Kids, raccoons, and roos: Awkward encounters and mixed affects

Awkward multispecies encounters work against indifference and invite a new kind of ethics

Through an ethnographic research approach, the authors document and examine multispecies encounters between young children and raccoons in Canada and between young children and kangaroos in Australia. The research is conducted in the early childhood centers at the authors’ respective universities and during regular walks with children and educators on the surrounding university campus grounds. The study focused on the emotional responses to the encounters between the children and other species. Field notes as well as visual multisensory recording methods were used to collect data.

In Canada, a family of raccoons had moved in and made the early childhood center playgrounds their permanent home, thus giving the children an experience of co-habiting a space. For the children, this experience was somewhat mixed and confusing. While the children enjoyed the raccoons’ entertaining antics (including manipulating toys and climbing on the playground structures), they were also aware — from the adults’ responses — that the raccoons may be dangerous. The educators, too, seemed to be both fascinated and concerned by the presence of the raccoons.

While the children were curious about the raccoons and the way the raccoons would display some play behaviors similar to the children’s, the raccoons were also curious about the children. At one point, a mother raccoon crossed the playground, approached the classroom window, and raised her paw to meet a child’s gesturing hand through the glass.

In Australia, the focus of the study was on young children’s encounters with large mobs of kangaroos in the grasslands of a university campus. The children showed a strong interest in getting a close-up look of the kangaroos and, over time, displayed increasing confidence in getting closer and closer to the mob. The kangaroos, in turn, also seemed to become increasingly comfortable with the children’s presence. They gradually allowed the children who approached slowly and quietly to get quite close. As the children got closer and spent more time near the kangaroos, they began to notice differences between themselves and the kangaroos in modes of attention and behaviors. They noticed, for example, the kangaroos’ large upright ears and the way the ears can swivel. They noticed, too, the kangaroos’ enormous tails and how they use their tails to balance and jump.

In response to what they noticed about the kangaroos, the children often tried out what it would be like to live in a kangaroo’s body. They found or made big tails, attached them and hopped around; and they put their hands on their heads to mimic the action of the protruding swiveling ears. After observing the carcass of a dead kangaroo, the children even pretended to be dead and dying kangaroos.

The researchers refer to what they observed and recorded as “awkward multispecies encounters” which, they suggest, could work against indifference and generate a new kind of ethics and environmental concern based on a relationship in which “humans are not the sole scriptwriters and actors.”