Check out these toy animals images:
3 Monkeys (266/365)
Image by andrewrennie
I was feeling lazy again so stacked up three toy monkeys we have and took a quick shot.
Bearded Dragon at Sydney Wildlife World
Image by Vanessa Pike-Russell
Created with fd's Flickr Toys.
teaching oppression: false categories
Image by arimoore
the labels read farm animals, wild animals, animal series (with different modes, collect them all!). these categories allow us to treat the same animal differently, depending on what role we humans have assigned to him or her. is she's a farm animal we can do anything we want to her, including lifelong torture followed by slaughter. if he's a wild animal we can hunt him, but if there are too few of him, we call him endangered and may even force breeding (perhaps in a zoo) to get his population back up to where we can hunt him again. if she's a pet she's still property but you can love her and if you're too cruel to her your neighbors might call the authorities on you. if she's an experimental subject the sky's the limit, as long as you get approvals first. toys like these allow us to teach these arbitrary categories to children, using animals we've agreed symbolically represent each category. (dogs might be problematic, since some cultures call them farmable food products and some cultures call them "man's best friend" while simultaneously cutting them up in laboratories and forcing them to perform tricks and pull sleds and.... well, you get the idea.)
