Primetime Animal Abuse

A few days ago, social networks caught fire for hours after what happened in MasterChef Junior, generating an interesting debate around two fundamental and interconnected issues: the values ​​that we transmit to our childhood and the relationship we maintain with animals, where the Violence is a key factor that was impossible to ignore on this occasion.

Studying Teaching I understood that education is expressed, programmed and executed formally in schools, but that we are all teachers. Although we do not want to, although the educational question is completely indifferent to us, it is something before which the human being has no choice. Our daily decisions contribute to generating the context and the society that the newly arrived generations will suck up, our trail is inevitable, observable and sticky.

Critical thinking is possibly one of the most important tools that teachers and people in direct relation to childhood should contribute to develop: the ability to observe reality, questioning it, analyzing the diversity of dimensions that compose it and extracting keys in sufficient abundance for its interpretation.

But like any learning process, we cannot understand it in absolute terms. Critical thinking is not something that you have or do not have, it is a process that develops in different degrees and evolves permanently also during adult life. Therefore, even assuming that it can be a key to protect children from the risk of continuing to repeat the same mistakes of the society in which they grow up, this does not exempt us from the responsibility of building a safe reality where they can develop safely.

Later I graduated in Psychopedagogy to delve into the psychological bases of learning processes: how we learn, what impacts us and what elements have to be addressed to guide the task of educators on students. From there I took it that boys and girls do not learn what we want, when we want, in the way we want, but are active subjects and complete beings who receive each message in its entirety: with what is expressed and what underlies , what is allowed and what is frustrated.

Then you will understand my horror when I see that on MasterChef Junior, a prime-time show and on public television, a boy named Hugo skinns and butchers the body of a whole rabbit. Then 12-year-old Lucia plucks a quail, visibly horrified, under pressure to show her bravery.

But the highlight of the night comes when 10-year-old Juan Antonio sees that the eel he will have to cook is still alive, writhing on the cutting board and trying, uselessly, to escape. All the children on the set scream nervously and Juan Antonio, as usual, freaks out, refusing to kill the fish.

“Juan Antonio: you put it on the board and cut it, like a chef!”

“But Juan Antonio, uncle, you’re cutting it with fear, you don’t have to be afraid of it!”

MasterChef Junior, in reality, is telling Hugo that to be a “champion”, that is, someone who deserves recognition (and for that, of course, you have to beat others), someone valuable, important and worthy of a place, he must skin and tear apart the lifeless body of a rabbit without showing the slightest doubt, compassion or vulnerability.

He is telling her that the body that bleeds between his hands is nothing more than an ingredient like any other, that the soft white hair that rips apart from the flesh is not the coat of an animal that once felt its same cold. He is telling him to disconnect his empathy, to start cramming it under some carpet of the adult mind that he will be, and to ignore the possibility of seeing in those petrified eyes someone with whom he could play.

MasterChef Junior is actually telling Lucia that to be brave she has to ignore her emotions or, at least, hide them a little bit, because being afraid and compassionate is cowardly. She is telling her that feeling sad for the quail lying in front of her is not allowed, it is not legitimate; that their feelings are worthless and of course, they are not important.

He is telling you that that quail whose bright brown feathers once served to camouflage itself in the bushes is insignificant, worthless. Let him rip them off, one by one, have no mercy. He is telling her to dismember her, to feel her little bones creak when they break, to ignore the heart and the guts that sprout from that lifeless body and in no case think if, perhaps, she would prefer to fly.

MasterChef Junior is telling Juan Antonio that when an animal writhes in its death throes, it should laugh. That if you want to be a real chef you cannot be afraid and that if you are not able to decapitate that animal that suffocates in front of your eyes with your knife, you never will be. If Juan Antonio wants to fulfill his dreams, he will have to show that he is capable of doing it at any cost, that empathy will never stop him.

You are telling him that that fish that is struggling to survive does not deserve the slightest consideration, that it pierces its flesh, that it does so without mercy, that it separates the head from the body of that animal without thinking that, perhaps, it would prefer to continue to sail deep waters during its migratory journeys.

MasterChef Junior tells them and also the millions of Hugos, Lucías and Juan Antonios who attend from their homes.

We want a more peaceful, more caring, more responsible, more conscious society.

But I wonder how it will be possible while we continue forcing our creatures to witness and practice cruelty against the weakest.

How will it be possible if we don’t even allow them to say NO to violence.