I’ve finally watched the BBC and Disney’s excellent documentary “Earth”.

For some reason (babies, dogs and life in general) this wasn’t my first attempt. To be precise, I saw the first 30 minutes about four times before I managed to get to the end of it, learning by heart all the lines of the commentary.
Although I actually loved it, I couldn’t help frowning upon the deliberate cuts at the end of the action whenever a predator actually got hold of its prey.

Don’t get me wrong, they were all done in an elegant and unobtrusive way, it’s not like, say, Darth Vader going “No, I am your f-”.
Nonetheless all the (few) chasing scenes ended up being some sort of outdoor activity in which no one gets hurt, very Disney-like so to speak, and after the wolf eventually gets hold of the terrified gnu calf you almost expect them to change roles. “Ok mate, my turn now, I chase, you run”.

It’s not that I can’t see the point of all this, my daughter was kind of upset as the lions chased an elephant calf down, however I was actually trying to remember when All This began. I mean the politically correctness, and the moment when we designated people to remove the nasty bits from the environment.

I’m not proposing to introduce gore and sex in children’s TV programs, and I have to admit that – although it didn’t turn me into a murderer – the sight of a rabbit hanging head down, bleeding to death over my grandma’s bath-tub was a bit disturbing when I was my daughter’s age. However, I’m not sure that this level of “protection” is any healthier than the things it’s trying to hide.

I’m still convinced that there’s nothing wrong in seeing the reason why a wolf would pursue another animal, and I still think that knowing what happens to animals when they’re not fast enough, in the detached environment of a television set, helps realise that food does not come from plastic boxes in supermarkets.

We take other animals’ lives to survive: acknowledging that is a matter of respect.
I don’t want to get into any of the well-known corporate-bashing arguments.
But I do think that by trying to keep everything as harmless and sterile as possible you risk getting rid of some parts that are not necessarily bad, such as most of Real Life Out There.

So I now declare my quest to figure out who exactly said that products for children needed to be all fluffy bunnies and pink unicorns.

In my next visit to the library I would like to look at some picture books and see whether there are any particularly daring dealing with what are considered inappropriate topics for children.
Oliver Jeffers, for example, talks about love and loss in his last book The Heart And The Bottle , not exactly a popular theme in picture books, thus confirming himself as one of my favourite authors ever.

As for myself, I understood three things today:

The first one is that, in general, safer equals more boring.

The second one is that, even if you’re as big as an elephant, travelling trough a pride of lions is never quite safe enough.

The third one is that gnus are the bloody pickiest animals on earth. They walk thousands and thousands of miles, through planes actually covered with edible plants, only to get to the grass they like best. How fussy is tha