Tim Eisemann, 13, was horrified when he learned that his school was sending ducklings from a hatching project to a slaughterhouse. Although his teacher didn’t want to help him, Tim found a home for the ducklings at a wildlife rehabilitation center. “School hatching projects are wrong,” Tim says. “They are inhumane, they don’t teach students very much, and there are many alternatives.”

Is your school planning a chick-hatching project? The peeping yellow fluffballs may be cute, but for these infant birds, classroom life can be ugly.

Mother chickens usually keep watch over their eggs, surrounding them with bits of straw and feathers, sitting on them to keep them warm, and constantly turning them so their temperatures remain steady. When the eggs are used in classrooms, people can forget to turn them on schedule or can accidentally unplug the incubator, resulting in dead or crippled hatchlings.

Chicks can carry diseases like E. coli, salmonella, and the West Nile virus. Most schools don’t realize that caring for baby birds is a huge responsibility. Hatched chicks often grow sick without their mothers to teach, feed, and take care of them.

Finding good homes for them when the project is over isn’t easy—animal shelters are already full of homeless animals, and farmers usually won’t take them, so many birds are just killed.

If your school is planning a hatching project, urge your teacher to consider a different project—like visiting an animal shelter or a wildlife center.

To learn more about chicks, read Egg: A Photographic Story of Hatching by Robert Burton, which is available at PETABookStore.com. For a free copy of PETA’s comic book “A Chicken’s Life,” go to PETAKids.com or write to “PETA Chicken Comic Book,” 501 Front St., Norfolk, VA 23510.