Selected animals under discussion with the family (including Moby Dick.) More kinds streamed in during nursery and kindergarten.
When I was in kindergarten, our suburb was borderline-rural, only a few houses on our street and lots of woods. There was also a farm near to our school, and one day the class visited the farm and got to see all the animals. We saw how the chickens were raised, how the cows were milked, how butter was churned, etc. And part of the trip was a ride on a horse. I was petrified, so was the last one to ride. That’s when the class picture was taken. All the kids sitting in a group . . . and behind them was me on the horse. I still have that photo, over 60 years old.
I don’t really remember.
I do remember, when I was a child, having a dog and a cat; and I also remember many trips to the zoo–the lions and tigers were like our cat, and the wolves were like our dog. Later, thanks to my Dad and his experience on a farm, I would meet farm animals: horses and cows. And of course, we could find frogs, toads, birds, and snakes in the local ravine.
I’m another who learned from Marlin Perkins (Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom) and Jacques Cousteau.
Yeah, I don’t remember by “first” exposure to wild animals as a child, even though I was big into them and loved the nature shows, but I’d guess it was storybooks and cartoon segments with lions and elephants and stuff on children’s shows. I was no doubt watching ten lions jumping in a jungle on Sesame Street or something before seeing them on Wild Kingdom.
When I was little I had a toy with an arrow in the center that you could spin around and point to a particular animal. Then you pulled a string and it told you what that animal was and the sound it made.
Kinda like this one, except the one I had was older and it was red:
I also remember Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. It wasn’t just Wild Kingdom it was Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. I had no idea what Mutual of Omaha was at the time. All I remember is Marlin Perkins sitting safely in the truck every week while Jim got mauled by lions and tigers.
Another one weaned on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. “The lion mother protects her family. You can protect your family with a policy from Mutual of Omaha.”
My Dad worked in a large zoo when I was born (my Mum quit a few years earlier- that’s where they met, and I really did go there all the time, including behind the scenes); we lived in a house backing on to a farm, most of my extended family were farmers, plus we had a fairly impressive selection of usual and unusual pets.
The question, to me, is meaningless- like ‘where did you first learn about doors?’. They were just… there.
Both my parents grew up on farms and some of my first memories are their stories of chickens, goats, cows, etc. When I was really little my parents took us to a dairy farm. One of the cows licked my hand and a love was born. Now I visit the Jersey Girls when ever I am in the neighborhood.
Heh. Hi, cousin. The first time I saw a black person in person (excuse the repetition) was in Dublin, when I was 15; I’m from Spain.
While trashumancia* has pretty much dissappeared for cows, sheep herds are still a common sight in Spain’s roads; cañadas reales (the ancient roads used by the herds) still have precedence over newer roads of any type, meaning that if at any point a road crosses or follows the cañada, cars have to let the animals pass. Goats are often included in sheep herds; dogs are anywhere you care to look for one, as are cats. Horses were rarer in northern Spain than in the South but you were likely to see some from the road, or if you went up to the mountains. There’s a fighter bulls herd which uses, among other locations, a pasture close to the town where I grew up.
My grandmother’s flat is in Barcelona, a few hundred meters from the Sagrada Familia; we grew up going there two or three times a year. Like many of the area’s blocks, hers has a sort of crown shape, with the houses rising 5-7 floors around the edges and the central area occupied by terraces and yards. One of the shortest houses used to be a granja, a kind of “bar” that’s very typical of Barcelona and which serves mostly milk-based items. Nowadays most of them are just shallow storefronts, but until I was 10 or 11, that one was a literal granja, a farm: they had a few cows and the milk they served was from those cows. While we only could catch glimpses of the cows (most often of their rear ends), the smell and the mooing were unavoidable.
I don’t know if it still exists, as we haven’t gone there in decades, but there used to be a farm less than an hour from Barcelona’s edge which doubled as a restaurant. The first time we went there (I don’t know how old my cousin and I were, maybe 6?), the farmwife showed us the barns and let us touch the animals and watch as she milked one of the cows.
And then there’s Barcelona’s zoo, which back then included some small carts pulled by goats or donkeys, which children could ride on. One of my earliest pictures (age 5 I think) is riding one of them with my same-age cousin.
- Moving herds from an area to another, and I don’t just mean “the pasture high on the mountain” vs “the pasture near the farmhouse” - some of the cañadas reales are hundreds of km long.
How could I forget the See 'n Say. I remember it mainly as a baby toy for my little brother (3 years younger), but I still think of it when I’m reminded of certain animal noises.
The first animal that I came in very close contact with as a young kid (5 years old) was not a mammal. It was an invertebrate animal - a common earth worm, to be exact. I discovered that they were all over the sidewalk after a good rain. I had friends and cousins (both male and female) who were afraid of them. I chased them with handfuls of worms while they ran away from me squealing like I was trying to kill them. I also cut them up in little pieces and had tea parties with my best friend Benny. No we didn’t eat them…but we pretended to. Good times. I no longer massacre worms. It was a phase… 
I grew up in a farming family so there was regular exposure to animals like cows, sheep, chickens, pigs, goats, horses (plus dogs and cats).
I do remember when I started a new job when I was twenty and met another guy starting the same time as me. He was from Queens and he was telling me that he had just seen a live cow for the first time that week while traveling to the job. That amazed me. It was like somebody telling me they had never seen a live dog. But obviously there wouldn’t have been a lot of farms in Queens.
Growing up I was around a dog, a cat, several chickens, several hundred parakeets and several hundred chinchillas. Every summer I spent time on the family farm or visiting other relatives who were working farmers/ranchers.
I knew animals from very early on.