ANIMALS IN BOOKS USED FOR PRESCHOOL-CHILDREN

Children's literature has been considered a tool of socialization. It is likely that the way in which animal protagonists appear in books fo r young children could influence later attitudes. The aim of this stud y is to investigate books from preschools in high and low-income areas in South Africa, in order to analyze animal content and frequency of animal books chosen by the children. The method was to categorize the books (n = 2259) according to format, genre and subject. The animal ch aracters were divided into the categories realistic, humanized, anthro pomorphic and fantasy. The results show that the most commonly encount ered format was that of picture books (77.3%). The genre most frequent ly encountered was realistic fiction (43.2%) and non-fiction informati on (30.0%). In 44.5% of books animal characters were central to the pl ot. The most popular books were realistic fiction where anthropomorphi stic or fantasy animals were the main protagonists. Preschool children from low-income areas where illiteracy is high in the surrounding pop ulation were found not to make use of books. Such preschool children w ould therefore not be influenced by the animal content of books. They did, however, see wall-charts at the preschools and these could be use d to convey the positive aspects of human-animal interactions. It is s uggested that books with animal content for preschool children should be selected on a multi-disciplinary basis, including input from veteri narians, who may play a role in conveying sound ethological principles . To this end, practical recommendations are made regarding a standard evaluation system for animal topics in preschool literature.