By Charles Stampul
Reading Bambi to my daughter, I come to the heartbreaking lines…
“Bambi ran as fast as he could. When he reached the thicket he said, “We made it, Mother!” But she wasn’t there. Then Bambi heard a second gunshot.”
“Why do they kill Bambi’s mother?” she asked with tears welling up.
“I don’t know, they probably need her for food.”
“Why don’t they get it from the supermarket?”
“Maybe they think it is better to harvest it themselves.”
Later in the story, she asks, “Why do they burn down the animals’ home?”
“Sometimes people have to burn down trees in order to grow food.”
A story can have a powerful impact on a child, maybe more than we even realize. In his final work published right after his death, psychologist Eric Berne theorized that fairy tales become life scripts for many people.
It’s questionable whether a child can be imprinted by Little Red Riding Hood and spend his or her life running errands for others and getting rescued. But only those raised on prince and princess stories could admire the British Royal Family and Bambi has surely forged many vegetarians.
Most of the new children’s books published today have some kind of agenda. When I read these to my daughter I omit an extraneous “super” before an adjective, and give at least a hint that there is another side of the story.
If a story suggests that it is bad to eat meat I might say that a plate of pasta kills more animals than a steak, because many small animals get caught in plows that cut grain.
If a story says that we are facing a climate crisis caused by man, I might say that excess carbon in the atmosphere causes trees and plants to grow more abundantly which generates more oxygen which lessens carbon in the atmosphere. It is a self correcting system. The climate will change as it always has whether we drive cars or not.
Usually I will save these discussions for a time when they can be understood and just dismiss the book as propaganda. When she asks what propaganda is, I will say that is anything that tricks you into thinking in a wrong way.
Bambi personifies animals in the forest, then has the titular fawn’s mother inexplicably shot and his forest home inexplicably set aflame. Perhaps more insidiously, it repeatedly refers to Bambi as a “prince.”
A good alternative to Bambi, with true-to-life portraits of animals and the people they interact with, no less charming and entertaining, is James Herriot’s Treasury for Children. These stories engage children emotionally without suppressing their reasoning capacity. The writing and illustrations are superb. There is no agenda other than to enrich and educate.
Charles Stampul is the author of I Am Free To Learn. He writes at https://simplicityandpurity.wordpress.com/
Yes, Bambi must go woke.
It would be interesting to see the results if the children were read the fairy tales as many of them were written in their original German.
After I read Bambi to my daughter, we went to the Range and did some target shooting.
She’s getting pretty good.