Children's Wild Animal Stories: Questioning Inter-Species Bonds (original) (raw)
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Children€s Wild Animal Stories and Inter-species Bonds
Canadian Journal of Environmental Education, 2002
In this paper, I discuss the contemporary dilemma of animals disappearing from the minds and direct experiences of many human beings in Western culture, and the implications of this dilemma for the fields of child development, environmental education and biological conservation. As part of a larger research project, I explored kindergarten and grade 5 children's (N = 177) ideas and stories about three common, familiar and wild, Canadian animals-bats, frogs, and raccoons. In the research process, I attempted to attend to the methodological decisions I made along the way. I reflect upon trends in the children's wild animal stories, and questions they raise about anthropomorphism, kinship, and inter-species bonds. Résumé Dans ce document, j'aborde le dilemme contemporain de la disparition des animaux de la pensée et de l'expérience directe de plusieurs êtres humains de la culture occidentale ainsi que les implications de ce dilemme pour les champs du développement infantile, de l'éducation environnementale et de la conservation biologique. Dans le contexte d'un plus vaste projet de recherche, j'ai exploré les idées et les histoires d'enfants (177) de la maternelle et de la 5e année portant sur trois animaux sauvages qui nous sont familiers au Canada : la chauve-souris, la grenouille et le raton laveur. Au cours de la recherche, j'ai tenté de prêter attention aux décisions méthodologiques que je prenais chemin faisant. Ma réflexion porte sur les tendances de la littérature enfantine sur les animaux sauvages et les questions qu'elles soulèvent à propos de l'anthropomorphisme, de la parenté et des liens interspécifiques.
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’.
Childhood Animalness: Relationality, Vulnerabilities, and Conviviality
2018
This paper traces how animals have been and are reduced to mere objects for use in child development, examining historical and contemporary trends in developmental literature. We alternatively present scholarship that delves into children’s and animals’ subjective encounters and intersecting worldhoods as critical of more anthropocentric developmental psychology models. We utilize continuity as a model that emerges from our field work in order to make various suggestions about the ethics that emerge from children’s embodied experiences with animals, including felt senses of vulnerability, death, and precarity. Finally, we finish the chapter by outlining potential pedagogical directions that encourage deeper reflections about the precariousness of childhood lives, lived differently and J. Russell (*) Department of Animal Behavior, Ecology, and Conservation, Canisius College, Buffalo, NY, USA e-mail: russellj@canisius.edu L. Fawcett Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, T...
Moral and Fearful Affiliations with the Animal World: Children's Conceptions of Bats
Anthrozoos: A Multidisciplinary Journal of The Interactions of People & Animals, 2008
The purpose of this study was to extend knowledge on how children understand their affiliation with an animal that can evoke both fear and care: bats. We interviewed 120 children, evenly divided between four age groups (6-7, 9-10, 12-13, and 15-16 years) after each child had visited an exhibit at Brookfield Zoo that displays Rodrigues fruit bats. Results showed that in the same children a fear orientation toward bats existed alongside of a caring orientation. Children accorded bats the right to live free and to be wild. Yet most of the same children also said that zoos did not violate the rights of bats by keeping them in captivity. Discussion focuses on this seeming contradiction, and the resulting implications for the ecological mission of many zoos today.
2018
Using the human-animal bond, relational ecology, and the “common world” framework as theoretical underpinnings, I set out to better understand the array of settings and experiences wherein young children are able to interact, either directly or indirectly with animals within the context of early childhood environmental education (ECEE). There is opportunity within the discipline of ECEE to reflect on practice and means of supporting children’s engagements with and relations to non-human animals. This approach asserts children and animals as co-creators of children's learning and development. The relationships, nuances, and engagements between child and animal are themselves teachers (Taylor & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2015). This has important implications as we move into a time where environmental connectedness and interspecies connectedness matter more than ever (Haraway, 2008; Kellert, 2012; Louv, 2007).
The perils of presenting animals as humans to kids
The PHAIR Society, 2021
An interview with the PHAIR Society on the dangers of anthropomorphism in children's books. The interview was conducted by Victoria Simpson and Jared Piazza. Read online: https://phairsociety.org/2021/09/19/the-perils-of-presenting-animals-as-humans-to-kids/
One animal among many? Children's understanding of the relation between humans and nonhuman animals
2012
How do children come to understand the relation between human and nonhuman animals? This relation is central to endeavors as diverse as scientific reasoning and spiritual practice. Recent evidence reveals that young children appreciate each of the two concepts-human and non-human animal. Yet it remains unclear whether they also appreciate that humans are indeed part of the animal kingdom. In this study, we adopt a cross-cultural, developmental perspective to examine children's interpretation of fundamental biological concepts, focusing on children from three distinctly different US communities (urban European Americans; rural European Americans and rural Native Americans (Menominee) living on ancestral tribal lands) that vary in their habitual contact with the natural world and in their cultural perspective on the human-nonhuman animal relation. Using structured interviews, we trace 160 children's understanding of concepts including 'human,' 'mammal,' and 'animal', and the relations among them. We include 5-to 6-year-olds (who have had relatively little formal science education) and 9to 10-year-olds (who are well into a Western-science curriculum). The results reveal a surprising convergence across all communities: At both ages, children in all communities largely deny that humans are animals. The younger children strictly maintain the uniqueness of humans; the older children accept that humans are mammals (and that mammals are animals) but nonetheless deny that humans are animals. The implications of this finding for our understanding of early cognitive and language development, early
Unraveling the Wild: A Cultural Logic of Animal Stories in Contemporary Social Life
2016
This dissertation is about the stories people tell about animals when they don’t do what they are expected to do in contemporary social life. More specifically, it examines three case studies where “wild” animals unexpectedly challenge, transgress, or blur socially defined boundaries in public spaces. Drawing on cultural and interactionist studies of animals and environment, I explore popular animal stories written in news media, social media, and enacted in situ. Each qualitative case study illustrates a moment in time/space where the surprising movements or presence of wild animals causes the cultural categories of wildness/order to breakdown and destabilize. These “surface breaks” of social expectations provide an occasion to tell “animal stories.” Animal stories help people explain how the lives of animals can be allegorical strategies modern people use to communicate and enact moral lessons about the social world. In the first chapter, I analyze news stories that emerged after ...
Too many monkeys jumping in their heads: Animal lessons within young children's media
Young children's media regularly features animals as its central characters. Potentially reflecting children's well-documented affinity for/with animals, this mediabooks, toys, songs, clothing, electronic media, and so on-carries with it many explicit and implicit messages about animals and human-animal relationships. This article focuses on the particularly foundational age of children under four and their parents/caregivers as children's first early childhood environmental educators. Drawing on ecofeminism, ecocriticism, and early childhood environmental education, we explore messages about animals in children's media, critically considering notions of mis-and dis-placement, anthropomorphism, and subjectivity. Our inquiry challenges parents and environmental educators to reconsider the lessons young children learn about animals from their surrounding media and explore possible alternatives that question and seek to transform social and ecological inequalities.