Children and the animal kingdom

If you want to tell a small child a story with a moral, it is likely to communicate all the more readily if the tale concerns a frog or a pig. Apparently children are instinctively aware that they are members of the animal kingdom, while adults instinctively distance themselves from it.

Allen Shawn, Wish I Could Be There: Notes from a Phobic Life (New York: Penguin, 2007), 58