La Chat Animal Rights Group

Animal Rights Group. This phrase seems to provoke more laughter than anything else among the seemingly apathetic students of La Châtaigneraie. This is not to say that nobody cares about the group, but they are amazingly outnumbered by people who could not care less, and even people who are against the group. The sign-up sheet, which had already collected a few names on it, was removed for no reason last Friday morning. Also, as the person who started the group, I am openly mocked as I walk through the school hallways, and one of my classmates began wearing a very obvious fur hat the day after I announced the group, and others repeatedly point out the hat to me and laugh.
This attitude provokes, other than anger, two questions. Do students know about the horrible conditions animals are kept in, and not care? Or do they simply not know?
Do they realise that when they sit down in front of a traditional chicken dinner, that these animals were kept in cramped conditions, up to 7 chickens in an 18-inch (45 cm) cage, after having their upper beaks painfully cut off with scalding knives, and that in these cages, the chicken’s talons grow around the metal bars underneath them so that they cannot move at all, until they are slaughtered at the age of 7-8 weeks, while chickens in normal conditions live that many years?
Do La Chât’s students understand that when they slip on a fur coat, that these animals were either trapped in steel-jawed traps in the wild (the animals caught which were not needed for fur coats were, of course, thrown out), or raised on fur farms, which, despite the name which indicates this is not a place where the animals run about freely, but are kept in wire cages, usually outside despite the temperature, and with little or no veterinary care, until they are beaten with clubs or drowned (as to not harm the fur), and then skinned; because they are not “meat” animals, the corpses of the hundreds of animals this is done to (It takes the pelts of 60 mink to make a small fur coat) are simply discarded.
Would knowing information such as this cause students to stop mocking people who are against these treatments, and maybe even join the group? Or do La Chât’s students conform with all assumptions: that they are apathetic?

To learn more about animal rights and animal cruelty, try http://www.peta2.com/, or check out one of the many books in the MMC, under the number 179.3.
To contact the Animal Rights Group of La Châtaigneraie, email us at lachatanimalrightsgroup@hotmail.com.