As regular visitors to Yellowstone National Park (we live
only 2 ½ hours to the south) we see it every time we visit.
There’s a buffalo or elk on the side of the road, or in a
meadow nearby. Visitors, cameras and children in hand, flock to the roadside
and begin snapping pictures. The vast majority of them – children included –
keep a respectful distance. But there are always one or two of those hundredth
monkeys who have to get closer. And closer. And closer. It’s always the adults,
sometimes with a very reluctant child in tow. I’ve never seen anyone get gored
or trampled, but I have seen enough buffalo and elk look at the interlopers and
stomp their hoofs, only to run off, to know there are many close calls.
And I, myself, by choice, have been within twenty feet of a
Yellowstone black bear. The smartest thing I’ve done in my life?
No.
But is anthropomorphism to blame? A study published in
Psychology Today seems to intimate so. And I don’t buy it. (Of course, I'm doing what every other journalist is doing with such studies: Misinterpreting it in order to write a screed on my own agenda.)
The study looked at how children process information about
animals based upon whether they’re exposed early on to fact-based information
about them, or whether they’re told cute, cuddly little stories about them
instead. (Big admission here: I’m currently writing a novel about
anthropomorphized animals and grew up on such novels, so I have an obvious bias
here.)
They’ve got some funny things to say in their study:
[T]he results of Study
1 indicate that preschoolers can learn simple biological facts about animals
from books, whether the information is presented to them in a context that uses
realistic or anthropomorphic language to describe animals. This ability is more
robust in 4- and 5-year-olds than in 3-year-olds. This finding is consistent
with the results of Ganea and colleagues regarding the learning of simple
biological information (e.g., color camouflage) from picture books that varied
the type of language (realistic vs. intentional) used.
The results also show
that the type of language used in books affects how likely children are to
attribute anthropomorphistic traits to real animals. Children were more likely
to say that real animals feel human emotions or even talk after listening to
stories that used anthropomorphic rather than realistic language. There are two
ways to explain this effect: either that the anthropomorphic language increases
children’s [sic] tendency to attribute anthropomorphic traits to animals, or
that hearing realistic language suppresses their natural inclination to
attribute human-like traits to other non-human animals.
So, first they say that it’s possible for children to learn
“facts” about animals, whether the information is presented in realistic or
anthropomorphized language. That’s fine. They also demonstrate that
anthropomorphizing animals may make children more prone to attribute human
characteristics to animals than if they read purely fact-based books.
Then, later in the study, they go on to say this:
When children in Study
2 were exposed to books where anthropomorphic images and language were combined
they were less likely to apply the facts to photographs of the real animals
compared to a book that used only anthropomorphic images. This type of book,
which combines both fantastical language and anthropomorphic illustrations of
animals, is typical of commercially available books. Our results suggest that
this combination may create a story context that is too dissimilar from reality
for preschoolers to realize that information important for the real world is
being conveyed. As children get older and have more experience with fantastical
stories, they may acquire knowledge that information encountered in fantastical
books can’t be relevant to the real world, but the current findings indicate
that this is not yet the case for preschool-aged children.
This, I suppose, would hold true if children only learned
information about animals from books. Maybe that’s the case for many children,
who live in situations and in cultures where real interactions with animals
aren’t possible or practical. We do, after all, live in a world where many want
to be or are by situation isolated from nature, where they don’t have pets,
rarely frequent zoos or live in urban centers where the only animals to be seen
in their natural habitat may be birds, insects, squirrels, and such.
And part of me wonders how much of the response they’re
getting is just because the children are parroting what they’ve just learned,
not because one set of information is more important to the real world than the
other. What’s in the mind now with kids is most likely what is going to come
out when you ask them questions. Thus the odd story of Jesus coming to Earth
inside a meteor at a family discussion shortly after our kids saw the original
Superman movie.
I grew up reading these kinds of books, and by choice.
Ribsy. The Mouse and the Motorcycle. Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. They are
what I enjoy (though I read many reality-based books these days) and what I
want to write as an author.
Am I doing harm by writing such books?
No. And I don’t think the study is saying that, contrary to
what Slate might be thinking about it at the moment. But I think it’s
disingenuous to think that our preschoolers have to be filled with facts
“relevant to the real world” and that reading them books of this nature is
harmful to their learning. (Slate gets a bit silly on this as well, linking
their article to that of a 12-year-old girl who “petted” a bear attacking her,
neglecting in their summation to say that she petted the animal as a last-ditch
attempt to stop its attack after she’d already been bitten, run away, and
caught again, not because she’d read fuzzy stories in which the bears were nice
and liked to be stroked.)
There is other learning that, perhaps, these folks didn’t
study. I consider attributing human characteristics to animals as the first
steps to developing sympathy and empathy for animals, notwithstanding the
outlandish scenario I started this essay with.
This is a scary bear,
right?
Are folks being gored and trampled in Yellowstone because
they believe the animals they see are of the fuzzy, cute nature they’ve read in
books? Maybe a portion of them are. But I think the bigger problem is that they
are in the moment, wanting to get closer and closer to nature in a world where
we’re so disconnected from nature that we have lost respect for it,
notwithstanding the many real-world, relevant facts we may have learned from
them. I can know that bears can climb trees and that they can run both downhill
and uphill equally well and that they can outrun me, but in the moment those
facts may be overridden by the desire to connect to nature, despite what I
know.
And my children, who grew up around books that
anthropomorphize, have learned a great respect for animals because we don’t
rely on books to teach our kids how they should behave if they see an elk or
buffalo or bear up close. We respect nature, because we know what it can do.
And when I went to see that bear up the trail? My kids, who love Narnia and
Warriors and other such books, stayed behind because they knew the dangers. How
much more real-world do we need to get?
Besides, I want my kids to be sillyhearts, while still
respecting nature:
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