![]() ![]() My Kind Dog moment shows how we project human emotions on to animals and how children’s literature builds on that, as well as how long the effects of that literature endure. ![]() Kind Dog always wore a dark green hat, which our puppy didn’t, but otherwise she did look a bit like him. Without really noticing, in the course of the story you learned about something: the alphabet, counting, colours. ![]() In case you weren’t raised on them, the Ant and Bee books were an endearing, lightly educational series for children written in the 1950s and ’60s by Angela Banner, in which Kind Dog helps the two insects out of various scrapes. ‘Like Kind Dog in the Ant and Bee books!’ I felt a sudden rush of warmth and affection for this small creature which was now related to a fictional dog I’d loved as a child. ![]() I was regretting the whole enterprise when my sister happened to say that the puppy seemed kind. Although she was clearly a beautiful creature, I wondered why on earth I’d taken on more responsibility when the freedom of an empty nest was just around the corner. The full text is that I’d caved in to over a decade of my children’s pleading, we’d acquired a puppy, and I found that I didn’t know how to relate to her or begin to understand her. Last summer, something happened that showed me how utterly our lives are steeped in anthropomorphism. ![]()
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