“Daddy,” begins my son, “Do you think that a giraffe is a nice animal, or a dangerous one?”
“I suppose they are nice,” I say. “They are herbivores – They eat only plants, not meat.”
“No Daddy, you are wrong,” says my son. “Giraffes have a powerful kick, and are very dangerous. It says so in my book.”
My son had his seventh birthday recently, and he was given a reference book about dangerous animals as a birthday present. He now spends a lot of his time reading about scorpions, jellyfish, snakes, and bees.
We were initially pleased that he had found something which caught his interest. But I fear that his interest in dangerous creatures is becoming a problem.
We stayed overnight in a hotel in Tateyama this week, and took our son to the beach. The last time we took him to the beach, he was incredibly excited, and ran in the water happily, looking for seaweed and interesting shells.
This time he refused to go into the water.
“Do you know that there are many kinds of dangerous jellyfish that live in the waters around Japan?” he said.
“Okay,” I said. “We’ll keep our waterproof sandals on when we wade into the water,” I said.
“But what about the urchins with poisonous spines? They are so sharp that they will cut through our sandals.”
It took a lot of persuading to get my son into the water. I didn’t tell him about the recent release of radioactive water into the sea a little further north.
Later, in the hotel hot spring, my son shouted in panic. “A wasp, a wasp! It will sting us!”
It was a fly.
Next year we will buy our son a book about
a safer topic. The world of kittens?
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