Someone is haunted by a wolf, another by a bear or a jaguar. And even though you may not do it anymore, the fairy tales, the old stories that are supposed to actually protect us from danger, are still encoded in us. “At the same time, an animal that somewhere serves as a symbol of fear, for example a snake, can in another culture symbolize, for example, wealth and success,” says naturalist Markéta Janovcová in the podcast.
You can find the podcast about emotions and animals here:
It is the culture and therefore also the fairy tales with which we grow up that plays a big role in the creation of fear. “During research in our country, even in Africa, we know that it is necessary to explain, to describe the given animal, to say that it is not completely evil,” explains Markéta Janovcová, a zoologist from the Faculty of Natural Sciences of Charles University, who studies the emotions that animals arouse in us. Who gets the most out of the animal kingdom?
Bad wolf
It’s a European classic and anyone who doesn’t know a single fairy tale with a bad wolf in the main villain role has probably grown up. The Three Little Pigs or Little Red Riding Hood could tell their stories about it. And even children who are not actively threatened by the wolf are sometimes afraid to walk around the wolf enclosure in the zoo, even if the lion leaves them completely alone.
Why did he actually get into fairy tales? In the Middle Ages, there were simply a lot of them, they usually attacked farm animals, and even if a wolf would not dare attack an adult, it could easily harm children. Especially if it was the whole pack. Add to that the image of the wolf as something wild and unbridled, sprinkle in Christian symbolism and the wolf is the obvious first choice.
Sly hyena
You might remember the pack hyena from The Lion King. Or the bush children who put bark on their heads to make the hyena think they are bigger, from the comedy The Gods Must Be Mad. And if African parents scare their children with anything, it’s hyenas.
Like the wolf or owl, the hyena is a nocturnal creature, and since it can really attack a smaller farm animal or a lost child, it works surprisingly well as a scarecrow. Additionally, symbolically, in African myths, the hyena represents disorder, chaos and threat.
Dark bats
There are quite a few winged creatures that take naughty children to their nests or elsewhere around the world. From eagles in some European fairy tales, through evil bats to the classic South American god, a scarecrow who sometimes takes the form of a giant owl.
Bats, but also owls or ravens, are associated with death in many cultures and are also messengers of bad news. Add to that the fact that they are nocturnal creatures, and you can hardly find a more suitable scarecrow that can carry disobedient children into the dark.
Aunt Tigress
Children in Taiwan encounter it, but similar stories are told throughout East Asia. He kidnaps and usually eats disobedient children, but also those who are alone somewhere. It thus functions primarily as a warning against strangers, rather than against the tiger itself.
After all, fairy tales abound with large beasts, including bears or jaguars. Warnings about them were just as important to children hundreds of years ago as they are today, because nothing has changed at all about their dangers.
The dreaded snakes
In fairy tales and myths, they appear wherever snakes live or are very poisonous. That is, from Australia through South America, Africa and partly Asia. In West Africa, they have a downright snake monster that can pull down children who wander too close to the swamps by themselves.
However, snakes as such also feature in a number of fairy tales, children are warned not to run barefoot outside or reach into dark crevices. The justification in this case is clear – it is equivalent to death in many of these places, so it is necessary to really emphatically explain to children that they should be careful of themselves.
