Role of Animals in Books for Children and.Youth

Nonhuman animals are primarily defined according to their form of relation with human beings, which broadly depends on the perceived utility of those animals to humans. These relations may be analyzed to generate typologies, membership of which circumscribes the probable fate of nonhuman animals when they enter into contact with humans. However, these judgments of utility and category membership are contingent and socially constructed, as demonstrated by cultural and historical variability in the species and individual animals assigned to particular types. This paper explores how the combination of childhood literary and film traditions relating to animals and associated promotional food tie-ins aimed at children contribute to a food socialization process whereby children learn to conceptually distance the animals they eat from those with whom they have an emotional bond or for whom they feel ethically responsible. In so doing, we develop a theoretical scheme for the differentiated positioning of animals.

Issues in Educational Research, 2020

Children's literature in the Arabic language has seen an impressive boom in the last decade both in quantity and quality. Arabic children's literature awards have also increased in number and competitiveness. However, children's literature in the Arabic language continues to be criticised for not being appealing to children, due to its didactic content and its highly symbolic language. This study analysed 47 award-winning Arabic children's literature books, looking at five domains. The purpose was to look for features and trends common to award-winning books. Results revealed that Arabic children's literature continues to be seen as a tool to educate and impart morality. Results also revealed the dominance of male characters, the prevalence of realistic fiction genres, and the repeated use of poverty, child displacement, family and refugees as the topics of choice when writing for children.

The Pig in Thin Air

Published with Lantern Books in April 2016, this is an account of how the author came to terms with his destructive habits and changed his relationship with his own body. The Pig in Thin Air critically explores the relationship of the body to animal activism; looking at academic scholarship and animal advocacy organizations, the book explores the dimensions of embodiment from the author's own body to those of the animals he bears witness to, from bodies of knowledge and those who place themselves in the way of the machinery of death, through to our physical efforts to make sense of a world where so much is desensitized, disembodied, and fragmented. In exploring different modes of activism throughout North America, The Pig in Thin Air asks how animal advocacy and environmental activism can best join forces to tackle these interconnected crises in such a way that we might develop deeper, more authentic compassionate relationships with all other animals, including ourselves. The {bio}graphies series explores the relationships between human and nonhuman animals through scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences viewed through the lens of autobiography and memoir, to deepen and complicate our perspectives on the other beings with whom we share the planet.

The paper focuses on animals and their functions in children’s literature since 1900. Children’s literature is one of the famous medium of entertainment for children and it is read all over the world. Animals have become common in the realms of children literature. This study is important because though animals are ruling in children’s literature for hundreds of years still a little has been researched on this topic. Mostly anthropomorphic animal characters are used in stories. Behaviorally, animals that are fully anthropomorphic are almost indistinguishable from humans; they go to school, drive cars, and deal with the same daily issues and concerns that humans have. These animal characters are effectively helping children and educating them with life lessons. Which animals were featured most often in children’s literature, would also be the focus of this paper. Dogs, cats, pigs, chickens, ducks, rabbits, mice, wolves and foxes and bears are featured most often. Story books have proved to be efficient and entertaining class material, and there is no reason to turn the back on the educational use of animals in children’s literature. This thesis paper consists of analysis of 21 story books with animal characters. Significant good teachings and moral lessons were found while doing this study.

Philip Pullman is the author of “His Dark Materials” a prize-winning trilogy of (children’s) pseudo-science and fantasy religion books that invert John Milton’s Paradise Lost, and describe a war, across multiple universes a cosmic conflict between a strangely perverse version of science and perverted forms of Christian religion. In 1998 he published a newspaper article that was extremely critical of C.S. Lewis and his seven famous children’s fantasy novels “The Chronicles of Narnia”. (He also attacked J.R.R. Tolkien, and Lord of the Rings.) Pullman is not the first strident (misguided) critic of Lewis and “Narnia”. But he is the only prize-winning best-selling author to do so, and he continues in his attacks. This paper responds critically to Pullman’s complaints by adding annotations to the original newspaper article that explain where and how Pullman is – simply – wrong.

The Reading Teacher, 2005

New Formations, 2011

This essay pursues the processes and obstacles involved in making food out of an animal. Taking kangaroos and roo meat as the object of investigation, the essay follows roo through environmentalist arguments, promotional campaigns, animal activists and decades of Skippy. Following kangaroo entails tracking the interconnections and disconnections between assessments of environmental sustainability and the sentiment that the kangaroo is a 'friend'; between the association of roo meat as pet food and the attempt to produce a cuisine around it. It also means following roo from Australia to Russia and the Czech Republic. Based on the assumption that food is intractably and simultaneously both cultural and 'beyond-cultural' (agricultural, metabolic, biological and so on) the essay argues for a complex description of its phenomenal forms.

For millennia, adults have told children stories not only to entertain but also to impart important moral lessons to promote prosocial behaviors. Many such stories contain anthropomorphized animals because it is believed that children learn from anthropo-morphic stories as effectively, if not better than, from stories with human characters, and thus are more inclined to act according to the moral lessons of the stories. Here we experimentally tested this belief by reading preschoolers a sharing story with either human characters or anthropomorphized animal characters. Reading the human story significantly increased preschoolers' altruistic giving but reading the anthropo-morphic story or a control story decreased it. Thus, contrary to the common belief, realistic stories, not anthropomorphic ones, are better for promoting young children's prosocial behavior.

Society & Animals, 2010