring. Somewhere in the process there is public review and oversight that renders the contents politically neutral, as it should be when presented to a captive and diverse audience of schoolchildren.

Parents who send their children to the liberal Crossroads School anticipate that they will be exposed to animal rights. This position does not have a place in a public school curriculum.

WILLIAM S. PIRONE

Sherman Oaks

*

We at the Los Angeles SPCA/Southern California Humane Society wish to thank you for your balanced and impartial coverage of the teaching of animal rights in Southern California classrooms. As an independent, nonprofit organization that has long been dedicated to the welfare and protection of animals, we believe--and a number of studies have decisively shown--that the manner in which children are taught to interact with animals has a profound effect on their subsequent behavior both toward animals and their peers.

At the same time, we would like to call attention to a slight error of omission on your part. Specifically, Hamilton accurately points out that animal welfare organizations provide a range of materials and tools to enhance local schools’ humane educational efforts. It should also be noted, however, that a number of such groups have recently taken a more proactive stance by launching educational projects of their own.

Last year, for example, the Los Angeles SPCA/SCHS initiated a pioneering program called “Teaching Love and Compassion,” in which “at-risk” students from an intermediate school have been taught to nurture, care for and train animals in one of our shelters--an effort that has not only bolstered students’ sense of self-worth but also cultivated in them an abiding sense of compassion and respect for all living things.

MADELINE BERNSTEIN

Executive Director

Los Angeles SPCA/SCHS