Charlotte's Web was copyrighted in 1952. It's been a long time since I read this; I think the older kids read it on their own instead of having it be a read-aloud. Maggie and I started it yesterday.
The story begins with 8-yr-old Fern begging her father not to kill the runt of the pig-litter. She says that he wouldn't have killed her if she had been born particularly small. The dad tries to explain that that's different; Fern is a person. But she says that doesn't make any difference. And there is no answer to her claim.
Later in the story, when one of the sheep tells Wilbur that he's being fattened up, the phraseology is that the people are going to "murder" him in late fall. The word "butcher" is not used. It's always "kill" or "murder."
Ten years earlier than Charlotte's Web was the movie Bambi where we learned about evil Man in the forest who shoots innocent animals and sets fire to their homes.
The PETA-type people have been working subtly for many decades. Their work is finally paying off. Small wonder that things are finally falling into place so fast that it seems there's no way to stop it.
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I started reading a book to Sparkle, "There's An Owl In the Shower." It looked cute. It was published by Scholastic - which should've been my cue to dump it in the trash, but I didn't.
ReplyDeleteThe entire first chapter was a diatribe about evil loggers who destroy the habitat of the Spotted Owl. There's this bitter man who's lost his job because of the Spotted Owl. His son has a vendetta against the Spotted Owl, on behalf of his poor unemployed father and who heads out into the forest to shoot one, blah, blah, blah.
It was heavy-handed, obvious, and very dreadfully written, and all that in the first chapter. The book is now officially "lost." Heh, heh, heh.