A school in arctic Norway is facing criticism for taking five-year-old children on an outing to view the slaughter and skinning of reindeer at a nearby farm.

The criticism appeared on Facebook after the school posted photographs of eight children looking at reindeer, a culled animal hanging above a pool of blood, a child dragging bloodied pelts in the snow and children in their snowsuits tossing bits of animal carcasses into a container.

Dag Olav Stølan, head of the Granstubben Barnehage school, said the day trip on Tuesday was designed to teach the children about the indigenous Sami, who live in northern Norway and are often involved in reindeer herding.

Hundreds of thousands of reindeer roam freely across the region and provide work for those in the country’s sparsely populated northern wilderness.

“There are many reindeer outside,” Stølan said on Friday, speaking by telephone from the school near the city of Steinkje, 320 miles (515km) north of Oslo. “This is not the first time we have done it.”

“It is important to show where the meat comes from,” he said, adding that “we will do it again”.

A child gets out of a truck filled with pelts at a reindeer farm in Henning, Norway. Photograph: AP

The school has had previous outings to see pigs being slaughtered at other nearby farms.

Stølan said once parents had agreed to let their children participate, school employees talked to the children about the farm before and after the outing.

Teacher Therese Johnsen told the local daily Trønder-Avisa that none of the children had reacted negatively.

Negative reactions, however, did come on the school’s Facebook wall, where some people accused the school of “making sure we get more psychopaths among us” and said “people who are killing animals are not far away [from] killing human beings”.

Public dissections of animals are common in Scandinavia. In October 2015, a Danish zoo faced criticism and online protests for publicly dissecting a lion in front of children.

The Copenhagen zoo, meanwhile, made international headlines a year earlier when it killed a giraffe because it was unsuitable for breeding, then dissected it and fed it to lions in front of visitors, including children.



