Vegan thoughts about children

The other day I was watching Jeopardy and at the beginning when the contestants have to tell a interesting or funny story about themselves, one contestant says that when he was a child his mother was teaching him to help plant the family garden and he decided to plant a pork-chop....to grow some more pork-chops.  Which quite obviously did not work out the way he thought it would.  Of course, everyone in the audience and on the show laughed, but to me it was one of the saddest things I've heard in a long time.  Just thinking of a child's pure heart and innocence breaks my heart.

Isn't it interesting how a child shown how food grows from seed in the dirt, would automatically assume that all the food they are given to eat would come to be just as simple?  I find it terribly sad how children are lied to from the moment they are able to understand words, about the food that they are given to eat.  Children are not told that a "pork-chop" is really a murdered and cut up pig.  A pig, that the child, if given the chance, would naturally identify as a friend.  Kids are not told that the "hot dogs" they love so much are really ground up pigs. They are not told that the milk that their parents give them everyday was really meant for a calf, that was stolen within days of birth from it's mother, only to be stuffed in a crate not even big enough for the baby to stand up or turn around, left to sit and suffer in it's own excrement until it is sent to be murdered and chopped up, all so their family can eat "veal" for dinner.

None the less, after being desensitized and removed from the reality of the situation the child grows up with such a distorted view of the world they live in.  Maybe they will be upset when they learn that animals have to die to put the food they eat on their plates, but after being repeatedly lied to and shielded from the horrors that are the truth, they eventually accept it and move on. They grow up to be very much disconnected from it all. If we tell children that it is okay to kill certain animals and or use them for whatever purpose we see fit, where does it stop?  Just what are we really teaching our youth about the sanctity of LIFE?

Please teach love, kindness, compassion and Respect for ALL LIFE.