Opinion: A Child’s Wild Kingdom

IN a couple of weeks, my daughter will turn into a dolphin. Right now, she's a fox. Last year, she was a cricket.

That's just how it works at the Montessori school where she goes. Instead of "4-year-olds" and "5-year-olds," or even "preschoolers" and "kindergartners," each class is given an animal name and, at the end of every school year, the children graduate into being a different species entirely, shape-shifting like spirits in an aboriginal legend.

It can be a little alarming to step back and realize just how animal-centric the typical American preschool classroom is. Maybe the kids sing songs about baby belugas, or construction-paper songbirds fly across the walls. Maybe newborn ducklings nuzzle in an incubator in the corner. But the truth is, my daughter's world has overflowed with wild animals since it first came into focus. They've been plush and whittled; knitted, batiked and bean-stuffed; embroidered into the ankles of her socks or foraging on the pages of every storybook.

Most parents won't be surprised to learn that when a Purdue University child psychologist pulled a random sample of 100 children's books, she found only 11 that did not have animals in them.

But what's baffled me most nights at bedtime is how rarely the animals in these books even have anything to do with nature. Usually, they're just arbitrary stand-ins for people, like the ungainly pig that yearns to be a figure skater, or the family of raccoons that bakes hamantaschen for the family of beavers at Purim. And once I tuned in to that — into the startling strangeness of how insistently our culture connects kids and wild creatures — all the animal paraphernalia in our house started to feel slightly insane. As Kieran Suckling, the executive director of the conservation group Center for Biological Diversity, pointed out to me, "Right when someone is learning to be human, we surround them with nonhumans."

SCIENCE has some explanations to offer. Almost from birth, children seem drawn to other creatures all on their own. In studies, babies as young as 6 months try to get closer to, and provoke more physical contact with, actual dogs and cats than they do with battery-operated imitations.

Infants will smile more at a living rabbit than at a toy rabbit. Even 2-day-old babies have been shown to pay closer attention to "a dozen spotlights representing the joints and contours of a walking hen" than to a similar, randomly generated pattern of lights.

It all provides evidence for what the Harvard entomologist Edward O. Wilson calls "biophilia" — his theory that human beings are inherently attuned to other life-forms. It's as though we have a deep well of attention set aside for animals, a powerful but uncategorized interest waiting to be channeled into more cogent feelings, like fascination or fear.

Young children have been shown to acquire fears of spiders and snakes more quickly than fears of guns and other human-manufactured dangers. And in this case, the researchers Judith H. Heerwagen and Gordon H. Orians offer one logical, evolutionary explanation: if you are an infant or toddler spending a lot of time on the ground, it pays to learn quickly to fear snakes and spiders. Fear of big predators like bears and wolves, on the other hand, doesn't kick in until after age 4, around when the first human children would have begun roaming outside of their camps.

Children also fixate on animals in their imaginative lives. In her book "Why the Wild Things Are," Gail F. Melson, a psychologist at Purdue, reports that kids see animals in the inkblots of the Rorschach test twice as often as adults do, and that, when a Tufts University psychologist went into a New Haven preschool decades ago and asked kids to tell her a story that they'd made up on the spot, between 65 and 80 percent of them told her a story about animals. (The heartbreaking minimalism of one of these stories, by a boy named Bart, still haunts me: "Once there was a lion. He ate everybody up. He ate himself up.")

Jon Mooallem is a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine and the author of "Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America," from which this essay is adapted.

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