The idea of introducing kids to farming practices in general is not a bad one, but it can be bad if you only introduce them to the most gruesome parts of it and you introduce them to it without them having previous experience with animals.

Having spent my summers on small farms, I had no issue seeing animals being slaughtered, and even doing it myself, I remember begging my grandparents every day to let me assist in the slaughtering of various livestock (which they usually wouldn’t allow me to, mainly because a 10 year old and swinging sharp object don’t got very well together).

And it’s hard to explain why this didn’t feel “gory” or “traumatic” at all to someone that always lived in a city. But in some way, if you interact with animals, their dead bodies don’t have the same “creepy” element to them.

Partially because you see that death is a natural part of life, you see the how birds of pray kill the same chickens that you are slaughtering. You see how the chickens themselves sometimes kill small animals and insects… etc

The killing of animals at the hands and mouths of other animals (including humans) is pretty much a routine occurrence of life in any place but a city.

Thus, it’s probably ethical to expose kids to it, but only if they’ve been exposed to nature in the first place.

As it stands, it’s not more ethical than showing them the hundreds of dead carcasses of birds and mouses that gather upon the blades and beneath the wheels of a combine harvester or showing them the death of animals as a result of clearing forests in order to make way for farmland.

If you show only the most gruesome parts of a process to someone, they will end up thinking something is wrong with said process.