Animal Tales: True facts or myths? Fiction versus Reality

This is not the usual story with “once upon a time”. But it goes like this: there was this girl, Flor­ina Gor­gan, who be­came a bio­logy teacher, but by a strange twist of fate (as twists of fate are usu­ally strange), she chose to study at a second uni­ver­sity. Of course, to make things more in­ter­est­ing, she op­ted for children’s lit­er­at­ure. And not just that. but children’s lit­er­at­ure in the Eng­lish language.

She had some pre­vi­ous know­ledge of it as she had gradu­ated an Eng­lish class in high school; oth­er­wise, she could not have passed the first semester ex­ams at the fac­ulty. Which she suc­cess­fully did.

Then, the second semester began to­gether with its new chal­lenges. One of her fa­vour­ite classes was en­titled An­imal Tales, as it dealt with stor­ies writ­ten for chil­dren and teen­agers where the main char­ac­ters were animals. 

One day she had a con­ver­sa­tion with a class­mate, Alina Lobos, who was also a teacher, this time an Eng­lish teacher. The dis­cus­sion went like this:

Alina Lobos: “What is your opin­ion re­gard­ing the An­imal Tales class?”

Flor­ina Gor­gan: “Well, of course, I like it! So far I think it is my fa­vour­ite. If you are won­der­ing why, well, it is be­cause it deals with sub­jects that are fa­mil­iar to me: an­im­als. I am a bio­logy teacher after all, and I both teach and have stud­ied zo­ology. It was one of my fa­vour­ite sub­jects in the faculty.”

A.L.: “Do you find that this class uses the same ap­proach that you are used to? Do you teach this way to your pupils?”

F.G.: “No, of course not. That is ex­actly why I like this class so much. WE only study and teach stu­dents about an­im­als from a bio­lo­gical point of view. I mean, we talk about evol­u­tion, clas­si­fic­a­tion, body parts and such, but some­times, it can be really dry and abstract.” 

“This class shows a more “hu­mane” ap­proach, it sym­path­izes with the an­im­als, it is a totally dif­fer­ent point of view from the usual one. When read­ing the books re­com­men­ded this semester, I found not only a great deal of an­thro­po­morph­iz­a­tion of the char­ac­ters, but also some ele­ments of eth­o­logy, a sci­ence that stud­ies an­imal behaviour.”

A.L.: “How about the fact that an­im­als take in most cases hu­man traits? Does this not bother you?”

F.G.: “Well, it de­pends on the ap­proach. For ex­ample, in fables I could find only a few an­imal traits, most of the char­ac­ters pos­sessed hu­man fea­tures whereas stor­ies like The Jungle Book or Black Beauty, The Omnivore’s Di­lemma or Cod: A Bio­graphy of the Fish that Changed the World, I  really en­joyed, and the char­ac­ters were closer to their nature.”

A.L.: “Do you think such stor­ies or books could have an im­pact on chil­dren? Would that im­pact be a pos­it­ive one?”

F.G.: “Of course they could have a pos­it­ive ef­fect. First of all, every book read by a child nowadays is a brick in the wall of his edu­ca­tion. Es­pe­cially be­cause we all know that chil­dren do not en­joy read­ing now like we used to do.”

A.L.: “Yes, you tell a sad truth.”

F.G.: “I also think, and this comes from my ex­per­i­ence as a bio­logy teacher, that by read­ing this sort of stor­ies, chil­dren can em­path­ize more with an­im­als and un­der­stand them better.”

“As I said be­fore, we do not teach eth­o­logy in school, at least not at the primary or sec­ond­ary level.”

“My opin­ion is that an op­tional class in which you could in­teg­rate Eng­lish, Lit­er­at­ure, and Bio­logy could be a total suc­cess for a bet­ter un­der­stand­ing of all three sub­jects by the pupils.”

A.L.: “In­deed, it could teach chil­dren and teen­agers to be more re­spons­ible and aware of their nat­ural en­vir­on­ment, of an­im­als, to un­der­stand and as­sume dif­fer­ent roles in their in­ner circles of friends and to pro­ject them into the wider so­ci­ety. Those roles might be either the leader or the bully, the op­pressed or the op­pressor, the in­di­gen­ous or out­cast and so on. These are roles that people play in so­ci­ety and they could be re­cog­nized but in a gentler way by young and sus­cept­ible minds.” 

F.G.: “Yes, be­cause these books usu­ally nar­rate about an­im­als as char­ac­ters, but the char­ac­ters are drawn from hu­man so­ci­ety, with all the people’s struggles, joys and sor­rows present in their lives.”

*

And so their con­ver­sa­tion went on. I do not wish to be a bore or to im­pose on your pa­tience with a length­ier tran­script. Suf­fice it to say that they reached the con­clu­sion that An­imal Tales should be present in children’s, teen­agers’ and even adults’ edu­ca­tion, and the fact that most of the time the char­ac­ters are an­thro­po­morph­ized should not de­ter people from tak­ing them as ex­amples, whether good or bad. 

And as an af­ter­thought… Alina Lobos’ middle name is Flor­ina, and Gor­gan used to be her maiden name. Be­sides Alina Flor­ina Lobos (née Gor­gan) has two BA’s, one in Bio­logy and the other in Mod­ern Lan­guages. And so, this con­ver­sa­tion was purely fic­tional, or rather a con­ver­sa­tion in the mir­ror, since Alina, the Bio­logy teacher, and Flor­ina, the Eng­lish teacher, are one and the same person. 

Alina Lobos