A middle school teacher in Kaohsiung County was criticized yesterday after his student posted a Web entry describing how the teacher instructed him to throw a month-old kitten in the trash.
The teacher later said he meant to show the student how to bury the kitten in case it died.
The incident occurred last Friday at Kaohsiung County’s Ziguan Middle School (梓官), when three newborn kittens were found in a classroom by students, Animal Rescue Team Taiwan (ARTT) volunteer Antony Ni (倪京台) said.
After two of the kittens were adopted by students, the children took the third kitten to the school’s environmental hygiene section chief, Cheng Yu-hung (鄭裕宏), to ask what they should do with it, Ni said.
“Cheng told the children to bury it in the school’s garbage collection area if nobody wanted to adopt it,” Ni said.
Though Cheng later said that the children had misinterpreted his comments, saying he only meant they should throw the kitten in the trash if it died, Ni said the teacher was not telling the truth.
“Ten students asked the teacher what they should do with the kitten on three separate occasions,” Ni said.
The children know the teacher as being serious and strict, so they did not want to ask him why he told them to toss the kitten in the trash, but since they didn’t want to do what he said, they asked him several times, Ni said.
After the students posted the exchange, along with pictures of the kitten, on ARTT’s Web site, users of the site’s online discussion board criticized Cheng, Ni said, adding that the teacher later logged onto the board to apologize for his “inappropriate phrasing of comments.”
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