Last week I did an English camp on a farm in Berlin's northern suburbs. Of course there were lots of smelly animals for the smelly kids to screech at and attemt to touch despite clear warnings telling them not to do so.
Two unusual things struck me on this farm.
Their signs requesting that visitors to the farm don't feed the animals anything, under any circumstance, were proving ineffectual, with the result that some goats died when fed bread and some bunnies died when fed something else (cyanide possibly, I don't know. I have never understood the attraction of rabbits, perhaps due to a childhood spent in the company of greyhounds). Instead of increasing vigilance, or sign size, or barring ignorant feckers, they arranged the dead bunny and dead goat bodies around the pen, took photos of them, printed them out nice and big and hung them up outside the respective enclosures.
So when little Hans and little Gertrude ramble along to see the cute bunnies, what do they see? DEAD BUNNIES!
Another unusual thing. They have pigs there, a special breed that have a black rump and head with a white stripe around their midriff. One of these sows had just given birth to four piglets, two of whom had a cute little black spot on their white backs. The tour lady informed us that those two would be butchered pretty soon, as they are not considered to be thoroughbred because of that little black spot.
Happily, she seemed as preturbed as I was at the idea of this piggy ethnic cleansing and together we managed to convince the children that Germany is a progressive, forward thinking nation that has mostly left that sort of thinking about sixty years in the past.
And that was my second week on English Camp.
