Animal stories and children's reading

I think animals are a convenient shortcut for writers. A fox is cunning and a tortoise is slow before a single sentence has been written, so a four-year-old grasps the character at once without needing any description. Animals also let an author deal with frightening subjects at a safe distance. A story about a piglet whose house is blown down is thrilling, whereas the same story about a human child losing a home would be upsetting. And of course they belong to no country or social class, which is partly why those tales travel so well in translation. Whether such stories teach anything real, I'd say yes, but the lessons are about people, not animals. The fable of the hare and the tortoise has nothing to do with zoology; it's a warning about overconfidence that children remember precisely because it's attached to a race. That said, there is a cost. Picture books give us friendly bears and villainous wolves, and that can leave children with quite false ideas about wildlife, which matters when they later form opinions on conservation. As for reading in the future, I suspect children will read fewer books for pleasure but not necessarily fewer stories. Audiobooks and animated series now deliver the same plots with far less effort. What worries me is the loss of the slow part, since a child with a book has to build the pictures in their own head, and no screen asks that of them. I'd expect keen readers to remain, but as a smaller, more deliberate group.