& with all due respect, Pickle, you do not know for sure that nothing is going on. Are you going to tell everyone to sit back & wait for a witness to come onto these forums to verify? Feel free to do that, whilst some of us try to get to the bottom of this. The topic title is misleading & I would personally prefer not to see this escalate. For this reason I think this thread should be removed or at the very least edited. The parents may or may not have already been in touch with the school. Reading the original post I'm not convinced anything was done about it so I contacted the school to make sure they were aware. ''Exactly. very surprised that anyone would give this third-hand gossip the time of day.'' Jeremy, you would be surprised how much third-hand gossip has lead to real cases of animal cruelty. Some witnesses are just not comfortable with reporting it. This may not even be true. But how many children do you know in year 3 who cannot distinguish the difference between a cat in a carrier & a fox in a trap or have been exposed to so much animal abuse that they would make something like this up just to stay at home from school? Either way, it has been reported. Pickle Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > James, with all due respect, what's been described > is information passed by a child to its parents, > and then posted on an Internet forum by a friend > of the parents. It's hardly first hand verified > fact!