I was talking with friends and this came up. As kids when did we learn about animals, where they live, what they eat etc.
I can remember singing Old McDonald Had a Farm long before I ever saw real farm animals. Dad always watched Wild Kingdom on Sunday afternoons. I vaguely recall playing in the living room while it was on. Coloring books always had animals and I can recall my mom telling me about some of them. Mom took me to see Disney’s Jungle Book when I was about five and that made an impression.
At school I remember flash cards with pictures of animals, what they ate, and where they lived.
It may of been haphazard, but by the 4th grade I was familiar with the names of most animals.
Can’t remember. They always existed, as far as my young mind was concerned. At least, there never was a time when I suddenly thought, “Hey, that’s animal!”
I do remember the first time I saw a black person, though. That was freaky.
First person of color I saw, at age 4, was a cook at a restaurant when I was on a trip to Florida with my folks. My response: “Mommy, look! That man has a black face!” She shushed me, and told me lots of people had dark skin like that.
Meanwhile, animals were all around me in my lily-white rural agrarian community of origin.
But you didn’t have lions, tigers, elephants, rhinos, pandas, pythons, cobras, and so on in your agrarian community. Wild Kingdom brought them to my living room as a 5 year old.
Not sure when I saw my first real chicken. Other than at KFC. Sounds like you saw more farm animals as a young kid then I did.
Ditto on Wild Kingdom. (Ah, I can still hear my sister and I chanting “Mutual of Omaha!” whenever a segment was leading up to a commercial break.)
We also had an animal book that was some sort of grocery store promo – a blank album of black pages into which we pasted animal stamps that came in a pack Mom and Dad brought home from the store each week. One I distinctly remember from the book was the slow loris. It wasn’t all wild animals, though. I remember the stamp for Felis domesticus, too.
I didn’t know that. I grew up in the sticks as well so we owned most common animals and some uncommon ones as well since I was born. However, I didn’t quite get how big the world was or that some animals only lived in the wild far away when I was little. To me, the chance of seeing a lion or tiger come bounding out of the woods was just as great as seeing a horse in the pasture. I distinctly remember being 4 and getting dressed up in my toughest clothes when my grandmother asked me where I was going. I said into to the woods to catch a gorilla and I was dead serious. I wanted a pet gorilla badly and I knew that the only way I was going to get one was to catch it myself. She let me hunt for one a few times but they must have been out of season because I didn’t get even see one.
I can’t remember not knowing about animals. I grew up with household pets, we had cats and Great Danes when I was a wee thing, and my sister got a horse when I was about a year old. We always watched wildlife shows on TV, and once I learned to read I devoured books about animals. We had that Life Nature Library and I remember pouring over the Mammals book, and the one about the oceans too. Going to the zoo and to a local nature preserve place that had sciency stuff and a petting zoo was a favorite.
I remember having an alphabet poster of some kind where many of the letters were represented by animals (E is for Elephant, G is for Giraffe, etc.) Storybooks were always full of animals. My mother is a huge fan of the Richard Scarry books, which also featured animals. I’m not sure how old I was when I first went to the Animal Discovery Room at the Lawrence Hall of Science, but that’s where I remember getting up close and personal with rats, mice, lizards, snakes and other smaller animals.
As a small child my favorite animal was the rhinocerous. I’m not sure why.
Yeah, I still cringe when I remember me as a little kid, getting on a bus and noticing the driver.
“Mommy, is that a colored guy?”
He didn’t respond. Mom just pushed me along.
At the time, the term was acceptable but surrendering to black. Still…
Um, on second viewing, this should’ve had a quote from a previous post. About first sight of an African American being freaky. Not to equate black people with animals. Eeek. Sorry.
We had a cat and a goldfish when I was little, so I learned about those animals first, I imagine.
Oddly, I didn’t seem to be familiar with cows until I was maybe two or two-and-a-half years old. I remember going to my grandparents’ house, and there was a farm across the road. I saw cows there for the first time. At first, I thought they were some strange kind of horse.
I came from a family of animal lovers; there were always dogs and cats and birds and fish and rabbits and… You get the idea. Some distant relative had a horse named Ranger and they used to sit me up on him and lead me around the pasture on him.
I had books about animals, watched anything on TV about animals. We went to zoos and museums. Like Saje above, I cannot imagine life without animals.
I grew up in a lily-white “restricted” suburb, and I remember being convinced that the cooks at my elementary school were cannibals. Oddly, my parent’s business had a black employee, and I don’t remember ever thinking anything similar about him.
This was the early '60s. I doubt the real estate restrictions had legal force by that time, but certainly they had moral force - more accurately, immoral force.
For whatever reason, we had a ton of those time-life books and junior encyclopedias laying around the house so I remember reading a lot about animals from an early age.
I also loved wild kingdom as well as Jacques Coustou’s tv shows.
Wild Kingdom brought them to my living room as a 5 year old.
Sounds like you saw more farm animals as a young kid then I did.