Traumatizing Children by Killing Animals in Literature; or Why I Hate “Where The Red Fern Grows”

Cafe Society
1

Sometimes I just like to yammer about things. This is one of them.

My daughter’s third grade class is currently reading “Where The Red Fern Grows.” I remembered being forced to read this as a child. I only remembered the one scene where a boy falls on an ax and dies. Lucky for me, I had an older brother who warned me about the axing. Of course, since he was an older brother, he had to tell me about it in gruesome detail, adding nasty, blood-spurting touches that weren’t in the original. God, I miss him.

Anyway, I likewise warned my daughter that there was a disturbing scene in the book, and explained it to her very briefly, depriving her of the hilarious trauma that my brother dispensed to me. Her teacher had also warned the class before reading that section. But I remembered nothing else about the book.

She has been enjoying it so far. Over dinner tonight, she told us the plot that she had been told, about a young boy in the Ozarks who wanted nothing more than two hounds. After dinner, she wanted to watch the movie, despite the fact that her class had not yet finished reading the book. She was worried about how it would end, having overheard a snippet of conversation among classmates about the death of a dog. Jokingly (as is my wont), I told her that it ended Hamlet style, with everyone dead. I then reassured her that I had no memory of how it ended, so it probably wasn’t as dire as that.

So, we watched in on Netflix. Turns out, I wasn’t far from the truth. Along with the previously mentioned death of a child, one dog was killed by a mountain lion, and the other died of a broken heart, refusing to eat until it starved to death. My daughter was bawling. Trying to comfort her by telling her that she was crying over the death of fictional dogs only made me look like an asshole. Which I so wasn’t. I was the realistic dad. Thing is, though, when your kid’s crying over something sad in a movie, they don’t want realistic dad, but sympathetic mom. But I digress.

Why the hell is animal death so prevalent in classic juvenile fiction? And why the hell do teachers make us read it? Really. Old Yeller? He was a good dog. Got shot in the head. Sounder? That was another fun one. Charlotte’s Web? The dread specter of death loomed large for almost the entire book for that damn pig, but it was Charlotte who got it in the end.

I had a book once, an anthology of short stories for 8th graders. There was a story in that was seriously, for lack of a better phrase, fucked up. A young boy befriends a kitten and takes it home. His parents, not animal lovers, tell him to get rid of it. So the boy makes a noose out of a shoelace and strangles the kitten to death.

This was in a book for children. Dear God, why? I wish I still had the book. I’ve told people about it, and, horrifically, everyone believes me, because we’ve all read those sorts of stories as kids.

I absolutely understand that children shouldn’t grow up in a vacuum, believing the world to be a carefree charming place where only bad people in Batman movies die. And animal death is still less significant than a human death, and Disney slaughters parents by the hundreds in their movies.

But still, when trying to instill in children a love of literature, shouldn’t we try to preserve their sense of wonder a little while longer? Do we need to cram death down their scrawny little throats at such an early age? I lost various relatives throughout my childhood, including my brother when I was 15. Reading about it as a child? Not a barrel of laughs. More like a keg of lay-awake-at-night-staring-at-the-ceiling-contemplating-your-own-mortality-in-your-Spiderman-Underoos.

Why are these books classics? We all (barring teachers, naturally) have read them exactly one time: back in school when we were made to. And then we never read them again. Who’d want to?

Of course, as adults we read these sorts of things, because they are made for adults. “Titanic” is one of the top-grossing movies of all time. Women love to watch it and weep. For men, it’s “Kill Bill Vol. 2.” (Why did it have to suck so bad, Quentin? WHY?) We can separate cinematic or literary death from real death. But kids can’t. Everything is so realistic and immediate for children.

If I were a smarter man (and I’m already pretty smart), I’d figure out a way to get these books out of schools. Kids should be reading much lighter fare, like the “Wizard of Oz,” or “The Phantom Tollbooth,” or Chilton’s manuals. Let them wait a little while before death rears its ugly head in their lives.

Still, I suppose my up-coming children’s novel “Death Zoo” should at least sell well to schools.

Thank you for reading my nonsense. Carry on.

2

Death is a part of life, it’s inevitable. Kids gotta learn about death some time. We already coddle our children and keep them as babies for too long anyway. You can ban all the books you want, but what about when Grandma dies, or Fluffy? I think animal death is prevalent in children’s books because it’s somehow easier to deal with animals you don’t know dying than the alternatives.

3

This is true. But still to the OP’s question, why through a fiction book introduced in school, at that age?

What do you base this conclusion on?

I’m not following this - Rawlings (for example) is substituting the death of an animal for that of a person?
To the OP’s point, why ARE those all among the classics? Is it because as people age they remember being moved by the books, but forget how disturbing they were?

4

I had it even worse, we read A Day No Pigs Would Die, at least in Where the Red Furn Grows they didn’t end up eating the dog.

