Every class needs a Randy Peterson. Before we began grade one, he was a friend of mine. We played together frequently. One day we went down into the ravine close to my house. The ravine was very quiet because all the sound waves went over it, not down into it.
We found a toilet seat. Randy thought we ought to make ourselves a bathroom. We put up bush walls and dug a hole and promised not to look at each other when we used the toilet we had built.
When we finished down in the ravine we went to his house and he gave me a dead mouse. My father threw it out.
But the reason I say that every class needs a Randy Peterson was the fact that whenever our science experiments went wrong, he was the one designated to kill it.
Our seventh grade teacher decided to bring in an incubator and get some fertilized chicken eggs. At certain points in their development he would break open the egg and we would study the fetus.
When we finished the learning, there were some eggs left over, so we let them hatch. One of the chicks got it's leg caught in the wire of the incubator and crippled it's leg. Call Randy Peterson. He took the chick and came back about five minutes later telling the bird was dead and had been disposed of.
He was the only one able to kill an animal. It sounds cruel but the chick would have been at the mercy of the other chicks who were picking and pecking at it. When we sent all the chicks to the farmer, it would have died then from a chicken coop predator.
I've always thought well of Randy that he could take that little task in hand.R
I probably could have done it, but I'd have hated myself.
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