‘All They Need to Know Is Tigers Are Awesome’: The Place of Animal Pedagogies in Twenty-First-Century Schools

This chapter reports on a research project in which the authors interviewed 20 employees from animal or conservation charities and organisations. The aims of the research were to explore first, animal welfare issues that participants believed children should know about and secondly, to discover the pedagogical approaches these organisations employed in schools and local communities. Findings included participants employing concepts such as One Health and One Welfare to introduce young people gradually to the complexities and sensitivities of animal welfare and conservation. Participants spoke of using anthropomorphism to encourage children to understand animal sentience, and of then widening the scope of animal pedagogies to introduce a social and moral dimension into deeper discussion about human responsibilities to the planet, non-human and human life.