Essay - Animals in the Classroom

A horse is a horse, of course. It’s got four legs, a tail, a mane of hair along its neck, and apparently they like apples. Biologists call the domestic horse “Equus Ferus Caballus” and they were one of the first animals ever to be torn from the wild and brought into servitude, the tradition going back as early as 4000 before the Common Era. The animal is not even close to the endangered species list and is found in almost every nation drawn onto the maps of our world. It would seem to be fairly common animal, with uniform traits.

In the realms of art and religion, the horse has meant different things at different times to different people. Sixteen thousand years ago, early humans drew horses (364 of them!) on the walls of the famed Lasceaux Caves of south-western France. This is seen as a propitiation for the hunt. In Albrecht Dürer’s work, like the “Four Horsemen” or “Knight, Death and the Devil,” the horse is a beast of war, bringing bad tidings. In George Orwell’s famous work “Animal Farm,” a horse named Boxer was the farm’s greatest asset, a selfless, stolid workhorse
who never complained or said one word of ill to anyone. The Bolshevik pigs eventually worked him to death and sold his corpse to the glue factory. The horse is a symbol of pan-Arabism. In Chinese Zodiak, those born in the year of the horse exude the horse’s traits of limitless energy, hedonism and a desire to be centre of attention. Iron Age Germanic peoples used a white horse for divination purposes. The free spirit of the horse is the symbol for the “Mustang” brand of automobiles. The horse’s ferocity and martial attributes have landed the animal as the totem of the “Calgary Stampeeders” Canadian Football team.

While to a biologist, a zoologist, and arguably to a farmer, the horse would seem to be a fairly neutral animal, a horse is steeped in a cultural perception. With all due respect to the International Museum of the Horse in Lexington, Kentucky, which insists that there are hundreds of different types and breeds of horse, I’m going to group them all together under the same umbrella term of “horse.” If art is variation on a theme, different eyes seeing the same thing in different ways, the same applies to culture, and how different groups can see the same thing in different ways. Animals are a wonderful focus for this phenomenon.

Animals have found their way to the front of temples, to the sacrificial alters of various human tribes, to flags, to tribal names, to city shields and tattoos on the very flesh of our species. They are perhaps among the most primal and instinctual cultural phenomena that grace our earth. They’ve found this significance not through being designed by artists, the way many other cultural foci are, but by being of the natural world, seemingly untouched by human reasoning and culture. This means that we can only understand them as being natural life, without the trained instincts of human culture. This, ironically, is why they become so purely cultural.

Greater minds than I have tried to construct a hard and fast definition of culture, though this is a futile exercise. Some cultures incorporate religion more than others, some focus on the role of family, some are tied to nation states while some have simple racial connotations. Different cultures will distinguish themselves differently within their own narratives, and there are individuals who find themselves between two or even more cultures. For purposes of this paper, the term culture will refer to a series of norms within a large group that self-identifies as a community.

We incorporate culture into the ESL classroom for this very reason. Different cultures can see the same thing through a different prism and come to a very different conclusion. Continuing in the vein of farm animals, if you call someone a “cow” in Canada, then you’re making a statement about their weight. If you call someone a “cow” in Turkey, you’re calling them a nerd, saying that their head is always down in the books. Are Canadian and Turkish cows so different? In India, they’re considered holy by some. Personally, I’ve never seen a fat cow. They’re usually very strong, muscular, beefy animals. I’ve never seen a cow graced by the gods, though to be fair, I’m not sure I would recognize one as such. I will go on record as saying that I’ve never seen a cow read a book.

Something as simple as that can make students aware of the cultural variance between them, without being as divisive as class or religion. One student sees an ox as being a symbol of strength; the other sees it as being a castrated beast of burden. Some say that a chicken is a coward, others that a chicken is someone who goes to bed early and wakes up early. There isn’t any real value judgement going on, simply an increased awareness that different cultures and countries see things differently. The reason that this is a better location for cultural meeting than many others is that there can’t really be any sense of hierarchy here. There can be cultural chauvinism about many other aspects of one homeland over another, the art, the history, language, music and whatnot, but could you imagine one student saying to another that “My country’s monkeys are smarter than you country’s jackals, or your country’s dolphins”? They would be ridiculed by their own co-nationals. Animals provide a safe zone because despite being steeped in a cultural tea, there’s still a knowledge that those animals live outside of human culture, unlike most other aspects of culture that are produced by human imagination.

With the plan to use animals as the focus of some lessons, I must stress the importance of doing so in the first few weeks of a class. The idea of cultural relativism is inserted into the group without any sense of competition, so doing this at the beginning sets a good tone, and allows for students from Country A and Country B to discuss nuances and differences, with a minimal chance of nationalist competitions arising. This is still an ever present possibility and it should be the teacher’s responsibility to oversee the group dynamics of the classroom to make sure that this doesn’t happen.

