Monday 23 May 2016

Eco-warrior in training

Among LittleBear's (current) foibles, is an insistence on only reading "fact books". Despite the volume of lovely story books we own, and that are available in our local library, we only ever read "fact books". Ideally about dinosaurs, or snakes, or sharks, or (recently) big cats and birds of prey. To be honest, any kind of predator will do. And one of the features of most of these books is that there is almost always a section on "threats". And with extant animals, those threats are invariably people. People hunting, people shooting, people poisoning or simply people destroying habitat. And this has clearly had an impact on LittleBear, as evidenced by today's conversation in the car on the way home from swimming.

Imagine (if you can) a Carnotaurus and a Bunny having a conversation. Bunny's voice bears an uncanny resemblance to my own, where Carnotaurus sounds surprisingly like a four-year old boy.

Carnotaurus: What are all these people doing here?

Bunny: I don't know. They're everywhere aren't they?

Carnotaurus: I think we should kill them all.

Bunny: <alarmed> Erm, no, no, I don't think that sounds nice at all.

Carnotaurus: But they shoot us and poison us and destroy our habitat, and that's not nice either.

Bunny: Ah, no, I suppose it isn't. Perhaps we could ask them to leave some of the land for us?

Carnotaurus: But there's too many of them, and they live everywhere!

Bunny: Hmm, that's true.

Carnotaurus: I know! We'll have an ambush and trap them and then move them all to one half of the world, and build a big wall. It might take several days to build the wall, because we'll have to build it all the way up to the top of the sky to keep them out of our half of the world.

Bunny: Really? I didn't think people were that good at climbing...

Carnotaurus: No, but they have aeroplanes, so the wall has to go high enough that they can't fly over the top. Actually, it has to go all the way into space, as they can make rockets too. And we should make sure we have all the metal in our half of the world so they can't make any more cars or aeroplanes or rockets. I think we'll have the northern hemisphere. Then we'll have England.

Bunny: And the Himalayas and the Alps. And the North Pole and the North Atlantic (hastily mentioning things LittleBear loves, and avoiding mentioning penguins or jaguars).

Carnotaurus: Is Mount Everest in the Himalayas?

Bunny: Yes.

Carnotaurus: Yay! We've got Mount Everest!

And when we got home, we proceeded to find every small humanoid figure we could, from Bob the Builder to a variety of Playmobil characters, and set up traps and ambushes. We caught them all, apparently being careful not to hurt them, and packed them off to the Southern Hemisphere, while the dinosaurs, bunny, and assorted cuddly friends laid claim to the Northern Hemisphere, and all the mineral resources in the world.

It might not be any more practical than The Donald's plan to build a wall between Mexico and the US, but it's a much, much better idea.

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