Something is bound to go wrong on a middle school canoe trip, be it poison ivy, that kid who forgot his EpiPen or, say, a group of teachers who think it’s funny to trick kids into eating moose poop.
That last of these happened recently when a chaperone on a school trip in Manitoba, Canada offered an eighth grade boy a sandwich baggy filled with little brown pellets, promising they were chocolate-covered almonds.
According to CBC, as soon as the boy put the pellet in his mouth, someone yelled “You just ate moose poop!” and everyone started laughing, including the school principal, a resource officer and the kid’s teacher.
Moose poop can be funny, but that’s pretty messed up. And there’s more: after the boy ran off to rinse his mouth and probably vomit up his lunch and all his self-esteem, they pulled the same trick on a 13 year-old girl who got the moose poop caught in her braces.
A little girl trying to get the moose poop out of her braces while her teacher and principal looked on belly-laughing has to be one of the saddest middle school moments that took place anywhere in the last decade. Developmentally speaking, middle school is the shit-eating phase of our lives. Bringing literal shit and laughing adults into the equation sounds like torture.
I hope the kids were evil mean kids who deserved it, because that’s the only way this moose poop eating scandal would be okay-ish.
If they’re nice kids, maybe they’ll take home some Machiavellian “careful who you trust” life lesson which will make them wily and street smart. At the very least they’ll bring home some “character,” which, when you’re flossing moose poop out of your braces, probably seems like an unfair trade.