Some we talk to, some we pet, some we eat

For the past year or two I have been reading deeply into the genre of board books, those children's picture books appropriate, at least tangentially, to children young enough to rip the pages. I've stopped reading cloth books, which are more appropriate for children young enough to want to munch on the pages.

Board books, and children's picture books in general, contain a lot of animals. Barnyard animals, jungle animals, zoo animals, cats and dogs and rabbits and mice, you name it, there's a book there. Some of these animals are represented visually by photos, some by drawings, some by collage or painting or watercolors. Among the photo-based books, nearly all the animals act like animals in the course of the story. Hippos lay in mud, chicks eat corn, dogs sit with their heads out the window. None of these animals talk, wear clothes (that is clothes that they have chosen for themselves), or otherwise act like humans dressed up in animal bodies.

The drawn, painted, etc. animals are a different story. Some of them act like animals. Many of them act like humans, either children or adults. Their childlike or adultlike behavior is correlated to the apparent age of the animal, but not closely. Little Pookie the pig cries and is comforted by his pig mother. A pink dog and a blue dog meet to flirtatiously discuss haberdashery. Ollie the bird-of-indeterminate-species decides today is the day he's going to hatch.

In some books, some but not all of the animals are gifted with speech, magical invisible opposable thumbs, names, and reasoning abilities far beyond their natural brethren. These books range from confused to subtle. At their best, a book that has characters that look basically alike but have radically different abilities, so much so that some are people and some are animals, creates a space for stories and conversation about what it means to be human, why we consider it acceptable to eat some animals but not others, and how to create connection and understanding across differences. This potentially richly creative space is underexplored.

For example, I don't believe in two years of study I have come across any books in which animal characters eat meat. It might be confusing to a two year old, who has nearly no conception (at least in this supermarket culture) that piece of chicken on the plate and a chicken clucking around are the same substance. And as a vehicle for beginning a grounded understanding of the origins of meat and the ethics of killing animals for meat, such a picture book would almost require a parents' guide of reasonable answers to tough questions.

But even without using the power of mixing character-animals and animal-animals for opening up complex topics for discussion between parent and child, witty use of that mixing could create memorable (and salable) humor. There's a scene in Fantasia 2000 in which Donald Duck plays Noah, and in watching various animals go onto the arc two by two does a double take when the ducks walk by. By his standards, they are naked (and by our standards, he is always half naked, perhaps in reference to his half human-half animal status), and they don't recognize him as one of them, or know quite what to make of him. There are far too few moments like that in board books with cute little animals currently in print.