From this morning's edition of The Times:
Quote:
Parents of Britain, Chris Packham has an important child-rearing tip for you. If you should find yourself in close proximity to a giraffe, it is essential that you let it lick your offspring’s face. And if that friendly giraffe is actually a wolf — even better.
The natural history broadcaster is deeply concerned about the poor level of engagement between young people and wildlife and believes one of the problems is that attitudes have changed since he was a boy. “I remember being licked by a giraffe in Southampton Zoo and my mum taking me by the hand to the toilets and saying ‘go in there and wash’. I stood looking in the mirror and I didn’t wash my hands and I didn’t wash my face. I had been licked by a giraffe! I didn’t want to wash it off. What would happen nowadays? 1) you wouldn’t get any where near a giraffe to get licked by it and 2) it would be first aid ,wouldn’t it, if you got licked by a giraffe? You’d have to be bathed in hand gel. It’s absurd.”
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Quote:
“This whole process is alien to children because they want to pick it up and touch it. The feel of worms, the feel of a caterpillar inching up their finger, the marvel of a ladybird gyrating round that finger and getting to the top of it turning this way and that and then taking flight; that’s the stuff of magic. What are you going to do? Wash their hands with hand gel?”
He really doesn’t like antiseptic hand gels. “When you ask a child to open their hands and you squirt that liquid and say ‘rub that in’ you are saying ‘you are in a dirty and dangerous place’. And when you say to them not to climb the tree because you might fall out and hurt yourself, you are instigating fear in that child.”
He sees a decline in the way children interact with the wild and he knows who he thinks is culpable. “Parents are to blame. Clearly we can’t blame kids. They are born with the same innate curiosity that all of us were, but parents have pulled back from allowing their kids to engage with it.
“When I was a kid I would get home, dump my bag before my mother realised I was back from school and I was over the fence and gone until it was dark. I happened to go looking for grass snakes and birds’ nests but the other kids were playing football down the park. They were doing their thing, independently of adults. Now they are taken to football, taken here and there.”
His golden rules for children and wildlife: “You have got to let them pick up those newts. They have got to be stung, slimed, slithered on and scratched.”
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The article is behind Uncle Rupert's pay wall and I'm not sure if the usual 'measures' will allow you to access it, however, the above extracts are representative of the work.
The Times