Leunig on violenceLearning Goal: to understand Leunig’s idea that violence and cruelty should be acknowledged.

Questions:

What is Leunig’s perspective about meat-eaters?What experiences led him to form this reality?Do you have the same perspective? Why/Why not?

‘I had held the theoretical view that if you eat meat you had better be prepared to kill the animal. Perhaps in my youthful sensitivity I felt betrayed and isolated because I was being cast into something that I felt all meat eaters should face but were mostly refusing to…’

Analogy

Analogy-

a similarity between like features of two things, on which a comparison may be based: the analogy between the heart and a pump.

It simply means the relationship between two things

What is the point of an analogy?

•A heart is to the blood as a pump is water.

Summarise Leunig’s ideas here in your own words.What does he suggest about the reality of our politicians who decide whether we go to war?

• ‘the refined and educated Western man’ who has no direct contact with violence, yet ‘can sign with an elegant golden pen the document that unleashes the cowardly invasion and who can then go out to dine on claret and lamb cutlets.’

Our criteria

• Complexity, complexity, complexity

Work out the analogy…

• Eating meat without knowing what is like to kill an animal is like…..

• Not knowing what goes on in a slaughterhouse is like……….because….

.

Did you have something similar? What other ideas did you come up with?

• So for Leunig, eating meat when you don’t kill animals is akin to sending people to war without experiencing it yourself.

• The people who suffer in war have a very different reality to those who make the decision to go to war.

• There is a lack of integrity in those who ‘sign with an elegant golden pen’.

On your own…

• Read the article attached about U.S. anti-war veterans.

 • Read the article by Jesse Strauss. Take notes as you do so.

 

Summary of ideas My ideas What would Leunig think?

People need to acknowledge that human beings can be violent and cruel.

Writing….

• For homework tonight:• Write a paragraph connecting the Leunig story about the

abbatoir with the story of the U.S. Veterans. • OR• Write about a personal experience and link it to Leunig’s

ideas about war or eating animals.