"The kids help slaughter the animals they raise at my son's 4-H," a dad told me the other day at a rural pot luck supper.

"Well that's certainly a red hot topic," I said.

"It means they understand where their food comes from," he said.< p>

Well, it certainly does do that, and in principle, I'm for it. If you're going to eat meat, there's a lot to be said for learning what's involved -- i.e. killing living creatures -- in an up-close and personal way. Most of us would have some qualms about actually chopping off a chicken's head, slitting a bunny's throat or doing whatever they do to lambs nowadays. As a keen fisherman I'm even increasingly unwilling to bash my cold-blooded catch on the head even when technically entitled to do so--I've never quite bought into the idea that they don't feel it. But I eat the fish, and the beef and the lamb and chicken and occasionally the bunny, in spite of the fact that if I had to kill most of it myself I would probably be a vegetarian. The same goes for most of the rest of the population (and that's leaving out the equation entirely how we'd feel if we had personal experience of a modern industrial feed lot, slaughterhouse or meat-packing plant).

So kids learning at 4-H what is involved seems like a pretty good idea, right?. Except for one small hitch: some of these kids are only 7, which seems a little young. Of course, at English fox hunts (until they were banned a couple of years back) the youngest child on the hunt would be smeared with the blood from the tail of the fox when it was killed ("blooded"). But that, as Oscar Wilde observed ("The unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable") was part of a somewhat unpicturesque social ritual.

Waddya think, folks?