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PETITION TARGET: New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern

The extremely worrisome Predator Free New Zealand program that teaches and encourages young children to trap and kill wildlife has been recruiting additional schools, including those for primary students with kids as young as five years old.

Their website quotes a teacher involved with the program saying of the students, “They’re very boisterous boys and girls – they love building things that kill…”

Another educator shared that a pupil said, “Every break. We don’t go playing any more. We go trapping!”

Such praise for young children excited about killing animals is deeply disturbing — the schools of New Zealand are raising children to become bloodthirsty adults with little regard for the lives of the possums, stoats, ferrets, weasels, cats and hedgehogs destroyed at their hands.

Professor Marc Bekoff objects to the cruel practice, sharing concerns of teaching children to kill animals, the well researched link between violence against animals and violence against humans, and New Zealand’s extremely high prevalence of domestic violence. According to the NZ Herald, “New Zealand has the worst rate of family and intimate-partner violence in the world.”

Additionally, New Zealand conservation researchers have declared that the program is horribly flawed and ignores less gruesome alternatives.

We must act now to protect and respect wildlife, as well as highly impressionable children, before it’s too late.

Sign this petition to urge Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern to end this disturbing program, and teach the children of New Zealand to practice compassion, not violence against animals.