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"Marcus is dead. Long live Marcus! Marcus, in case you haven&amp;#039;t heard, was a lamb raised by primary school students in Kent, a county in southeast England. According to a story published this week by Reuters, Marcus was raised as part of a project designed to teach children about breeding and raising animals. The late lamb was just one critter among a bevy of other animals including ducks, chickens, rabbits and guinea pigs.  The plan was to raise Marcus until he had reached the appropriate age for slaughter and then use the proceeds from his sale to purchase pigs. That, evidently, is on hold. While the children who raised him and, ultimately, voted to send him to slaughter seemed to be perfectly OK with their decision (they voted 13-1 on the matter) large numbers of adults are apparently wigged out over the discovery that farm animals are frequently raised to be slaughtered and eaten. Perhaps even more alarming to them might be the fact that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of American kids are relatively familiar with this process. Through organizations such as Future Farmers of America and 4-H, kids learn about all facets of agriculture, including raising livestock for sale and slaughter (My own participation in FFA was wholly unremarkable and consisted of a short lived membership on my school&amp;#039;s FFA agronomy team). When I was a kid, my family raised livestock on our small property in the Arkansas Ozarks. We raised cattle, pigs, and chickens with the idea that we would eventually sell them or eat them. We rarely ever had more than a few steers or cows around and, along with the sow we kept for breeding, we named them, enjoyed them, played with them, and got to know them. We appreciated their different personalities, and I learned a lot while raising them. Eventually, they were sold off or ended up in our freezer. These weren&amp;#039;t Old Yeller moments; I understood \u2013 much like any kid who grew up in a farming community \u2013 that it was simply how these things worked.  The adults in Kent \u2013 who even set up a Facebook page to protest Marcus&amp;#039;s slaughter \u2013 seem to be the ones with the problem. Assuming they&amp;#039;re not vegetarians (a perfectly reasonable option for which I have a great deal of respect) it seems dangerous to me that people are so disconnected from the sources of their food. Why is it OK to buy a pound of anonymously slaughtered flesh, wrapped up hygienically in cellophane, but it&amp;#039;s not OK to know and understand the process that puts meat on the table?  There are a great many problems with the way we produce meat in the United States. Factory farming is responsible, I believe, for much of that disconnect. The kids in Kent, whether they realize it now or not, are actually better for this experience and will be able to make much better informed decisions about food as they grow older. Hopefully the adults will learn a thing or two from them. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.delish.com/food/news/a37696/the-late-great-marcus/>