The Child and the Animal in Times of War: Halahmy’s The Emergency Zoo and Contemporary News Reports on the War in Ukraine

Abstract

This article looks at both Miriam Halahmy’s historical novel for children, The Emergency Zoo, set during several days of mass pet culling in London prior to World War II and Hilda Kean’s published research on the somewhat conveniently forgotten phenomenon, entitled The Great Dog and Cat Massacre. In both these works we observe the strong connection between child and pet, emphasised all the more in a period of uncertainty brought on by impending conflict. The reader is also presented with a detailed exploration of the child’s worldview as compared to that of the adults’ largely hierarchical humanistic perceptions, a way of thinking which is taken as one of the key contributory causes of the terrible pet cull of 1939. Comparisons are then drawn with the treatment of the child–animal relationship and that of household pets during the current Russo-Ukrainian War (the largest European conflict since World War II) as broadly represented in newspaper articles and photographic reports. These reports not only recognise the importance of the child–animal relationship (especially in terms of alleviating trauma and providing a sense of well-being) but also demonstrate that animals are both perceived as refugees and rightly given refugee status. Through an analysis of the strong contemporary media focus on the child and animal refugee, along with the comparison drawn with both Halahmy’s novel and Kean’s historical study, the article concludes that there is clear evidence showing that more recent perceptions of the child–animal relationship and the improved status of pets have been specifically shaped by both posthumanist thinking and the various debates concerning the nature and consequences of the Anthropocene.