5

Where the Red Fern Grows is the first time I can remember being moved by a book. I am grateful that my 4th grade teacher read it to us although maybe it did screw me because I"m a woman who prefers Kill Bill Vol. 2 to Titanic.

I remember being upset but my parents were much more worried that I might read about Greek gods or black magic (fundamentalist Christian household) so I don’t remember it even registering on my parents radar.

A positive animal story (after chapters of neglect and tear-inducing abuse) is Black Beauty. It’s grim in it’s own way but at least has a happy ending.

6

I accept that as a non-parent my words are meaningless, but I think every parent should get their child a pet, for the express purpose that they do die, and hence teach a valuable lesson about dealing with loss.

7

Plenty of kids find out about death before they encounter those books. Dunno about others, but I had a grandmother die when I was 5, and my best friend a couple years later. At least one fish died during that time as well. I guess many are lucky enough to not have a pet/person close to them die before they get to deal with those books too.

Plus some of those stories are just screwed up. Having one dog refuse to eat so it dies of grief-induced starvation? A boy strangling a kitten? Way to give little kids some nightmare fuel.

8

I’m going to defend “Red Fern” and their ilk here. I vividly recall the first time I read that book (and yes, I did read it more than once and no, it wasn’t a school assignment). It was heartbreaking. I sobbed and ached and hurt. But it was a safe hurt. Nothing in my world really changed, life went on. Books like these challenge kids emotionally, which is just as important as intellectually IMO. They teach empathy and gratitude without sugar-coating reality.

I’m not sure if the OP is being sarcastic mentioning Wizard of Oz, but that series has some seriously disturbing moments. I had a lot more nightmares about Mombi than I ever did about hound dog-eating mountain lions.

9

You’re right. Kids really know nothing of mortality until they are introduced to it somewhere. The fear in regard to it occurs when they realize that neither mom or dad nor they will live forever, and that everyone or everything eventually dies.

The fact that death occurs in children’s literature is nothing new – fairy tales are full of death: the witch in Hansel and Gretel, the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood, the wolf in The Three Little Pigs, for example, all get done in for their wickedness, and that is the first lesson. Sometimes, the innocent die, too and that is where stories like Old Yeller and Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Match Girl come in.

Where the problem comes is when parents don’t discuss such things with their kids before they find out about them from other sources.

Traumatic? Maybe. But then again, life is traumatic, isn’t it? Reality can be traumatic, can’t it? Better to learn from something fictional first before having to learn it from reality, because you just can’t pretend that reality doesn’t happen – you have to accept it. In a perfect world, kids wouldn’t have to learn about death until the age of eight or so, but as we know, it’s not a perfect world. Sure, a lot of kids have to learn about the reality of death earlier, but this number is still in the minority, overall.

Perhaps the fact that the OP’s daughter is in Grade Three and still is freaked out by the concept of death?

Kids are coddled these days. So much is made out of such things as “preserving their self-esteem” and the “touchy-feely” aspects of most schools these days that a great majority of them are remaining babies far too long. They have to learn that the world isn’t the wonderful place they start believing it is because of the way they are dealt with in the classroom. I take a look at the boys in my stepson’s Grade Seven class, and I know that my childhood friends and I at the same age would have labelled them “sissies” and beat them up.

10

Doesn’t always work; we got a dog when I was 4, but he ended up living to something like 18-19 years old, so I was well into college by the time we had him put to sleep.

I think part of the reason that animal death may be so prevalent (and this is based on my own recollection only) is because by the time a child is reading well enough and comprehending well enough to read a novel like “Where the Red Fern Grows”, they’re not really looking for a rehash of the Thomas the Tank Engine stories or more wordy versions of Disney books.

They want to read something more “grownup”, and authors writing for them tend to have animals die because it’s actually more traumatic for the children. I mean, when you’re 9 or however old you are when you read books like that, the concept of your parents dying is pretty abstract, but the concept of your dog dying is a lot less abstract, especially if you had another pet that died (goldfish, hamster, etc…) So authors can get across themes of loss, etc… and have it actually resonate with the children in a way that having adults die wouldn’t quite hit.

11

Little kids are perfectly capable of understanding death. What, they haven’t stepped on any bugs? Never seen dead worms on the sidewalk? Never went for a walk and saw a dead bird, rat, or anything? Never saw a roadkill? Kids don’t get told not to swallow unknown pills, or liquids under the sink, or stick things in electrical sockets 'cause you know, you could die? What, they don’t get that?

I balled my eyes out when Bambi’s mother died, and that in no way whatsoever prepared me for seeing my dog get run over a couple years later, and no amount of cheap fictional emotional animal death sucker punches to the gut prepared me in anyway for my mom’s death when I was fully adult.

I don’t buy that animal death in childrens’ books prepares them for anything other than skipping to the end of childrens’ books to find out who and what dies so they don’t waste time getting emotionally attached to the characters.

