The Seeding Plan of Animal Protection Education

The Life Conservationist Association (LCA) has been conducting “The Seeding Plan of Animal Protection Education” for many years. Through the long-term implementation of the plan, we expect to promote teachers’, children’s, and teenagers’ understanding of the meaning of animal protection and to help them recognize the interdependent and intersubjective relationships among human beings, animals and Mother Nature.

Belief

    The Life Conservationist Association (LCA) has been conducting “The Seeding Plan of Animal Protection Education” for many years. Through the long-term implementation of the plan, we expect to promote teachers’, children’s, and teenagers’ understanding of the meaning of animal protection and to help them recognize the interdependent and intersubjective relationships among human beings, animals and Mother Nature. We hope to lead children to establish positive relationships with animals and to strengthen their ability to empathize with animals. Furthermore, we want to convey the concept of respect and affection for animals and their habitats, and to generate humane and caring values and the power to act.

Current Policy

  1. Activities in animal protection education for seeded teachers aim to empower seeded teachers.
  2. A team of lesson planners develops plans for animal protection education, researching and developing teaching plans and materials regarding animal protection that can fit into the grade 1-9 curriculum.
  3. A research team on the relationship between children suffering from domestic violence and their companion animals examines teaching and therapeutic plans.
  4. Resources are shared and exchanged on the websites.
  5. Trans-territory research is conducted into the relationships between children and animals.

Goal 1: To push for animal protection education to be included in the educational system

By seeding teachers’ promotion of teaching plans and materials regarding animal protection education, children’s and teenagers’ attention can be focused on animal protection; furthermore, the rights and well-being of animals can be improved.

  1. The establishment of benevolence and sympathy
    1. If students understand that animals, like humans, also have the ability to feel pain, they can develop the power of benevolence and sympathy.

  2. The acquisition of scientific knowledge
    1. To change students’ impression of the relationship among animals, humans and natural environments through investing, they observe and listen to their environments and animals, including insects, aquatic animals, and birds.

  3.  The improvement of innate ability
    1. Making students care about animal life and the earth’s environment and can help them to develop the ability to listen, to sympathize, to make themselves healthy, while increasing self-respect.

  4.  The advocacy of animal protection ideas
    1. Encouraging children and teenagers to convey the concept of animal protection to the public can help them gain the ability to interact with people and develop effective communication skills.

  5.  The empowerment of action
    1. Helping children and teenagers understand the truths behind animal shows, animal banter, and even animal abuse will empower them to engage in concrete actions, namely refusing to view or participate in circuses and animal shows, domestic or overseas. They can participate in the promotion of this idea.

 Goal 2: To promote the rights and welfare of wild animals

  1. Habitat conservation
    1. To protect the right of wildlife to live freely.
    2. To maintain the natural laws of wildlife.
  2. Humane treatment
    1. To free wild animals from the cruelty of being captured, killed, eaten, traded, or reared in captivity.
    2. To prevent the cruelty of wild animals being subjected to improper artificial breeding.
    3. To avoid disturbing or abusing wild animals in the community or on campuses.

Goal 3: To promote the rights and welfare of companion animals

  1. To establish positive relationships between children, teenagers, and companion animals
    1. Encouraging children and teenagers to bond with companion animals and to establish a positive relationship of sharing, feeling, listening, understanding, accepting, sympathizing, respecting, tolerating, being responsible, respecting others’ boundaries, understanding causal relationships, trusting, being loyal, being self-confident, loving, and caring.
  2. Humane treatment
    1. Preventing them from being abandoned, hurt, or mistreated.
    2. Replacing buying with adoption.
    3. Providing adequate food and water.
    4. Providing adequate places to live and preventing them from being held captive in cages for long periods of time, and in the wind and rain.
    5. Allowing companion animals to show normal behavior.
    6. Ensuring that companion animals are protected, and properly cared for when ill or injured.
    7. Keeping companion animals from being stressed and frightened. Keeping them from being inadequately punished, neglected, mistreated, or violently treated.
    8. Providing sufficient exercise and play.
    9. Ensuring that companion animals receive adequate love and care.

Goal 4: To promote the welfare of farm animals

  1. To understand the plight of animals
    1. Directing children to understand how farm animals are fed, conveyed, and slaughtered so that we can advance their concept of improving farm animals’ welfare.

  2. Providing children opportunities to choose a set of values different from that of the mainstream.
    1. Allowing children to have lifestyle options, such as avoiding products containing animal skins and fur, reducing meat consumption, or choosing a vegetarian diet.

Goal 5: To promote alternative teaching plans

  1. Reducing the number of lessons using live animals or experimental animals.
    1. Encouraging teachers to use teaching materials with animal images and pictures instead of live animals.
  2. Promoting out-doors teaching with respect for the environment
    1. Encouraging teachers to grow flowering plants to attract local butterflies for students’ observation lessons instead of by growing silkworms.
    2. Encouraging teachers to execute out-door observation lessons to observe insects and butterflies in their natural habitats, instead of catching them.
    3. Encouraging teachers to direct children not to buy or pick up seashells on the beach in order to preserve hermit crabs’ homes and seashore ecology.

Study plans to empower seeded teachers

One-hundred-year vision and goal

    To promote animal protection education and to see it take root in school education.

The importance of the role of teachers

    In the education systems of advanced countries, animal protection is a key educational issue. With correct beliefs and attitudes toward animal protection, teachers can utilize teaching materials well and flexibly. Their control over teaching methods and their interactions with students, inside or outside the classroom, have a strong influence on students, whether in the formal curriculum, in the hidden curriculum, or in life education. Teachers are role models that students learn from and imitate. They are important characters who influence students and, furthermore, key persons who guide children to form the beliefs and attitudes underlying animal protection values.

