Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Here’s an interesting question I’ve always wondered over.  Why is it that we endear some of the most violent animals to our children by depicting them as cuddly stuffed animals that look anything other than their potential for violent behavior?  Bears, tigers, lions, Kuala bears, zebras, hippos, etc…they all possess potential for high violence, yet by immortalizing them as cuddly stuffed animals, our children, who clutch them tightly, are led to believe these same animals are tame.

When I was a little girl, I loved my stuffed animals.  The ones I found most appealing I later discovered were amongst the wildest of the real animal kingdom.  When I became a mother, aware of this, I let my kids pick and choose which stuffed animals they liked best.  Why?  I was curious which ones they’d gravitate towards.  Almost without failure, the ones they selected were also the wildest animals.

Hmmm….

When I first discovered how violent some of my beloved childhood stuffed animals could be in real life, I was stunned.  How, I wondered, could a cute “cuddly” Kuala bear, for example, be so vicious?  And a zebra?  Come on, now.  Lions I understood.  But adorable teddy bears?  Again, how could something that looked so innocuous represent something that, in reality, could be a ruthless killer?

Course, me being me, I had to turn the thought over and over in my head, trying every which way to come up with a probable answer.  Couldn’t imagine that the manufacturers of those same stuffed animals wanted to intentionally mislead children into believing those animals were worthy of going up to in the wild and offering a big hug.  That would be silly.  But why then are those particular types of animals most often depicted as stuffed animals? 

Not many adults I know still have stuffed animals.  But then, I freely admit that I’m a bit unusual.  I still have some of my original stuffed animals, a number of which were passed along to my own children who still have them.   In addition, I’ve acquired a few additional ones over the years.  And yup, you guessed it, all the ones I have fall into the category of potentially dangerous animals.

Hmmm…imagine Freud would have a field day with this….

Or, would he be more interested in what causes the masses to gravitate towards potentially violent animals?