12

Because literature isn’t just about entertainment, or even wonder–it’s about power, about connecting you to the sublime. Kids deserve that as much as anyone.
Thomas Dequincey said

Kids want to think deeply about their world–and not just about the happy stuff. They want to understand truth and justice and fairness and virtue and loss and redemption and anger and pain. They often are capable of beginning the process of thinking about these things much earlier than we realize, and we should not deny them the chance to think about these things just because it makes us uncomfortable to seem them in pain.

Wait two weeks and then ask your daughter–as neutrally as possible–if she would rather never had read the book. I know, for me, I never regretted painful stories.

13

Yes, they can. I certainly could. My father died when I was four years old, and I never confused that experience with a character dying in a book. I was an avid reader growing up and read plenty of books where animals or people died, but I was never traumatized by any of them and cannot imagine that any mentally stable child would be. Heck, I liked books like A Little Princess in large part because the young heroine’s father died – I didn’t know anyone else aside from my own sisters who’d been in that situation, and it obviously made other people I knew in real life uncomfortable.

What I find far more offensive than children’s books that involve death is this attitude that death, any death, is so traumatic that children must be shielded from all reference to it. When I hear someone say that the fictional death of a dog, or a spider, is too much for a school-aged child to handle, I wonder if they think I should have been thrown into an institution when my father died. Is what actually happened to me so nightmarishly horrible that other children need to be protected from made-up stories that involve death? I’m certainly not happy my father died and I won’t pretend it was easy to deal with, but it would have been easier than it was if I hadn’t had to tiptoe around the subject for the sake of other people’s comfort.

14

I think it depends on the story, frankly. In grade school, I read a book of scary stories - geared towards kids and from our school library - that had a puppy dying in some terrible fashion, and I seriously regretted reading it. I had trouble getting that mental image out of my head, and had nightmares as well. I don’t remember similar from many other books, though, and did a lot of “advanced” reading for my age.

15

Kids are a lot more resiliant than a lot of adults give them credit for.

The tragedy is that many adults don’t remember what it’s like to be a child, parents and teachers (especially) included.

16

I was reading John Saul books by the time I was in the third of fourth grade…loved 'em! It was fun to be scared like that! I know it’s not exactly the same, but I do think that kids can deal with a lot more than they’re often given credit for.

17

So I should replace my one-year-old’s mobile of butterflies with little skulls and scythes?

Wait a minute. That was supposed to be sarcastic, but that actually sounds pretty cool.

I certainly don’t advocate coddling children to an extent that their world view is so warped that when a real death occurs to someone they know, they don’t know how to react. I acknowledge as much in my OP. I also don’t think it necessary to make our kids so jaded about death, or so overly concerned about death, that it becomes a problem, either.

And please understand that much of my post was tongue-in-cheek. I could give a crap that that damned spider died. (So wise, though. sob) I suppose that, in the end, I just don’t like seeing my little girl cry.

And the death of the story seems to become the focal point of the story, overshadowing everything else. Anyone remember that Old Yeller was about a boy who slowly grows to love a dog? Nope, it’s the ending that we remember.

Still, I’ve enjoyed reading the responses, and I certainly understand your points of view.

And Lamia? I’m so sorry for your father, and I agree that children shouldn’t be shielded from all reference to death. When dealing with my crying daughter last night, it just occurred to me that death seems to happen a lot in literature aimed at a certain age-group. You certainly shouldn’t have had to tip-toe around the subject.

18

Just because death is a fact doesn’t mean it isn’t worth freaking out over. I’m not suggesting denial of death is the way to go, but I am pointing out that it’s a serious subject, and it’s worth contemplating how it’s introduced rather than just throwing the baby into the (death) pool…they’re going to find out about personalized death sooner or later, but is it possible they’ll actually be better able to handle it at 11 years old than they were at 7?

Weirdly, none of the adult environment I live in has people getting beat up for being sissies, and the world still seems like a wonderful place to me. And the level of meanness I see among peers at school (that place where kids are being coddled into being touchy-feely) vastly exceeds the meanness I see in real life. So what world are we exactly wising them up to if we beat them up?
Anyway, getting back to the OP’s question, I’ll stick with my read that people remember what moves them, from a viewpoint where death has become less scary.

19

My theory? Of all the things that happen in fiction, death of a beloved character (human or animal) produces the strongest emotion in the reader and is the most memorable. And it’s the books that produce strong emotion and are memorable that get considered “great” or “classics.” And teachers want their students to read the classics.

20

Right, but I don’t remember that the dog died. I remember that sometimes the right thing to do feels really wrong, but you still have to do it; I remember that life isn’t fair; I remember that sometimes it isn’t about you, it’s about the person (or animal) you love; I remember that you have to be strong even when it really, really hurts.

These are big, important thoughts that, I firmly believe, kids need to start having at a pretty young age. They don’t need to fixate on them, but they need to be in their mental landscape.