Same thing with my TSC the employes were trying their hardest to educate a couple with kids on how to take care of chicks while the kids are climbing over everything and screaming at the top of their lungs. When I backed the employe up on how they could not keep their chicks next to their lawn tractor in the garage he did not care in the least. people like that shouldn't breed
Education is only part of this problem. Too many people don't see animals as living beings, no amount of education will change that for them. Yes lots of us maybe started out with an impulse gift/buy, but people who 'started out' like that, generally have the sense that these 'things' are living beings, that's already a step up so to speak.
You can't break stupid, you can break ignorance, but not stupid. When animals are just 'things', it doesn't matter how you 'educate', often times, bluntness works much better. Working in animal medicine proved this more times than I care to remember & it breaks my heart to see something suffer because its people are too stupid for their own good.
My dad started me on chickens by buying me 5 because he expected some would die (as chicks ARE fragile- not that he expected ME to kill them), but all survived baby-hood & thrived. They eventually retired on a farm. But he educated me on their needs- basic & more. Same with ALL animals I encountered.
The problem is too many people today don't care about anything, we've gotten so disposable! So these adults aren't teaching these kids that these are living beings, they're engraving this disposable ideology into them. So these cute Easter chicks get 'taken care of' by their parents & either the kids don't know or care what happened, or the kids aren't supervised appropriately & the chicks die at the hands of the kids. When I was a teen, a little boy I helped babysit- his mom got him 6 chicks for Easter one year "to teach him how to be gentle", he was 3yo & ROUGH- like uncontrollably rough, the LAST child I'd give any animal to- they proceeded to allow him to handle them even though he squeezed them to death (every time they'd try to take them back & put in the box), until all 6 were dead. Their post-chickencide comment "guess he's not ready for animals, he was just too rough"- REALLY DUMMY?! It didn't bother them that they pretty much LET their kid kill 6 helpless baby creatures. I lost that job when I gasped "Well I'm glad it ONLY took 6 dead chicks to teach you that!"
So, in this case, I completely support how the OP responded. If this woman seriously considers anything she said & it spurs her to educate herself & get chicks later (for a small flock), then that's HER achievement, but in THIS case, at THAT time, bluntness was called for since she obviously only had "Easter stars" in her eyes, not a chicken's best interests.
Teaching kids to value LIFE, no matter what form it's in, is where it has to start.
