The Fear of Animals
I have purposely reserved for special discussion two varieties of children’s fear, namely, dread of animals and of the dark. As the former certainly manifests itself before the latter I will take it first.
It seems odd that the creatures which are to become the companions and playmates of children, and one of the chief sources of their happiness, should cause so much alarm when they first come on the scene. Yet so it is. Many children, at least, are at first put out by quite harmless members of the animal family. We must, however, be careful here in distinguishing between mere nerve-shock and dislike on the one hand and genuine fear on the other. Thus a lady whom I know, a good observer, tells me that her boy, though when he was fifteen months old his nerves were shaken by the loud barking of a dog, had no real fear of dogs. With this may be contrasted another case, also sent by a good observer, in which it is specially noted that the aversion to the sound of a dog’s barking developed late and was a true fear.
Æsthetic dislikes, again, may easily give rise to quasi-fears, though, as we all know, little children have not the horrors of their elders in this respect. The boy C. could not understand his mother’s scare at the descending caterpillar. A kind of æsthetic dislike appears to show itself sometimes towards animals of peculiar shape and colour. A black animal, as a sheep or a cow, seems more particularly to come in for these childish aversions.
At first it seems impossible to understand why a child in the fourteenth week should shrink from a cat.143 This is not, so far as I can gather, a common occurrence at this age, and one would like to cross-examine the mother on the precise way in which the child had its first introduction to the domestic pet. So far as one can speculate on the matter, one would say that such early shrinking from animals is probably due to their sudden unexpected movements, which may well disconcert the inexperienced infant accustomed to comparatively restful surroundings.
This seems borne out by another instance, also quoted by Preyer, of a girl who in the fourth month, as also in the eleventh, was so afraid of pigeons that she could not bring herself to stroke them. The prettiness of the pigeon, if not of the cat, ought, one supposes, to ensure the liking of children; and one has to fall back on the supposition of the first disconcerting strangeness of the moving animal world for the child’s mind.
Later shrinkings from animals show more of the nature of fear. It is sometimes said that children inherit from their ancestors the fear of certain animals. Thus Darwin, observing that his boy when taken to the Zoological Gardens at the age of two years and three months showed fear of the big caged animals whose form was unfamiliar to him (lions, tigers, etc.), infers that this fear is transmitted from savage ancestors whose conditions of life compelled them to shun these deadly creatures. But as M. Compayré has well shown144 we do not need this hypothesis here. The unfamiliarity of the form of the animal, its bigness, together with the awful suggestions of the cage, would be quite enough to beget a vague sense of danger.
So far as I can ascertain facts are strongly opposed to the theory of an inherited fear of animals. Just as in the first months a child will manifest something like recoil from a pretty and perfectly innocent pigeon, so later on children manifest fear in the most unlikely directions. In The Invisible Playmate, we are told of a girl who got her first fright on seeing a sparrow drop on the grass near her, though she was not the least afraid of big things, and on first hearing the dog bark in his kennel said with a little laugh of surprise, ‘Oh! coughing’.145 A parallel case is sent me by a lady friend. One day when her daughter was about four years old she found her standing, the eyes wide open and filled with tears, the arms outstretched for help, evidently transfixed with terror, while a small wood-louse made its slow way towards her. The next day the child was taken for the first time to the “Zoo,” and the mother anticipating trouble held the child’s hand. But there was no need. A ‘fearless spirit’ in general, she released her hand at the first sight of the elephant, and galloped after the monster. If inheritance played a principal part in the child’s fear of animals one would have expected the facts to be reversed: the elephant should have excited dread, not the harmless insect.
So far as my own observations have gone there seems to be but little uniformity among children’s fears of the animal world. What frightens one child may delight another at about the same age. Perhaps there is a tendency to a special dread of certain animals, more particularly the wolf, which as folk-lore tells us reflects the attitude of superstitious adults. Yet it is probable that, as the case of the boy C. suggests, the dread of the wolf grows out of that of the dog, the most alarming of the domestic animals, while it is vigorously sustained by fairy-story.
For the rest children’s shrinking from animals has much of the caprice of grown-up people’s. Not that there is anything really inexplicable in these odd directions of childish fear, any more than in the unpredictable shyings of the horse. If we knew the whole of the horse’s history, and could keep a perfect register of the fluctuations of ‘tone’ in his nervous system, we should understand all his shyings. So with the child. All the vagaries of his dislike to animals would be cleared up if we could look into the secret workings of his mind and measure the varying heights of his courage.
That some of this early disquietude at the sight of strange animals is due to the workings of the mind is seen in the behaviour of Preyer’s boy when at the age of twenty-seven months he was taken to see some little pigs. The boy at the first sight looked earnest, and as soon as the lively little creatures began to suckle the mother he broke out into a fit of crying and turned away from the sight with all the signs of fear. It appeared afterwards that what terrified the child was the idea that the pigs were biting their mother; and this gave rise in the fourth and fifth years to recurrent nocturnal fears of the biting piglets, something like C.’s nocturnal fear of the wolf.146 To an imaginative child strongly predisposed to fear, anything suggestive of harm will suffice to beget a measure of trepidation. A child does not want direct experience of the power of a big animal in order to feel a vague uneasiness when near it. His own early inductions respecting the correlation of bigness with strength, aided as this commonly is by information picked up from others, will amply suffice. In the case of the dog, the rough shaggy coat, the teeth which he is told can bite, the swift movements, and worse than all the appalling bark, are quite enough to disconcert a timid child. Even the sudden pouncing down of a sparrow may prove upsetting to a fearful mite as suggesting attack; and a girl of four may be quite capable of imagining the unpleasantness of an invasion of her dainty person by a small creeping wood-louse—which though running slowly was running towards herself—and so of getting a fit of shudders.
It is, I think, undeniable that imaginative children, especially when sickly and disposed to alarm, are subject to a real terror at the thought of the animal world. Its very vastness, the large variety of its uncanny and savage-looking forms—appearing oftentimes as ugly distortions of the human face and figure—this of itself, as known from picture-books, may well generate many a vague alarm. We know from folk-lore how the dangers of the animal world have touched the imagination of simple peoples, and we need not be surprised that it should make the heart of the wee weakly child to quake. Yet the child’s shrinking from animals is less strong than the impulse of companionship which bears him towards them. Tiny children quite as often show the impulse to run after ducks and other animals as to be alarmed at them. Nothing perhaps is prettier in child-life than the pose and look of one of these defenceless youngsters as he is getting over his trepidation at the approach of a strange big dog and ‘making friends’ with the shaggy monster. The perfect love which lies at the bottom of children’s hearts towards their animal kinsfolk soon casts out fear. And when once the reconciliation has been effected it will take a good deal of harsh experience to make the child ever again entertain the thought of danger.