Target of empowerment

    “The Seeding Plan of Animal Protection Education” promotes animal protection education in schools with the belief of down-seeding; therefore, the targets of empowerment are teachers in junior high schools, elementary schools, and pre-schools.

To support teachers with the resources of animal protection education

    Regarding animal protection education, teachers’ educational beliefs, teaching content, and power of introspection and self-examination towards teaching efficiency have been shown to be very important. But at the junior high and elementary school levels, teaching resources on animal protection issues are scant at best. Confined to the contents of text books, teachers can only collect animal protection information by themselves. Thus, “The Seeding Plan of Animal Protection Education” promotes, step-by-step, study camps for seeded teachers and constructs, gradually, a social support system for teachers and children.

Building the Influential Power of the Circle

Participation: Study camps for seeded teachers

Feedback:

  1. Teach at least two lessons on animal protection every semester.
  2. Review and revise seeding teaching plans
  3. Join the lesson planning teams, and develop teaching plans and materials co-operatively.
  4. Share the experience of teaching and self-examination.

Outcomes:

  1. Children and teenagers develop the concept of animal protection.
  2. The power of supporting and sharing is condensed among seeded teachers.

Goals of studying:

  1. To increase seeded teachers’ knowledge, ethical values, sensibility, skills, and experience in animal protection to help promote their professional ability in animal protection.
  2. To develop seeded teachers’ power of self-review in order to raise awareness and increase consideration of their own ideas and attitudes towards animals.
  3. To develop seeded teachers’ respect for animal protection education, and then, via teaching programs, to develop children’s and teenagers’ concepts of animal protection.
  4. To develop seeded teachers’attention and ability to discourage the teasing and abuse of animals by children and teenagers.
  5. To improve seeded teachers’abilities to design courses on animal protection.
  6. To provide a place for seeded teachers to interact and to share ideas on animal protection education.

The plan of the lesson plan development teams for animal protection education

Visions

    To continue to develop teaching plans and materials that can be blended into the animal protection education of the Grade 1-9 Curriculum, and to include animal protection education as a main teaching issue.

Review of the lessons in the Grade 1-9 Curriculum that are related to animals

    Currently, local experts and scholars care about animal protection education in the Grade 1-9 Curriculum and review the contents of textbooks published by every publisher. They have found that in the curriculum, the ideas about animals are biased towards anthropocentrism, with a clear lack of the core values of animal protection education, such as animal rights and welfare.

The importance of developing teaching plans and materials

    Teaching plans and materials are very important bridges in the process of teaching and learning. The content of such teaching plans and materials reflect the ideas of animal protection conveyed to children and teenagers. The influence is profound.

Establishing lesson-planning teams for animal protection education

    This project, since 2009, via a study of seeded teachers, has discovered teachers who care about animal protection education and are willing to join lesson-planning teams to cooperate.

Working Guidelines

    The core value of lesson planning is to develop concern for animal rights and welfare. The principle is to connect animal protection with areas in the Grade 1-9 Curriculum such as cultural education, environmental education, nature education, ethical education, social and health education, life education, civil education, and arithmetic education. We’d like to invite experts and scholars in every field in our country to review the teaching plans. The teaching goals and contents will be designed according to the different stages of development in every year of junior high school and elementary school.

Goals

    We hope the animal protection lesson-planning team can assemble teachers who care about the welfare of children, teenagers, and animals and can continually develop animal protection education teaching plans and materials as teaching resources for teachers in junior high schools, elementary schools, and preschools nationwide and, in the long term, to be a support system for teachers in developing animal protection education.

To establish a research group on children, teenagers, and companion animals suffering from domestic violence and to promote education and treatment plans.

Vision

    To gradually establish a connection between the prevention of animal abuse and the prevention of child-abuse to achieve effects on both animal and child protection. To treat animal abuse by children and teenagers as a public issue and to urge public departments to build complete rescue systems for abused companion animals and protection systems combating domestic violence and child abuse. To develop these into a safety net in the social welfare system.

Caring about the relationship between children/teenagers suffering from domestic violence and their companion animals

    Research in recent years has revealed a mutual overlapping trait in the relevance of child abuse and neglect, animal abuse, and violent behaviors such as domestic violence and social violence, and a vicious circle has been recognized. Regarding the relationships in domestic violence from the domestic system, children, teenaged boys/girls, and companion animals may witness a father beating or abusing a mother, or witness one of the parents beating or abusing companion animals. Some teenaged boys/girls are also abused, and children and teenaged boys/girls mimic behaviors of the abuser, in turn abusing their companion animals. The situation mentioned above leaves children and their companion animals the most disadvantaged in the household.

Working guideline

    To care about the relationships between teenaged boys/girls and children, and their companion animals. Via cooperation between departments governing family, social politics, medicine, school, child psychotherapy, and animal behavior consultation, to provide children and companion animals suffering from domestic violence essential support and healing services for physical and psychological trauma. To improve the quality of life, security, and space for stable development of children and companion animals.

Goals

    The key point of this project is to develop a positive connection between children and teenaged boys/girls and their companion animals; to guide children to face the tension and stress in life, and to accept or conquer their emotional feelings; to make children aware of their own physical and psychological feelings, and those of companion animals, and to improve the interactions and positive emotions between them and their companion animals; furthermore, to develop the inner ability to revise maladjusted behaviors and tenacity in life.
What is most important is to stop, as early as possible, the cycle of violence spanning generations. If violent behaviors form a vicious circle, the range of violence could spread from abusing animals to bullying at school, to beating family members or spouses, and even to committing crimes in society.


 

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