Where did the animals go?

In the 21st century children are constantly warned about the damage humans are doing to the natural world. It’s not surprising then if…

“Lacking direct experience with nature, children begin to associate it with fear and apocalypse, not joy and wonder.”

(Last child in the woods by Richard Louv 2005)

Most of our children in the UK have less and less direct and meaningful contact with animals in the wild or in captivity. We plan family visits to zoos and farm attractions to let our children ‘experience’ real animals, but these encounters will never provide the emotional connection that comes when a child and an animal meet one to one and on an equal footing.

“The visibility through the glass, the spaces between the bars, or the empty air above the moat, are not what they seem – if they were, then everything would be changed.”

(John Berger, Why Look at Animals 1980)

In Victorian times, society’s attitude to animals was reflected in how they were portrayed in children’s books of the time. This poem and illustration by Palmer Cox (1840 – 1924) is taken from Little Folks magazine of the 1890’s. Palmer Cox was a well-known Canadian poet and children’s illustrator. Although animals were beginning to be portrayed in a more anthropomorphic way, this was usually for comic effect rather than in an attempt to build empathy. They were, like the indigenous people of the new colonies, usually portrayed as very much different and separate from ‘civilised’ humans, a view that had been promoted by the Christian Church and that was beginning to be challenged by evolutionary scientists like Darwin. Fast forward one hundred and thirty years, and it would be a brave children’s publisher who included this poem in a nursery collection today.

Creating a true sense of the animal as ‘other’ in picture books for children has become increasingly rare. Animals are usually the subjects of often very beautiful, factual, information books; they are presented in anthropomorphic ways as humans in animal costume, and they sometimes have an almost mystical, supporting role in human stories of emotional distress. All these depictions reflect ways that animals are commonly viewed in society today.

There are a few exceptions. Loveykins is a 2002 book written and illustrated by Quentin Blake and published by Jonathan Cape. It tells the story of a lady finding a lost bird, and the very real chain of events that unfold, despite her preconceptions. ‘Out of the Woods. A true story of an Unforgettable Event’ written and illustrated by Rebecca Bond (2015. Farrar Straus Giroux Books, New York) where the human and wild animal populations are both saved from a forest fire by wading into a lake. Mr Potter’s Pigeon by Patrick Kinmonth and illustrated by Reg Cartwright (published by Hutchinson Junior Books Ltd 1979) is a book about a lost racing pigeon that was popular with all my children but which seems sadly to now be out of print.

My book ‘The Creature’ is an attempt to present a relationship between children and ‘the animal’ in a different way. The creature is not ‘cute and cuddly’, its behaviour is not human or anthropomorphic and it doesn’t behave in a socially acceptable way… yet it has come to live uninvited, with a human family, like a common household pest.  The children try to get rid of it and fail. They are frightened, disgusted, intrigued, and in the end accepting. The youngest child, unlike his older siblings and not yet fully socialised to the human world, accepts this animal ‘other’ more easily. But at no point do they come to believe they understand the mind of the Creature, and the Creature certainly never fits in to their human world. It uses the resources the family house provides and leaves as it nature dictates.

In his acclaimed 2016 book ‘Being a Beast’ Charles Foster writes how as a child, he tried to get a feeling of what it is to be an animal…

“I had a blackbird brain in formalin by my bedside. I turned the pot round and round in my hand, trying to think myself inside the brain… It didn’t work. The blackbird remained as elusive as ever. Its abiding mysteriousness is one of the greatest bequests of my childhood.”