It's alive? I can take care of that.

Boy, the Manners Police are getting fussier and fussier.

Take poor Jerick Hutchinson, a high school agriculture teacher in Huntsville, Ark.

The other day he was all set to give his class a demonstration on how to skin an animal — and haven’t we all sat through dozens of them? — when a little problem came up.

See, a student promised to bring a raccoon for the demonstration, which he did, which is important, because you can’t have a skinning demonstration without a critter to skin.

Anyhow, the animal was alive, not deceased. So Hutchinson, being the resourceful type, took ol’ Rocky out back and turned him into a dead raccoon.

With a nail gun.

Now some of these tree-hugger types are saying that was just a bit icky for high school kids.

Gimme a break. Even the head honcho defended Hutchinson.

"It wasn’t like he held a nail gun against the head of a cute little animal in front of the class," said Superintendent Alvin Lievsay. " … He does a great job. The kids love him."

Damn straight. I mean, if he’d capped the ’coon in front of Billy and Susie, well, maybe then you’ve got a gripe. But he was discreet, as any good skinner is.

Thanks to Hutchinson’s pluckiness, the rosy-cheeked youngsters were able to observe proper skinning techniques on the raccoon, and, as the AP story put it, “examine the contents of its stomach.”

I have to end this post now. I’m just getting a little teary-eyed thinking about this Norman Rockwell moment in a little red schoolhouse somewhere in the hills of Arkansas.