Speaking and Listening
Animals are a great topic for speaking and listening activities. Discussions about domestic animals, pets and farm animals can be light-hearted and easy to join in. Once the point has been made that there is no “right” answer for zoological preferences, it becomes much easier for more shy students to join in the discussion. For a more structured speaking activity, students can engage in role-plays and jigsaw conversations about animals interacting. What kind of a personality does a donkey have? How do you role-play a rabbit? These examples can produce some fun and exciting conversations and other speaking activities.

For listening activities, there are an unfathomable number of videos about animals, about conservation, about loss of habitat. Greenpeace currently has dozens of three to four minute videos on their YouTube channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/GreenpeaceVideo) as does the BBC on their own website (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006mywy). National Geographic also produces short videos of exceptional quality (http://video.nationalgeographic.com /video/player/animals/). These three sites are very useful because National Geographic, the BBC and Greenpeace all give rights of reproduction to educational institutions, so there’s no need to fret about with permissions.

Reading and Writing
There are two kinds of readings about animals that a teacher can find: Those that are devoid of culture and limited scientific, quantifiable descriptions, and those that are pleasantly surrounded by it. For those more cultural stories about animals, Aesop is a good first step. The Fables of Aesop are so widespread that they almost defy any attempt to quantify them as culturally specific. They were composed for an ancient Greek audience, though they’ve found themselves translated throughout the Mediterranean and Western World since before there was a Western World. Tales such as “The Grasshopper and the Ant, The Tortoise and the Hare, The Cat and the Mice,” and “The Lion and the Mouse” have entertained children of different cultures since approximately 560 Before the Common Era.

This is hardly a western phenomenon, as by the Third Century BCE, the Panchantantra appeared in India, featuring many similar animal fables, with more sub-continentally common animals such as elephants and tigers. These stories are also easily accessed by a quick trip to Chapters, or a cursory search of the internet (http://panchantantra.org) to access various on these tales. Panchantantra stories are also very common in Iranian and Arabic culture.

There is another category of animal tales for reading in class, and they belong to a category of literature called “Trickster Tales” and these are very popular across the world, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, through “Reynard the Fox” appears in Northern Europe, cunning trickster monkeys appear in Chinese tales and other geographically appropriate anthropomorphisms to Amerindian storytelling traditions.

While less influenced by fantasy and imagination, the realms of science are no less devoid of culture. A reading about the loss of habitat and the plight faced by Animal X can be very interesting, and the discussion of the role of animals in various cultures can be very fruitful. In some countries, animals are seen as either vermin or food, while in others there is an intrinsic value placed on all living things. Having students write a report on an endangered animal from their homeland will tell everyone much about how their culture views animals, views conservation, views environmental degradation, views modernization and views their national self-awareness. What do normal Siberians think of the perils faced by the Siberian Tiger? Farmers can think one way, trappers another and city dwellers could be apathetic. What is the role of the government in all this? Why did the student choose this animal? Is it close to their heart? There are numerous cultural attributes at play even when the topic is broached from a very un-cultural tact.

Taboos
There are some cultural taboos that a teacher should be wary of when dealing with the topic of animals in the ESL Classroom. Black cats, black dogs and black birds are associated with death and demonism in different cultures, it’s best to avoid them. Carrion animals, opportunistic scavengers that eat the flesh of the not so freshly dead are also to be considered verboten. Aggressive animals are also a touchy subject, not for any culturally specific reason, but some people may have had bad experiences in their past, and the last thing that any teacher wants is for a student to re-live a traumatic experience in the classroom.

A final note is worth mentioning with regards to animal sacrifices. Millions of Muslims every year sacrifice animals on Eid al-Adha (Day of Sacrifice) to commemorate the piety of Abraham and his willingness to sacrifice his son Ishmael (Ishmael in the Qur’an or his brother Isaac in Genesis). Christians have a variation on this story with Jesus as the Lamb of God at Easter time, with the father again sacrificing the son, but Christians are not encouraged to go out and sacrifice a lamb themselves; they usually just pick one up from the supermarket. Teachers should have a rough idea when Eid al-Adha is (varies year to year in accordance with the lunar calendar) and do their best to avoid the more bloody aspects of the holiday. Some students would invariably find a discussion of sacrificing techniques to be most uncomfortable.

Conclusion
Animals, particularly the most common sorts of animals, are the focus of a totemism that cannot possibly be ignored. Among the members of myriad culture groups, this totemism may well take a different form than would be elsewhere anticipated, but the human tendency is there, to assign a personality, an animus, a soul to those animals. We give them motivations and character, above the refined instinct of the animal kingdom. What someone sees when they look into the big, black, reflective orbs of a horse’s eye is not the spirit of the beast, but a reflection of the viewer, a reflection of their cultural norms and prejudices that the viewer carries within themselves. For this reason, if for no other, the theme of animals is not about animals, but about people, about culture, about prejudices and worldviews, and is a welcome addition to any ESL classroom where the teacher is serious about incorporating an intercultural approach to their repertoire.