Höing, Anja. "The Wild and the Child: The Children-Animal Bond in Talking-Animal Stories" in Höing, Anja and Arieahn Matamonasa-Bennett (eds.). Humans and Animals - Intersecting Lives and Worlds. Oxford: Interdisciplinary Press, 2016. (original) (raw)

Talking animal stories are an unusual medium in portraying the relationship between humans and animals. The agent of the story is generally an animal, which despite various anthropomorphic qualities, bears clear traits of the non-human. Many British talking animal stories feature wild animals that are captured by humans and thus temporarily forced into a pet position, from which they encounter both adult humans and children. The consequence is a triangular relationship, in which the reader will often find not the animal but the adult human constructed as ‘the Other’, while the child, fascinated by the animal’s intrinsic wildness, instinctively bonds with the animal. In these stories, both child and animal often share an uncorrupted animal instinct and a naïve immediacy of experience. Often, child characters heal the (wounded) animal, and, by releasing it back into the wild, prove morally superior to patronizing adults rationally assessing the animal’s use or chances of survival. The child, on the other hand, either actively or in imagination seeks to enter the animal’s world. Both the animal and the child longing-to-be-animal are often constructed as pre-Christian and pre-enlightenment figures, unbound by adult rationality. Yet, in most of these stories, the child characters’ struggle to retain their innate animality proves futile; adults successfully trivialize or channel into imagination their children’s yet untamed animal instincts. The animal can escape back into the wild. The child, usually, cannot. The triangular relationships between animal, children, and adults in talking animal stories approach the animal-human bond from an unusual perspective. Additionally, they also reflect predominant constructions of childhood and of ‘the animal’, and both re-enact and challenge the controversial dichotomies of human/animal, instinct/reason, and nature/culture, and in doing so give voice to Western society’s intrinsic fascination with and fear of the animal ‘other’.