The younger girl left today for horse camp after saying quite an elaborate good-bye to our dog. Just a flip "See ya" for dad.
Does anyone understand very well the connection between kids and animals? I feel like my kids aren't the only ones who, when there were around a hundred words in their vocabulary, knew the names of all the common pets, farm animals, and several more for good measure too: dog, cat, horse, pig, cow, bird, frog, snake, fox, donkey, bug, zebra, monkey, butterfly, wildebeest—the last is the only one I'm kidding about. It's like they're all born zoologists.
Animals have a featured role in ten million kids' books, and if it's going to be a chicken-or-egg question, my answer is that the authors are catering to, not creating, the interests of kids. Regarding dogs, in particular: why is it practically impossible to catch even very young children making a category mistake? Dobermans, St. Bernards, German Shepherds, boxers, collies, French poodles, cocker spaniels, bulldogs, labs, pit bulls, Irish setters, beagles, Rottweilers, huskies, Golden Retrievers, Jack Russells, Dachshunds—without instruction, kids effortlessly identify all these as dogs, and never call a non-dog a dog. (Maybe they'd be tricked by coyotes or wolves, but still.) In other areas, they make mistakes, and you can detect a learning process. They talk about the toes on their foots, because with language they first learn rules and, later, the exceptions. But soon as they know the word "dog," they apply it correctly to all the different breeds and varieties of friendly mutts, though to an adult eye many of these look no more alike than a tabby and a red fox (which is another mistake they'd never make).
It seems they should be confused, but they aren't. Maybe I'm way off course about this. If not, I have no idea what accounts for it. If you google, say, "kids and animals," you end up reading about how it's good for kids to have pets, but nothing that explains the natural affinity between them and the animals that hog all the space in their earliest working vocabulary.
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