ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the confluent identities, functions, roles and experiences of human children and nonhuman animals are key factors in the historical developments. Industrialization and urbanization saw changes in the uses of nonhuman animals for human purposes, and inevitably children's participation in those practices. A key feature in the changes witnessed over this century and a half is the shift in the sensibility towards nonhuman animals in these changing roles and functions, and an increasingly prominent viewpoint that the sensibility of certain forms of relationship and practices involving nonhuman animals were morally harmful, especially to children. Representations of nonhuman animals in eighteenth-century art were peculiar to British art at this time, but did not feature significantly in wider European art. The chapter discusses the dual function becomes evident in other cultural sites aimed at children, such as zoos which were positioned as places of both delight and instruction.
