COMPLAINT ENDS PIG KILLING FOR SCHOOL.

Byline: Associated Press 

Pig lover Brittany Bechtel convulsed in shock when schoolmates told her a slaughtered hog was dangling from a workshop awning in preparation for an anatomy lesson.

The 16-year-old Camarillo High School student didn't actually see the pig - she closed her eyes - but she was so upset she called her mother and went home Thursday morning to Fabian, her 2-year-old pot-bellied pig.

``It just made me really sad that they would use an animal's life as a learning aid. It was completely unnecessary,'' the teen-ager said.

Deborah Bechtel, her mother, complained to Principal Terry Tackett and he assured Brittany he would end the agriculture department's practice of killing pigs from the school's small farm to demonstrate animal anatomy.

``It's stupid. Why should we all have to give up our pig because she's having a cow?'' said agriculture student David Ardito, 15, who helped skin and gut the swine after Thursday's anatomy class.

But Tackett said it was the only solution.

``If students are that upset and parents are unhappy, there is no need to have something like that on campus,'' he said. ``We can do it another way.''

He suggested that students take a field trip to a slaughterhouse for future physiology lessons. He even suggested they could use textbooks to discern the bacon from the chops, he said.

But agriculture teacher Bruce Ritchey thinks that would be a mistake. Showing kids the real thing works much better than telling them, he said.

Ritchey killed the 250-pound swine himself before classes and hosed it down before suspending it from an awning outside the classroom.