As a kid growing up on the farm you tend to take things for granted, things that other (non-farm) kids might never experience. Stuff like life, sex, birth and death. I'm not alone in this, plenty of other people who grew up on farms would be nodding their heads in agreement.
Mum still tells the story of the time I was in Kindy and was asked to bring an item in for show-and-tell. It was lambing season and my father had recently killed a fox in one of the paddocks. So he went and cut the dead fox's tail off and presented it to me to take for show-and-tell. I thought this was a great idea and loaded it into a plastic shopping bag.
The next day and my big moment arrived. I stood in from of the ring of my classmates who were sitting on the floor in front of me, and pulled out the fox tail.
I failed to notice the look of absolute horror on the teacher's face. She was fresh out of college and city-bred so my casual presentation of this piece of dead animal came as a real shock for the poor girl! Okay, it had been dead a couple of days and was a little smelly, but I thought it was really cool - as did the other farm kids and we all soon had a rousing discussion on foxes and how to kill them.
I'm guessing the poor teacher needed trauma counselling and couldn't wait to get back to civilised society in the city.
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